In Focus - Discover Spain: Experience the Best of Spain - page 598

Nowadays all is bared in Museo del Prado alongside many of his other works. At
about the same time as his enigmatic Majas, the prolific Goya executed the playful
frescoes in Madrid's Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida where the painter is bur-
ied. He also produced Los Caprichos (The Caprices), a biting series of 80 etchings
lambasting the follies of court life and ignorant clergy. The arrival of the French and
war in 1808 had a profound impact on Goya. Unforgiving portrayals of the brutality
of war are El Dos de Mayo (The Second of May) and, more dramatically, El Tres de
Mayo (The Third of May).
Goya saved his most confronting paintings for the end. After he retired to the
Quinta del Sordo (Deaf Man's House) in Madrid, he created his nightmarish Pintur-
as Negras (Black Paintings), which now hang in the Museo del Prado. The Saturno
Devorando a Su Hijo (Saturn Devouring His Son) captures the essence of Goya's
genius and La Romería de San Isidro and El Akelarre (El gran cabrón) are pro-
foundly unsettling. The former evokes a writhing mass of tortured humanity, while
the latter are dominated by the compelling individual faces of the condemned souls
of Goya's creation.
Goya's masterpieces are legacy enough, but he also marked a transition from art
being made in the service of the State or Church to art as a pure expression of its
creator's feeling and whim.
Pablo Picasso
Considered by many to be the finest and most influential artist of the 20th century,
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) stormed onto the Spanish artistic scene like a
thunderclap. Born in Málaga in Andalucía, he moved with his family when still a
child to Barcelona. Although he later studied in Madrid's staid Real Academia de
Bellas Artes de San Fernando, it was amid the avant-garde freedom of Barcelona's
Modernisme that Picasso the artist was formed. He later spent much of his adult life
in Paris.
Although best known for his weird and wonderful cubist paintings, Picasso's
oeuvre spans an extraordinary breadth of styles as his work underwent repeated re-
volutions, passing from one creative phase to another. The best place to get an
overview is Málaga's Museo Picasso.
His early style began, rather gloomily, with what is known as his Blue Period, then
moved on through the brighter Pink Period; Barcelona's Museu Picasso offers an
excellent collection of Picasso's early, pre-Cubist years. In 1907 Picasso painted
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which was strongly influenced by the stylised masks