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Slide Disparate (Proverb) #1 Goya

Bitter, ill, totally deaf & nearly blind & nearly 80, Goya with the aid of double lenses & a strong glass made some of his most extraordinary prints. The 4 lithographs of the Bulls of Bordeaux are the remarkable culmination of his tries at the then new medium. Lithography had been invented in 1799 & had swept Europe for commercial purposes immediately. Artists began to appreciate its fine possibilities about a decade later. 

Goya also made one more series of cetchings [[etchings]], the Disparates or Proverbs, of which this is number one. Goya had always enjoyed women & had the greatest admiration for their courage. Here you see them lightly handled. You see a group of graceful, personable & completely feminine women tossing some puppet men in a blanket on which a large donkey is pictured: the proverb is not stated verbally. which means absurdity & blunder

There are 18 plates in the Disparates. Some are as engaging as this one, many more are full of the nightmarish quality that is at once so vivid & so illusive. Elie Faure called Goya the greatest visionary of the real that ever existed. In an artist of such rank, he says, one sentiment is stronger than moral feeling, stronger even than sensibility, namely the inevitable necessity of saying what he has seen [whenever he has seen something which gives him cause for deeper reflection than is the case with the ordinary events of everyday.] 

And there is in this violent, voluptuous & sometimes cruel man, as Faure also says, a fierce kind of charity. He loved the people & that in reality constitutes the aristocracy of genius.