Currents Spring 2020 (Vol. 36, No. 1) | Page 33

ALLE EXHIBITIONS
GOYA, FRAGONARD, TIEPLO: THE
FREEDOM OF IMAGIINATION
www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/goya
Exhibition: Now until April 13
Actually, four artists are
featured in the exhibition.
Giovanni Domenico Tiepo-
lo (1727–1804) apprenticed
to and later often worked
with his father, the Vene-
tian painter Giovanni Bat-
tista Tiepolo (1696–1770),
for example on the latter’s
large-scale decorative proj-
ects like the stairwell of
the Würzburg Palace or the
Royal Palace in Madrid.
These two, along with the
French painter, Jean Honoré
Fragonard, are great mas-
ters of the Rococo period.
An oil sketch of the Triumph
of Hercules (1760–62) for an
As the ambitious grand finale of the shows and events
marking its 150 th anniversary, the Hamburger Kunst-
halle is focusing on the work of three artists whose lives
span the 18th century and whose works exemplify the
artistic transformation accompanying the era of the En-
lightenment and the French Revolution. Loans from ma-
jor institutions including the Prado, the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam and the London National Gallery compli-
ment the Kunsthalle’s own fine holdings of these artists.
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), Detail, Portrait of Asensio Julià, ca. 1798, oil on canvas, 54,5 x 41 cm,
© Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
illusionistic ceiling painting for the court in St. Peters-
burg by G.D. Tiepolo or a Birth of Venus /1753–55) by
Fragonard confirms the prevailing image of the Rococo
as being all about delicate pastel coloring and half-na-
ked lovers or gods and goddesses exuberantly swirling
in fluffy clouds. Other images of theater performances,
amorous picnics and surprised lovers in the exhibition
belong to the lighthearted themes which typified the Ro-
coco. These smaller pictures attest to a change in patron-
age. Fragonard was one of the first artists in France to
forego princely or church commissions in favor of sell-
ing to wealthy middle-class collectors.
Fragonard conceived his lusty scenes or images of fe-
cund, affectionate rural families in admonishment to the
prudery and regimented child-rearing of the wealthy.
But it is the considerably younger Francisco José Goya y
Lucientes (1746–1826) whose art became more explicitly
critical of the morals and behavior of his compatriots to-
ward the end of the century. Oblivious to the beautiful
countryside around them, Goya’s well-dressed but red-
faced picnickers jostle for more wine while their friends
retch and sprawl drunkenly around them. In a painting
from the Prado, Goya depicts tobacco guards, appar-
ently stuffing bribed goods under their clothing, in the
swaggering guise of the smugglers they are supposed to
be thwarting. Goya returned to this and other themes
of corruption and avarice as well as the deception, igno-
rance, and hypocrisy of his fellow man and the church
in his etching series Los caprichos (1797–99), a sharply
satirical version of the Rococo caprice. His grim etched
“emphatic caprices”, Los disastres de la guerra (The Disas-
ters of War) (1810–20), based on firsthand witnessing of
the atrocities of the Napoleonic wars, seem as remote as
possible from the lighthearted Rococo.
The Disastres confront us with a brutal reality that is
hard to reconcile with the English subtitle of the exhibi-
tion, “The Freedom of the Imagination” though it clearly
applies to the anthropomorphic animals and hybrid
creatures that mimic human foibles in Los Caprichos.
But what links all four artists is that they were imagina-
tive enough to recognize the artistic power of quickly
executed preparatory sketches and to use the animated
open brushwork and luminous, barely mixed colors of
those to create gorgeous finished paintings. Spontane-
ous preparatory drawing is likewise the source of Tiepo-
lo’s beautifully penned caricatures or Fragonard’s lovely
wash drawings but also of the urgency and directness of
Goya’s etchings.
by Holly T.

www.awchamburg.org
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