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Julia Blackburn has already established herself as one of the finest writers of non-fiction, but with
Old Man Goya she takes her ability to re-create the past to a new level in her haunting evocation of the final years of the great Spanish painter, Francisco de Goya. Partly inspired by the painful loss her own mother (who was also a painter), Blackburn's desire to write about Goya developed when she learnt that in 1792, at the age of 47, the painter went permanently deaf; "I wanted to know what sort of world this deaf man had inhabited and how he had managed to live with the isolation of deafness and how it had changed the way he used his remaining senses". The result is a remarkably perceptive voyage into Goya's mind, which hovers between history and fiction, as Blackburn moves between the death of her own mother, visits to Goya's old haunts in Spain and France, and the painter's own remarkable lust for life in the midst of domestic upheavals and the horrors of warfare in early 19th-century Spain.
Old Man Goya moves from Goya's early days as a rich court painter, creating "dozens of designs of light-hearted subjects", to the trauma of deafness, the devastation of the bloody Peninsula War that swept Iberia between 1807 and 1812, the death of his first wife and old age with a mistress half his age. Interspersed amongst the text are 23 beautiful Goya copperplates through which Blackburn "can see Goya, a silent witness who makes no comment, but gives a shape to everything he sees", whose relish for the absurd, the cruel and the carnivalesque remained with him throughout his long life. Blackburn's elegant prose and unerring eye for domestic and artistic detail creates a wonderfully compassionate portrait of Goya, and she happily concedes to being "caught up in the spinning energy of the man as he hurtled relentlessly through the years", a journey that her readers will find well worth pursuing. --Jerry Brotton
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From Publishers Weekly
A portraitist for the Spanish aristocracy before being struck deaf after an illness in 1792, Goya (1746-1828) subsequently developed a bolder, rougher style of religious fresco, sided with the French after they invaded, was pardoned by the Spanish king in 1814, and lived a more and more reclusive life, finally going into exile in Bordeaux in his final four years. In a conceit familiar from her previous titles (including The Emperor's Last Island, where British writer Blackburn juxtaposed a chronicle of Napoleon on St. Helena with her own life and travels), this book is as much about Blackburn's life as it is the second half of Goya's. Blackburn free associates, for example, from memories of her mother's paint studio to episodes from the life of Goya, finding parallel grotesques in each world. She interlards her narrative of Goya's life with her own tourist trips tracking his movements through Spain and France to the point where it can be difficult to tell the sets of experiences apart. The faux naIve tone that dominates the book seems to be an attempt to imitate the art writer John Berger's famed "peasant" style, with vastly inferior results: "Goya the deaf man makes me think of a toad.... But before he was deaf he was able to hear and before he was old he was young." For those serious about Goya's life and work, this book obscures more than it reveals.
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