Depression or Trauma – Goya’s <em>Quinta del Sardo</em> paintings in the Prado

He moved to the country away from the city to his own house. Who knows what kind of fantasy he may have had for the peace that he could find there. He decorated the rooms with murals for himself as previously he had done many times for clients. Country scenes, landscapes, crowds, peaceful views, one imagines. The remains and echoes of these exist under the pientres negros, a trace or an echo of the peace that he hoped to find, but rapidly left behind.

Who knows at what stage or what event disturbed this peace? Perhaps it just never got started and the dreams and images begun to crowd in the undistracted air of the country estate. The peace he found was the lack of distraction, the lack of external noise, but all this did was to leave the stage clear for the internal noise, the internal disturbance, to come breaking through. Who knows at what point, after how much fruitless struggle, did he decide to allow the images to emerge and form themselves? Over what period of time, painting bucolic scenes to keep them at bay, did his resistance crumble? Who knows over which landscape he begun to vent the image and destroy the peaceful scene.

He took up new colours to do this; pale, yellow ochre, a translucent bluish green, which had the kind of acid oxide tinge, scarlet red of the kind seen in the 3rd May painting. Indeed the pale ochre is also familiar from that painting, a violent light.

He thrashed at the existing landscapes. The main alteration immediately was of scale. The figures are huge in comparison with the existing landscape, which immediately endows them with the sense of giants. This sense of disproportionate gigantic movement across landscape is common to many in this series. It lends a kind of surreal unearthly drama and odd jarring dislocation of sensation. In these parts of the series, particularly the fight with cudgels, the asmodea, the drowning dog, and the giant, this strange light gives the feeling of an unearthly strange dreamlike air to them.

Typically the bluish green oxide is used to greatly magnify the surrounding landscape into vast cliffs in the background. Then massive figures are included dominating the landscape. The most easily approachable is the duel with cudgels. The imagery familiar from previous murals including the fight outside the tavern. Two giants seemingly submerged to their knees in the landscape, a fight to the death against the sleeping fields below.

In the asmodea the most striking original strange frightening of all, he has firstly transformed the landscape with two soldiers in the bottom right, completely out of proportion, aiming guns into the distance. The imagery echoing the 3rd May painting. The acid blue-green mountain rises behind enlarging the landscape, echoing the shape of the soldiers’ hats. The guns are pointing nowhere, out of scale, against the horsemen and people pre-existing through the landscape, riding over the mountains. And then in the air, a curious whirlwind image, an incubus, two figures bundled in one, the caped woman riding through the air carrying a man looking in complete terror, pointing in desperate warning up towards the clifftop town.

The man’s face has some resemblance to the face of the victim of the firing squad on 3rd May.

In their violent contradiction, their disproportion, their sense of forced unreality, these images seem like fragments of flashback, traumatic images forced to the surface, imposing themselves on the mind of the landscape. They are unprocessed, unlinked with the context imposed on the scene in a way that one could imagine them obsessively imposing themselves on Goya’s mind.

It has been correctly said that these are not the paintings of depression, they are too vivid, too wild, too alive in their imagery and their content. They are rather the images of traumatic memory, intrusive images linked to intrusive thoughts, flashbacks of war time experience, undigested and uncontextualised, separated off from the images that anchored them in previous paintings such as 3rd May into isolated, pressing, undigested fragments dominating the mind. The mood of the paintings is characteristic anxiety, hypervigilance, distress, the affect typically associated with post traumatic states. The distortion of spatial and temporal logic, wild gravity defying flight, has a kind of dissociated quality. Goya reaches back in imagery to many themes previous in his work – the facial types, postures, and affect are there in fragmentary form here. Asmodas is the key painting because of its surreal purity and unrestrained terror and warning combined. One can imagine that painting these was compulsive, violent and exhausting, probably in the end bringing little relief.

There are others in the series where one might detect a sense of great disturbance and a feeling of identification with sexualised eroticised violence. No aspect of the traumatised state is more worrying than this sense of personal pollution, a sense of collusion with the evil. Such is the Saturn eating his child painting, the first to be seen on entry to Quinta del Sardo. In this Saturn is depicted straight with no dislocation of space or time, half way through eating an adult violently and sexually aroused. There is no distancing or objectification here, only a sense of identification with the brutality, a sense of complicity. Other paintings are easier, in the sense that they seem to be referring to objectified hate and anger: directed towards aspects of people and institutions in his environment. Projecting this outwards is easier. Thus in the old men reading paintings of sexual depravity in the large painting of the inquisition there is a sense of criticism, satire, objectified disgust.

One of the more surprising paintings that is not in the mood of the rest is the Leocadia, a tender painting of loss, bereavement and death. Hard to know about this but one might imagine that he casts around for comfort in this series, simultaneously aware of the futility of such attachment in the face of death, but nevertheless it is very poignant, tender, sad, image full of love and loss, and tenderness.

Then there are two large images in the series, which are again in a way easier, where the separation between artist and that criticised is clearer and more comfortable. These are the two images, which expressively focus on the dangers of group mind/group thinking, irrational group process, terror and sadism. The Witches Sabbath contains one of the great images ever of the power of groups to destroy individual conscious to stir up murder, fervour, and to be prey to manipulation. The fetid, aroused, wild atmosphere of the witches’ excitement is interspersed much more frighteningly with cool (usually male) hardness, hatred, sadism, calculation. The great ego to the front is a nameless manipulator with his trusty secretary whipping the crowd up - and then to the right most frighteningly a quiet vulnerable figure apparently waiting to be initiated. Every facet of crowd behaviour, the multiple secondary gains of inclusion, projected hatred, revenge, envy, erotic charge, passive collusion, are reflected in the faces illuminated in flickering fire light.

And on the opposite wall a different sense of crowd trance. The pilgrimage of Isidiro, the singing, chanting, cruelly determined, stupid, calculating faces project out of the canvas at the head of the procession, which melts back into unindividualised darkness. On the right the young man in profile complete in himself, the voice of conscience.

So the state of mind that crowded these images onto the walls had a number of different facets unified by a mind, removed from everyday distractions and responsibilities, allowing its internal process to run. The images are a distillation of decades of witnessing trauma, a sensitive mind, a living through a horribly violent time, the best distillation of the effect of war and violence on the spirit. There are then components of intrusive undigested traumatic images, complex problems of personal identification with violence, internally projected on criticisms on external institutions and social forces. A great critique of the dangerous distortions within group-think, oppressive political social bureaucracies, persecution. The ways that individuals can be corrupted by group hysteria, social structures becoming fascist instruments of repression. And the effect of war and trauma on the sensitivity mind as Asmodas from fleeing from the horror and sending out a desperate warning of the terror of what is happening. 3rd May may be the great anti war painting, but these are a great expressions of the effect of war on the individual.

This is a man whose portraits reflect his emotionality and capacity for empathy, his feeling for intimacy and delicacy and his sensitivity to violence. These black paintings are still the effect of 30 years of warfare upon him. But his own individual human experience stands for that of millions. Asmodas is the greatest image, the most prescient, and the most surreal. It seems to represent the power of immigration and of flight, coupled with the need to make warning. The fates also malevolently floating over a moonlit landscape seemed to represent the impersonal, inevitable forces unleashed by this kind of social process.

The following year Goya left for France and Bordeaux. It would be nice to think that in some way he left the trauma put on these walls behind him there. Unfortunately this seems unlikely.

February 2008.