Page 19 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Francisco Goya: “Grande hazaña! Con muertos!” (An heroic feat! With dead men!), c1810–13 from Disasters of War 1810-1820 + No hay quien nos desate? (Can’t anyone untie us?) from Los Caprichos 1799..
The Disasters of War is a series of 82 prints on the subject of the Peninsula War in Spain and Portugal (1807-1814) during which Spanish popular resistance to the French invading armies resulted in a new form of guerrilla warfare, while Wellington and his Anglo-Portuguese armies battled the French forces. in his series of War prints, Goya focusses almost exclusively on the personal, human consequences of this period of brutal insurgent warfare, and the harsh punishments visited upon the guerrilleros who were captured. Los Caprichos (Caprices) are a series of 80 aquatint and etched prints published by Goya in 1799. They are Goya’s comments upon “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual”.These prints, and Goya’s oil paintings, presaged the expressionism that emerged some 50 years later, and the brutal realism of his war prints was echoed in the 20th century in the ‘trench’ prints and drawings of Otto Dix, and the paintings, collages and drawings of George Grosz, Hans Beckman and others during and after the 1st World War. The horror of ‘unconventional’ partisan war is echoed in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).
These images counterpointed the sneery, humorous satirical drawings of the English caricaturists like Cruikshank and Gilray. Goya’s image were far from that.
“Goya began the series at the age of 62; it was only published in 1863, thirty-five years after his death. For him, the weight of human suffering was too great; his career in many ways marks his descent from firm faith in order and reason into chaos, fear and disillusionment. But in the process he
shows us that which sits at the seat of the human ‘ascent’: self-knowledge.” ( Elizabeth Pearce https:// mona.net.au/blog/2015/08/goya-and-the-disasters-of-war)