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Lot Essay
A whirl of vigorous brushstrokes suspended between two expanses of monochrome canvas, Antonio Saura’ s Portrait imaginaire de Goya (1990) bristles with energy and tension. The work is a late example of the artist’s series of ‘imaginary portraits’, of which Francisco Goya, the great Spanish painter and Saura’s hero, most often featured. Here, Saura transforms Goya’s head into a teeming mass of lines, mangling his features into a kind of quasi-abstraction that reflects the influence of both North American Abstract Expressionism and European Arte Informel. The effect is complex, both monstrously mutating the painter’s identity, and at the same time supplying an expressionistic vision of visceral emotional interiority, the whirring brushstrokes and denatured forms of its head evoking a powerful sense of intense mental activity. With the sprawling regions of pale off-white and black that bifurcate the canvas meeting at Goya’s head, the painting seems to dramatize a highly fraught moment of almost Manichean significance, the world of the canvas realized in wide, imposing fields of light and dark, above and below. The work was in the former collection of Rodolphe Stadler, the gallerist who held the artist’s first solo exhibition in 1957, with whom he continued to work with throughout his career.
Though Saura took inspiration in all sorts of ways from Goya (a fellow native of Aragon), his ‘imaginary portraits’ were perhaps most highly influenced by The Dog , Goya’s portrait of a dog, mostly concealed behind an unidentified brown mass, gazing up uncertainly into a vast emptiness above. The painting was a fascination – perhaps even an obsession – of Saura’s that lasted a lifetime. Saura produced a long-running series of works explicitly based on the painting, beginning towards the end of the 1950s, and continuing until his death in 1998, as well as publishing a book entitled El Perro de Goya (Goya’s Dog) in 1992. One of the fourteen so-called Black Paintings that an elderly Goya painted on the wall of his house, beset by mental and physical anguish and in despair at the violence engulfing Spain at the time, the simplicity and openness of the painting conveyed both a searing emotional honesty and almost cosmic mystery that resonated with Saura. Moreover, Saura saw in Goya’s painting a harrowing self-portrait; as he wrote in 1959, “the dog’s head peering out, as our portrait of solitude, is no less that Goya himself, contemplating something taking place” (A. Saura, ‘El perro de Goya’, Note Book (memoria del tiempo) , Murcia, 1992, p. 52), and indeed Saura uses the structure of The Dog , with its powerfully simple, bipartite background, to frame his portrait of Goya here, reimagining the painting with the artist unequivocally centre stage. The sense is of the painter as both as carefully observer and helpless bystander – something that Saura himself must have felt keenly. Like Goya, Saura was also grappling with the reality of civic strife in his home country, working to process the horrific violence of the Spanish Civil War, and at the same time having to withstand the repressive dictatorship of General Franco – but in its dramatisation of the act of watching, the painting also seems to have held a more profound personal significance for the artist. “Since I was a child, I have been fascinated by this image of extremity,” Saura wrote, “which, for some strange reason, I have always associated with the memory of the ugly duckling of the children’s story, and its astonishment on emerging from the pen and contemplating the vastness of the world” (A. Saura, “Lectura de Antonio Saura”, in A. Cirici Pellicer, Antonio Saura , Barcelona, 1980, p. 105). It is this sense of vastness, and the primeval bewilderment one feels before it, that resound here in Saura’s own electric treatment of the picture.
Though Saura took inspiration in all sorts of ways from Goya (a fellow native of Aragon), his ‘imaginary portraits’ were perhaps most highly influenced by The Dog , Goya’s portrait of a dog, mostly concealed behind an unidentified brown mass, gazing up uncertainly into a vast emptiness above. The painting was a fascination – perhaps even an obsession – of Saura’s that lasted a lifetime. Saura produced a long-running series of works explicitly based on the painting, beginning towards the end of the 1950s, and continuing until his death in 1998, as well as publishing a book entitled El Perro de Goya (Goya’s Dog) in 1992. One of the fourteen so-called Black Paintings that an elderly Goya painted on the wall of his house, beset by mental and physical anguish and in despair at the violence engulfing Spain at the time, the simplicity and openness of the painting conveyed both a searing emotional honesty and almost cosmic mystery that resonated with Saura. Moreover, Saura saw in Goya’s painting a harrowing self-portrait; as he wrote in 1959, “the dog’s head peering out, as our portrait of solitude, is no less that Goya himself, contemplating something taking place” (A. Saura, ‘El perro de Goya’, Note Book (memoria del tiempo) , Murcia, 1992, p. 52), and indeed Saura uses the structure of The Dog , with its powerfully simple, bipartite background, to frame his portrait of Goya here, reimagining the painting with the artist unequivocally centre stage. The sense is of the painter as both as carefully observer and helpless bystander – something that Saura himself must have felt keenly. Like Goya, Saura was also grappling with the reality of civic strife in his home country, working to process the horrific violence of the Spanish Civil War, and at the same time having to withstand the repressive dictatorship of General Franco – but in its dramatisation of the act of watching, the painting also seems to have held a more profound personal significance for the artist. “Since I was a child, I have been fascinated by this image of extremity,” Saura wrote, “which, for some strange reason, I have always associated with the memory of the ugly duckling of the children’s story, and its astonishment on emerging from the pen and contemplating the vastness of the world” (A. Saura, “Lectura de Antonio Saura”, in A. Cirici Pellicer, Antonio Saura , Barcelona, 1980, p. 105). It is this sense of vastness, and the primeval bewilderment one feels before it, that resound here in Saura’s own electric treatment of the picture.