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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Spain may have lost her American empire, but dead Spanish painters lately rule the hemisphere of art: Picasso going mano a mano with Matisse at moma Queens; Velazquez and Zurbaran up at the Met this spring, soberly showing Manet the way to modernity; this fall at the Met, the heaven-oriented El Greco megashow; and now a thick, lovingly produced book, "Goya," by Robert Hughes (Knopf; $40). Hughes, a native Australian who moved to the United States in 1970 and was, until 2001, the chief art critic for Time, has been a robust, even rambunctious writer, unabashedly opinionated and flamboyantly metaphorical and aphoristic: I have seen his prose characterized as of the Muscle Beach school, which, transposed to the higher cultural tone of Sydney's Bondi Beach, seems fair enough. He has done the workouts to get himself into shape, and, if he turned a few handstands and kicked sand at a few ninety-pound weaklings, his pleasure in his own strength and suppleness of mind and pen was infectious.
"Goya" begins, however, with an Acknowledgments startlingly different from the customary bows to sources and editorial helpmeets. First off, Hughes thanks his wife for giving him the strength to do the book at all, "after a near-fatal car crash on a desert highway in Western Australia in 1999." The crash received ample publicity at the time and again when Hughes appeared in court in Western Australia, charged with "dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm." The charge was dismissed, then reinstated on appeal; Hughes entered a guilty plea and paid a twenty-five-hundred-dollar fine. The head-on collision left many of his bones pulverized; he underwent a dozen operations and a total of six months of hospitalization. "Three and a half years after the accident," the Acknowledgments tell us, "I am almost back on my feet," and he offers himself this consolation:
Perhaps, if life is fully experienced, there is no waste. It was through the accident that I came to know extreme pain, fear, and despair; and it may be that the writer who does not know fear, despair, and pain cannot fully know Goya.
So it is a wounded critic who portrays an artist wounded, in 1792, by an illness that left him stone-deaf and, in 1808, by Napoleon's conquest of Spain. Hughes...
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