Director of University Museums to lecture on Goya at the Prado
Janis Tomlinson, director of University Museums
5:53 p.m., June 20, 2008--Janis Tomlinson, director of University Museums, will deliver a lecture on Francisco de Goya later this month at the world-famous Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain.

The honor, for which Tomlinson was chosen because of her widely respected scholarship on Goya, coincides with the exhibit “Goya During the War Years,” and besides offering Tomlinson the opportunity to speak on a great artist in one of the world's finest art museums, also will give her the chance to take a private museum tour and be part of an informal colloquium with other art historians and conservators.

In connection with the exhibition, Tomlinson is quoted in an article in The New York Times, scheduled to appear in the Travel section on June 22, and she is featured as the narrator on an online multimedia page accompanying the article. To read The New York Times article, click here. To hear Tomlinson's narrated piece on Goya, click here.

“The exhibition really looks at Goya's works from about 1795-1820, and the Prado is the only place this could happen, because it has so many of Goya's masterpieces that won't ever travel outside the museum,” Tomlinson said.

The exhibition, she added, also is notable because it marks the 200th anniversary of the Napoleonic Invasion of Spain, and two of the paintings by Goya that will be on display, “The Second of May, 1808,” and “The Third of May, 1808,” recently were cleaned and restored.

Tomlinson will highlight both paintings in her lecture and will discuss a new twist she recently discovered in the first work, which depicts the uprising of the citizens of Madrid against the French artillery.

“My lecture, which I've titled 'The Sounds of Silence: Echoes of War in the Painter's Studio, 1808-1814,' follows Goya's activity during the war years and ends with a significant reinterpretation of 'The Second of May, 1808,'” said Tomlinson, who also contributed essays to the show's catalog.

Tomlinson said that she worked on the title of her lecture with a friend in Madrid so that it translated first in Spanish.

“The reason I chose 'The Sounds of Silence' is because Goya was deaf,” Tomlinson said, “and so my question was, if we were to reconstruct his experience of war, what would it be like for a deaf person? What I began to do then was to piece his experience together month to month and day to day.”

As documentation on Goya's life during the war years and latter half of his career was not plentiful, Tomlinson said the process of filling in the blanks required some sleuth work; but she added that one theme that did become readily apparent was his relatively comfortable lifestyle.

“We don't have the information to know exactly what Goya's life was like during the war years,” Tomlinson said, “but what does come up in this exhibition, just from the variety of his work, is that he maintained a fairly bourgeois lifestyle, keeping a nice apartment and painting commissions and portraits of relatives.”

It's this work--and relatively lavish way of living--Tomlinson said, that is particularly interesting because it contrasts so starkly with Goya's famous etchings, also produced during this period, that hint at a much more tortured, secluded lifestyle.

“The gruesome images that Goya created during the war years would make you consider an isolated artist absorbed in the atrocities of war, but that's really not what happened,” she said, “so it's interesting to recreate his experience of the war through all of his work that survived from that period.”

Tomlinson added that one of the challenges of composing her lecture, in fact, wasn't the dearth of information on Goya's life between 1795 and 1820 so much as it was the amount of contradictions that she had to respond to and put into a logical context.

“Goya is one of the most prolific artists that you can begin to study,” she said, “and also, after about 1793, his career began to divide and he became much more experimental.

“In this exhibition, there are new paintings that never before have been exhibited that we now have to bring into our understanding of Goya,” Tomlinson said, “and there also are some new documents that have recently been brought to light, as well, that need to be addressed. Typically, in an exhibition catalogue, you often have these little gems that are buried in the midst of very dense essays, so the challenge is to bring them out in a format that enables the general public to be aware of what is new.”


Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photo by Duane Perry