Apologies for this long quote but I thought others who have followed the life of Hughs' may be interested in something I read recently. Referenced here: http://www.worldtransformation.com/freedom-how-alienated-did-we-become/, and written by a biologist named Jeremy Griffith: "Goya’s heroic journey and which are best introduced through the words of someone who has been described as ‘the best known art critic in the world’ (The Bulletin mag. 11 Nov. 2003), the Australian Robert Hughes, who for many years was Time magazine’s art critic. Once again we can see in the following comment how much it escapes people what it is that is being portrayed by the likes of Bacon and Goya, namely the agony of the human condition. In a documentary Hughes made in 2002, titled Goya: Crazy Like A Genius, he commented that ‘ever since I started writing art criticism more than 40years ago…I have always been fascinated by one artist…Goya. For years I have been trying and failing to write a book about him…For a long time now he has haunted my dreams…I have wanted to understand him…There are two paintings of the same subject that sum up the huge changes that took place in Goya across his long career. [The paintings are of] a big religious festival, that of St. Isidro. On that day thousands of citizens, in their Sunday best, converged on a pilgrimage chapel outside Madrid and had a picnic.
In St. Isidro’s Meadow…the girls are in their white parasols, the men in their finery, the scene is of social pleasure and jollity…
Years later Goya returned to the same theme.… The Pilgrimage of St. Isidro, instead of these happy fashionable well-dressed young people, you have this horrible snake of…dark figures…like demons crawling across an ash heap. The faces are…of madmen and hysterics…The whole picture is deeply threatening, deeply irrational, profoundly weird…[This is what] Goya saw through the filter of his old age and his intense pessimism.’ In his 2003 best-selling book Goya, which accompanied the documentary, Hughes again began by focusing on these two paintings and the profound mystery they presented to him. In the book, Hughes referred to Goya’s so-called ‘Black Paintings’, a series that includes The Pilgrimage of St. Isidro, as ‘deeply enigmatic’ (p.11 of 429). He also mentioned that ‘it is not so long ago…that most people who thought about Goya considered him mad’ (p.25). It is only a measure of how in denial we are of our actual practice of denial that The Pilgrimage of St. Isidro, and so much of Goya’s work, could be viewed as ‘deeply irrational’, ‘profoundly weird’ and ‘deeply enigmatic’ because in truth what Goya sought to depict was very rational, un-weird and clear. It wasn’t Goya who was ‘mad’; it is our extreme estrangement or alienation from the truth of our condition that is the real madness on Earth."
