Will She Rise Again? Goya’s Etchings from The Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts

30 May – 17 September, 2023

Vilnius Picture Gallery of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art opens an exhibition Will She Rise Again? Goya’s Etchings from The Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts, presenting the famous series by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya The Caprices (Los Caprichos) and The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra). The artist’s critique of the Spanish and French war in nowadays context sends a powerful warning that any evil despite its innocent appearance must be stopped, and that war is the worst of all the evils.

 

‘The visual narratives by Goya, who witnessed the atrocities of war first-hand, reach us as poignant and timely statements in the context of ongoing war in Ukraine. The exhibition not only offers an opportunity to see the world-famous etchings here in Vilnius, but serves as a reminder of evil still rampant in Ukraine’, says Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, Director General of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art.    

 

 

Monsters Produced by the Sleeping Reason

 

Goya – Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes – is one of the most important Spanish artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries whose solid-with-social critique art and powerful records of political upheavals went to inspire Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso and other European artists. Goya created paintings, cartoons for tapestries, employed a range of graphic art techniques; to produce his famous series The Caprices (1796–1798), he used an innovative technique of aquatint. 

 

According to Olena Shostak, curator of the exhibition, ‘the series The Caprices is centred on the theme of evil which rules over humanity under multiple guises. Cruelty breeds more cruelty, depravity destroys everyone who gives in to it, while judges become no better than the accused.’

 

The first plates of the series feature the mask – an attribute of eighteenth-century art where it was supposed to communicate a sense of light-hearted playfulness and joyful mystery. Yet in The Caprices unfolds a carnival that is not a feast, but rather a total falsehood, triumphant vice and a barely disguised evil. Disgusting representatives from the devil’s realm appear in Part 2 of the series. Some of them embody real human vices, others just a general idea of universal wickedness. The end of the series is ambiguous, as at dawn the demons in turn into humans.

 

 

The Disasters of War

 

Between 1810 and 1820, Goya created a series The Disasters of War reflecting the armed Spanish independence struggle against the French, which he himself witnessed and was part of.  The war-condemning series was never publicly displayed during his lifetime. The prints were first published by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando posthumously, in thirty-five years after Goya’s death; by 1937 they saw other five other editions.   

 

According to the curators of the exhibition, ‘death in Goya’s work is a horrible and senseless end to human existence, nothing of a noble heroic death leading to immortality or eternal glory.’

 

A separate part of the plates in the series is dedicated to the famine that plagued Spain in 1811–1812. The artist experienced it while living in Madrid where the shortage of food was most severe. The last prints of the series record post-war episodes when King Ferdinand VII overthrew the liberal constitution adopted by the French, dismissed the Parliament and started repressions against free-thinkers.

 

The Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts acquired both of the series in 1940 from a private individual. The most recent technological scans have verified that the etchings are impressions from the original plates and were done in the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries.

 

 

 

The exhibitions were organised by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and The Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts, The Borys Voznyckyi Lviv National Art Gallery and The Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art under the patronage of the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania Simonas Kairys and the Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine Oleksandr Tkachenko

 

Organisers: LNMA Museum of Applied Arts and Design and The Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts

Project managers: Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, Julija Vaganova

Curators:  Olena Shostak, Olha Honcharenko

Exhibition coordinators: Dr Aistė Bimbirytė, Skaistis Mikulionis

Exhibition architect: Jurgis Dagelis

Exhibition designer: Loreta Uzdraitė

General Sponsor: BTA Vienna Insurance Company

Partners: Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Ukraine, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Poland, Embassy of Ukraine in Lithuania, Customs of the Republic of Lithuania, The Lithuanian Armed Forces, The Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, The Lithuanian Police Force, Department of Culture of Kyiv City State Administration, National Police of Ukraine, Jonas Karolis Chodkevičius Charity and Support Foundation

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