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The art of war: Heart of darkness

战争的艺术：黑暗之心

Francisco Goya’s vision of war is as urgent and powerful as ever

弗朗西斯科·戈雅描绘的战争一如既往，既有力又能体现出紧迫性

The line of drably uniformed infantrymen, rifles aimed, forms a forceful diagonal across the right side of the painting, a machine of terror.

身穿单调制服，手持步枪瞄准，这样的一排士兵在画的右侧形成了一条强有力的对角线，这就是一台恐怖机器。

Their target is a terrified rebel in a white shirt, his arms flung upwards in vulnerability and defiance, imitating Christ on the cross.

他们的目标是一名身穿白色衬衫的受惊叛军，他的手臂向上挥舞着，表现出脆弱和反抗，这是在模仿十字架上的基督。

His comrades cover their faces.

他的同志们捂着脸。

Several already lie inert on the ground in pools of blood.

有几个人已经躺在地上的血泊中，一动不动。

The subject of Francisco Goya’s “The Third of May 1808”, also known as “The Executions”, is the reprisals exacted by Napoleon’s troops after a rebellion by the populace of Madrid, portrayed in a companion painting, all slashing daggers and sabres.

弗朗西斯科·戈雅的作品《1808年5月3日夜枪杀起义者》，也被称为《处决》，主题是马德里民众起义后拿破仑军队实施的报复，戈雅在一幅配图中描绘了民众起义的画面，画中的所有人都在砍击匕首和军刀。

Yet it is also a universal indictment of violence.

然而，这也是对暴力的普遍控诉。

“It’s a work of today, of Ukraine, of all wars,” says Gudrun Maurer of the Prado museum in Madrid, where it hangs.

马德里普拉多博物馆的古德伦·毛雷尔说：“这幅作品反映了今天，反映了乌克兰，反映了所有战争。”

“You could put it in a square in Kyiv and people would understand it.”

“你可以把这幅画放在基辅的广场上，人们会懂的。”

Almost two centuries after his death Goya seems ever more contemporary, especially amid a war in Europe.

在戈雅去世近两个世纪后，现代的人似乎更能与他产生共鸣，特别是在欧洲的一场战争期间。

He was not the first war artist but no one has captured its horrors more powerfully.

他并非第一位战争艺术家，但没有人能比他更有力地体现出战争的恐怖。

Many of his concerns—the exploitation of women, mental health, human rights and the treatment of prisoners, the power of false beliefs and fake news—resonate today.

他的许多关切--对女性的剥削、心理健康、人权和囚犯待遇、错误信仰和虚假新闻的力量--都在今天引起了共鸣。

He was the first Western artist to paint his own ideas, visions, dreams and nightmares, not just external realities.

他是第一个描绘自己的想法、愿景、梦想和噩梦的西方艺术家，而不仅仅是描绘外部现实。

In other words, he was “the first Modernist”, as Robert Hughes, an art critic, called him, and the first Expressionist.

换句话说，他是艺术评论家罗伯特·休斯所称的“第一个现代主义者”，也是第一个表现主义者。

His eye is searching, often compassionate and ultimately bleak.

他的眼睛一直在探索，眼神中经常充满了同情，但最终还是黯淡无光的。

Not surprisingly, Goya is in fashion, though he has rarely been out of it.

不出所料，戈雅合于时代，尽管他很少过时。

The Fondation Beyeler in Basel staged a rare blockbuster show devoted to him in 2021.

巴塞尔的贝勒耶基金会在2021年为他举办了一场罕见的大型展览。

Next summer an exhibition in Oslo will pair works by Goya with those of Edvard Munch, whose masterpiece “The Scream” echoes some of the Spaniard’s images.

明年夏天，奥斯陆的一场展览将把戈雅的作品与爱德华·蒙克的作品配对展出，后者的杰作《呐喊》与戈雅的一些作品相呼应。

For several contemporary artists, such as Jake and Dinos Chapman, Emily Lombardo and Michael Armitage, Goya is a direct point of reference.

对于查普曼兄弟、艾米莉·隆巴多和迈克尔·阿米蒂奇等几位当代艺术家来说，戈雅也是一个直接的参考标准。

Last year Philippe Parreno, a French video artist, released “La Quinta del Sordo”, a 40-minute film showing Goya’s late “Black Paintings” in swirling hyper-close-ups, set to a soundtrack of interplanetary roars and moans.

去年，法国视频艺术家菲利普·帕雷诺发行了一部40分钟的电影《聋人屋》，这部电影以旋转的超特写镜头展示了戈雅晚年创作的《黑色绘画》，配乐是星际间的咆哮和呻吟。

The effect is ghoulish and mesmeric.

其效果令人毛骨悚然，又令人着迷。

Two Goya portraits will be auctioned at Christie’s in January; they seem guaranteed to smash the record price for his work, currently $7.8m.

两幅戈雅画像将于明年1月在佳士得拍卖行拍卖；现在看来，它们肯定会打破其作品的最高价格纪录，目前为780万美元。

Goya was an extraordinarily versatile and innovative artist who lived a long life, dying in 1828 aged 82 in voluntary exile in Bordeaux.

戈雅是一位多才多艺、富有创新精神的艺术家，他很长寿，于1828年在波尔多自愿流放时去世，享年82岁。

He was born in a village near Zaragoza to middle-class parents, his father a professional gilder.

他出生在萨拉戈萨附近的一个村庄，父母是中产阶级，他的父亲是一名职业镀金工人。

He was ambitious—and supremely confident of his abilities.

他雄心勃勃，对自己的能力非常自信。

Moving to Madrid, he became court painter to three successive monarchs and director of painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

搬到马德里后，他先后成为了三位君主的宫廷画家和皇家艺术学院的绘画总监。

His early work included the religious paintings that were obligatory for a budding artist.

他的早期作品包括宗教绘画，这对初出茅庐的艺术家来说是必不可少的。

A breakthrough came with commissions for scores of cartoons for the royal tapestry factory portraying scenes of Spanish life.

随后，他受托为皇家挂毯厂绘制了大量描绘西班牙生活场景的样稿，就此迎来了突破。

He became an insightful and sought-after portraitist.

他成为了一名有洞察力且受欢迎的肖像画家。

But he retained a lifelong appreciation of demotic tastes—bullfighting, hunting, the fiesta—even as he made friends among the intellectuals of the Spanish Enlightenment.

但他一生都保持着对大众趣味的欣赏--斗牛、狩猎、宗教节日--即使在他与西班牙启蒙运动时期的知识分子结交时也是如此。

His knowledge of those contrasting worlds, and affection for them, gave him a unique understanding when they came into conflict.

他对这些截然不同的世界的了解，以及对它们的喜爱，使他在它们发生冲突时有了独特的理解。

“His art is always aimed at more than one side,” says Ms Maurer.

“他的艺术永远不止着眼于一个方面，”毛雷尔说。

From the 1790s, two things happened to turn Goya into the artist so admired today.

从17世纪90年代起，有两件事让戈雅成为了今天如此受人钦佩的艺术家。

One was a mysterious illness, possibly lead poisoning from his paints, that left him deaf.

其中一件事是一种神秘的疾病，可能是颜料导致的铅中毒，这导致他失聪了。

That caused him to look inwards.

这让他开始向内观察。

His paintings began to deal with beliefs and transgressions.

他的画开始涉及信仰和违法行为。

A great colourist, his canvases became almost monochrome, dominated by blacks and browns.

他是一名伟大的色彩画家，可他的油画几乎从此变成了单色，以黑色和棕色为主。

One series denounced violence against women.

他的一个画作系列谴责了针对妇女的暴力行为。

Paintings now in the Academy detailed fanaticism in flagellants and the Inquisition, the phenomenon of witchcraft, the plight of prisoners and fantasies of the madhouse that mocked the “normal” world.

现在位于该学院的画作细致描绘了鞭笞者和宗教法庭中的狂热、巫术现象、囚犯的困境以及嘲弄“正常”世界的疯人院的幻想。

Goya also became a prolific printmaker.

戈雅也成为了一位多产的版画家。

In “Los Caprichos” (“The Caprices”) he lampooned the church and social hypocrisies.

在《突发奇想》中，他讽刺了教会和社会的虚伪。

The second turning-point was the French revolution, with which he sympathised, and Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and the long Peninsular war that followed.

第二个转折点是他同情的法国大革命，以及拿破仑入侵西班牙和随后的漫长半岛战争。

The ensuing brutality forced him to review his ideas.

随之而来的暴行迫使他重新审视自己的想法。

“Goya goes from being a follower of the Enlightenment who believes in the capacity for regeneration to a person whose experience leads to despair,” according to Javier Portus, the chief curator for Spanish painting at the Prado.

普拉多博物馆西班牙画展的首席策展人哈维尔·波图斯说，“戈雅从一个相信复兴能力的启蒙运动的追随者，变成了一个因经历而绝望的人。”

This bleak vision was expressed in the “Black Paintings”, executed as frescoes on the walls of La Quinta del Sordo, Goya’s country house, and now occupying Room 67 of the Prado.

这种黯淡的愿景在《黑色绘画》中表达了出来，这些画作曾以壁画的形式出现在戈雅的乡村别墅“聋人屋”的墙上，现在占据了普拉多博物馆的67号展厅。

They were painted for himself, not the public or the court.

这些画是为他自己画的，而不是为公众或宫廷画的。

They are peopled by nightmare figures, crones and paupers in rags, their mouths gaping cavities.

画上满是噩梦般的人物，比如衣衫褴褛的老妪和乞丐，他们的嘴巴都张得大大的。

It is as if dead souls returned to haunt the living.

仿佛死去的灵魂又回来纠缠活着的人。

Yet they are recognisable in the homeless people found in the streets of post-pandemic cities.

然而，在疫情爆发后的城市街道上发现的无家可归者中，很容易就能认出他们。

There was despair, too, in a series of prints, “The Disasters of War”, not published until 1863: body parts strewn on trees, piles of corpses, people being clubbed to death.

直到1863年才出版的一系列版画《战争的灾难》中也有令人绝望的景象：尸块散落在树上，尸体成堆，人们死于棍棒之下。

“I saw it,” he wrote on two of the prints.

“我看到了，”他在其中两张版画上写道。

He certainly visited the ruins of Zaragoza after the French siege, and he lived through the famine in Madrid in 1811-12 in which perhaps 20,000 died.

他无疑参观了法国围困后萨拉戈萨的废墟，他经历了1811至1812年间马德里的饥荒，大约有2万人在那次饥荒中丧生。

Yet the power of his portrayal of war is not as a literal record, but that it cuts to the essence.

然而，他在描绘战争时的力量并不是字面上的记录，而是他的描绘切中了本质。

It is war seen close-up, never heroic.

特写中看到的是战争，从来都不是英雄壮举。

Each age sees what it wants in Goya, Mr Portus notes.

波图斯指出，每个时代都能从戈雅身上看到它想要的东西。

That testifies to his genius in communicating ideas and images.

这证明了他在传达思想和图像方面的天赋。

He was of his time; other Enlightenment artists shared his concerns.

他属于他的时代；其他启蒙运动艺术家也和他有同样的担忧。

But he alone transcended that time to speak universal truths about the human condition so directly.

但只有他一个人超越了他的时代，如此直接地讲述了关于人类状况的普遍真理。

来源：经济学人