Goya: Truth and Fantasy: The Small Paintings

The catalogue of a traveling international exhibition that opens at the Art Institute of Chicago in July, this stunning volume celebrates Goya's art in all its unruly diversity. The Spanish realist's smaller pictures tend to be more intimate and spontaneous than his larger canvases, yet just as powerful and incisive. In acid satires, political allegories, phantasmagorias of witches and monsters, and scenes of superstition and fanaticism, we see Goya widening the scope of art to reveal the conditions in which unfreedom is created. Also here are penetrating portraits, devotional scenes and images of prisons, asylums, torture, rape, war and assassination. Oxford fine arts professor Wilson-Bareau and other scholars provide highly readable essays to accompany the 250 plates. (Sept.)