Visiones

Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2 February – 14 May 2000

Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La passion du dessin: Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 19 March – 30 June 2002, pp. 170-171

Vienna, Albertina Museum, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier Poniatowski, 8 April – 28 August 2005

Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge – Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 20 July – 7 October 2007

London, The Courtauld Gallery, Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album, 26 February – 25 May 2015

New York, David Zwirner, Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art (organized in association with Nicholas Hall), 12 September – 27 October, 2018

Dallas, Meadows Museum, Goya’s Visions in Ink: The Centerpiece of the Meadows Drawings Collection, 30 April–3 November

La passion du dessin: Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, Culture Espaces, Paris, 2002, exh. cat., pp. 170-171, reproduced no. 73.

Ed. Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Christine Ekelhart, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, Vienna, Albertina Museum, Bruno Helm, Berlin, 2005, exh. cat., pp. 30-31, reproduced no. 4.

Ed. Christiane Lange and Roger Diederen, Das Ewige Auge – Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski,Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Hirmer Verlad Müncher, 2007, exh. cat., pp. 144-145, reproduced no. 64.

Ed. Juliet Wilson-Bareau and Stephanie Buck, Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album, London, The Courtauld Gallery, 2015, exh. cat., reproduced p.96, cat. 10.

Dawn Ades, Olivier Berggruen, J. Patrice Marandel, and Nicholas Hall, Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art, New York, 2019.

Album D, also known as the ‘Witches and Old Women Album’ for its dominant subject matter, contained only 23 known drawings and likely remained unfinished, as posited by leading Goya scholar Juliet Wilson-Bareau. Apart from Visionesand the aforementioned Bajan riñendo, the contents this album are now dispersed among public collections around the world, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Courtauld Gallery, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, among others.

As the pages of Goya’s albums were removed from their original bindings, experts continue to debate the precise dating of the drawings from Album D. In 1958, Eleanor Sayre of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts originally labeled the albums A-H according to tentative chronology. Though the album names remain in accordance with her original classification, Sayre later revised the chronological order, dating the drawings of Album D circa 1816-17. Current scholar Wilson-Bareau noted that the paper used for these drawings—Netherlandish; which may have come from a supplier in Andalusia—was the same as Goya used for Album B, the ‘Madrid Album’, dated to 1796-97.

Accordingly, the Album D drawings were long believed to have been created around that time. The correspondence of witchy subject matter in this album to that of the Los Capirchos series of 1797-98 (also featured in this exhibition), supported this argument as well, and Pierre Gassier, who authored the 1973 catalog raisonné of Goya’s drawings, was also inclined to date Album D to around 1800.

However, despite the similarity of the Album D paper to that used in an earlier album, Wilson-Bareau suggests that the Album D works were likely made around 1819-23, even later than Sayre’s estimation. In the catalogue of the 2001 exhibition curated for the Hayward Gallery and exclusively devoted to the Private Albums, Wilson-Bareau justifies this date with her close comparison to Goya’s famous ‘Black Paintings’, which the artist executed after 1820 at his country home outside of Madrid. The numerous flying figures and witches featured in Album D recall the Black Painting mural Asmodea, which sees two people hovering above a mountainous landscape. As in Goya’s Black Paintings, the brushwork of the Album D works is loose and expressionistic, prioritizing movement and emotion over precisely delineated forms. Paired with the unfinished nature of the album, the similarities to the Black Paintings suggest a project undertaken in Goya’s later years.

The catalogue of the 2015 exhibition Goya: Witches and Old Women Album at the Courtauld Gallery attests to the provenance, rarity and good condition of the work. Many images once contained in Goya’s private albums were later unbound, cut and dispersed after the artist’s death, often with markings or cataloging numbers cropped out or erased in the course of ownership. In the case of Visiones, however, the paper dimensions match other intact dra wings from Album D, indicating that the paper has not been cut, with only Goya’s original numbering having been erased. Despite the erasure, visible outlines on the drawing definitively reveal its placement in Album D. Small carry marks on the well-preserved verso of the page reveal an offset outline of the number 11. Examination under infrared light suggests these marks were caused by the same ink used by Goya in his numbering of other pages. Compared to the number 11 noted on the recto of Goya’s Madness, the marks from the back of Visiones match the shape of the numeral exactly, confirming that the wet ink used to by Goya to paginate Madness was transferred to the back of the preceding page of our Visiones, thereby denoting it as number 10 in the album.

The Courtauld catalogue notes only slight discoloration and minor foxing, with a raised inclusion at the lower center near the bottom edge. The surface texture and particles of black chalk to the right of the work suggests the removal of part of the inscription, which now simply reads ‘Visiones’. Scraping around the figure of the grinning onlooker reveals pentimenti of earlier sketches which Goya removed in order to accentuate the main characters of the composition. The form and clothing of the man and that of the top half of the old woman are rendered in bold washes of black, beautifully offset against the white paper and tempered by the lighter traces of grey in the old woman’s skirt as well as the spectator’s face and shoulders. Though faint, theses subtle traces of past artistic decisions chart Goya’s thought process and bear witness to the genesis and evolution of the work.

In the 1973 catalogue, Gassier had only an incomplete provenance history listed, believing Visiones (listed therein as “A Vision”) to be lost. In the 1980s however, the drawing surfaced and was studied at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where the conservation team found flecks of pink paper from a previous mounting on the verso of Visiones. These specimens were identical to the former backing of La madre Celestina– a drawing from Goya’s Album D belonging to the museum–and proved to be the remnants of a distinctive pink paper onto which many of Goya’s drawing were once laid down. It has since been established that this backing links the works to those acquired by Federico de Madrazo, royal portrait painter and director of the Museo del Prado from 1860-68 and 1881-1894. This link to Madrazo serves as an important addition to the already prestigious provenance of Visiones, which was first inherited by Goya’s son, and later grandson before its acquisition by the renowned painter and museum director. Evidence from Gassier, who cites an inscription on the reverse of another Goya work sold to E. Féral at the same 1877 Hôtel Drouot sale, suggests that Visiones was in fact bought on behalf of Victor Hugo by Féral. Since that time, the drawing has belonged in the collections of celebrated curator and art historian at Harvard University, Philip Hofer, as well as the highly regarded dealer Jan Krugier, who is best known for his close associations with Picasso and Giacometti. Embodying the finest style of Goya’s late work, with the artist’s signature expressive style and cheeky subject matter, Visiones is an exceedingly rare find from one of the artist’s most unique and limited albums.