The Memorial Student Center Visual Arts Committee (MSC VAC) opens its spring schedule with an exhibition of
etchings by Spanish artist Francisco Goya and illustrations by Spanish-American
artist Federico Castellón. The
exhibition, titled “Fear and Folly,” opens on Tuesday, January 14
in the MSC Reynolds Student Art Gallery on the 2nd floor of the
MSC. An opening reception will be hosted
by the student members of the MSC VAC on Thursday, January 16
beginning at 6:30pm in the Reynolds Gallery.
“Fear and Folly,” which is organized through the Kalamazoo Institute ofArts (KIA) with generous support from Mary and James B. Crawley ’47, will
remain on exhibit in the MSC through March 15.
According to the exhibition
program produced by the KIA, the Goya prints in this exhibition, taken from his
last major series, los Disparates (roughly translated as the
follies), “are some of his darkest, most enigmatic creations.” The author notes that “nearly thirty years
earlier he (Goya) was painting lighthearted scenes of leisure activities to be
made into tapestries for the royal palaces.
In los Disparates, some of
Goya’s earlier subjects reemerge as disturbing and even diabolic images.”
Indeed these works, created in the last dozen or so years before the artist’s death in 1828, are filled with grotesques, absurdities, comic inventions, leering expressions, contorted bodies, and, of course, death. For a painter whose joyous, elegant work had once been beloved by Spanish royalty, los Disparates is representative of the darker turn the artist took in his later years, perhaps as a result of his illness, his descent into insanity, or the oppressive political conditions that overtook Spain at the time of the Inquisition and war with Napoleon’s France.
Indeed these works, created in the last dozen or so years before the artist’s death in 1828, are filled with grotesques, absurdities, comic inventions, leering expressions, contorted bodies, and, of course, death. For a painter whose joyous, elegant work had once been beloved by Spanish royalty, los Disparates is representative of the darker turn the artist took in his later years, perhaps as a result of his illness, his descent into insanity, or the oppressive political conditions that overtook Spain at the time of the Inquisition and war with Napoleon’s France.
“Fear and Folly” pairs Goya’s
works with the equally dark lithographs Federico Castellón created in 1969 for
Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death.” Poe’s story, published in 1842, is about a
group of aristocrats attempting to escape the plague by retreating to the
safety of a prince’s country abbey.
While the rest of the citizens of the country suffer the aristocrats
hold a masquerade ball, determined to wait out the epidemic in luxury. Their revelry is spoiled, however, by a dark
figure who has crashed the party. The
figure is, of course, the Red Death itself, and in the end all the revelers
die. Castellón, who was born in Spain
but moved to Brooklyn as a child, produced a set of sixteen illustrations as
macabre and imaginative as Poe’s narrative.
The MSC Visual Arts Committee is
a student programming committee in the Memorial Student Center at Texas A&M
University. The student-managed
committee operates the MSC James R. Reynolds Student Art Gallery and produces
programs to engage the Texas A&M community in the visual arts. More information about the MSC VAC is
available at vac.tamu.edu. The Memorial Student Center’s mission is to enrich
the campus living and learning environment through programming, services, and
leadership development opportunities.
More information about the Memorial Student Center is available at
msc.tamu.edu.
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