Searching for Goya. "Goya" by Robert Hughes [review]

Abstract

For the tourist who knows little about Spain or Goya, Hughes’s account will serve. It rescues Goya from the Hollywood film "The Naked Maja" (1959), in which he had an affair with the Duchess of Alba, played by Ava Gardner. Readers familiar with the basics can follow Hughes’s example by turning to the scholarship of Francis Klingender, Fred Licht or Janis Tomlinson, whose insights Hughes acknowledges. Meanwhile, Hughes might be left to ponder whether he is to criticism what Mengs was to Spanish art before Goya.