Los Caprichos, Etching
Spanish painter and graphic artist. Goya is generally conceded to be the greatest painter of his era.
"Goya y Lucientes, Francisco José de." The Columbia Encyclopedia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Credo Reference. Web. 10 October 2012.
A series of 80 aquatints by Francisco Goya published on 6 February 1799. Goya had been ill during the 1790s and had come to feel increasingly alienated and embittered. In the prints he expressed these sentiments with a series of satirical attacks of the follies and evils of contemporary Spanish society. The character of the work is revealed by what was initially intended as the title page (now no. 43) - The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters - an image of rational man plagued by nightmarish beasts, and inspired by Rousseau's Philosophie. Many of the plates were anticlerical (e.g. no. 73, Thou Specks of Dust, attacked the Inquisition) and critical of the monarchy and court (e.g. no. 39, And so was his Grandfather, showed a donkey looking up his family tree). Increasingly the later plates became dominated by the imagery of weird beasts and witchcraft which was to reappear in Goya's Black Paintings (e.g. aquatint no. 75 Can Anyone Untie Us?, criticized arranged marriage by representing a couple roped together and tormented by a sinister bat-owl figure). It is interesting to remember that whilst Goya was venting these views, he was employed as a successful painter at court and the style of his engraving, particularly of the figures, is recognizably that of the official portraitist. Los Caprichos, along with the later series the Disasters of War, place Goya among the foremost early 19th-century graphic artists.
"Caprichos, Los." The Bloomsbury Guide to Art. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd, 1996. Credo Reference. Web. 10 October 2012.
Derriere Le Miroir, Lithograph
Swiss sculptor and painter; son of the impressionist painter Giovannia Giacometti; b. Stampa. He settled in Paris in 1922, studying with Bourdelle and becoming associated first with the cubists and then the surrealists (see cubism; surrealism). His Slaughtered Woman (1932; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City), for example, is a violent surrealist work. Giacometti abandoned surrealist images in 1935. In the 1930s and thereafter, he created highly original sculptures of elongated, emaciated human figures, usually in bronze. He also made open cagelike structures (e.g., The Palace at 4 A.M., 1933; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) that were equally powerful.
Giacometti, Alberto. (2008). In The Columbia Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/columency/giacometti_alberto