An exhibition in Parma compares two giants of satire: Goya and Grosz

In Parma, as part of its 2022 cultural programming, the City of Parma is organizing the exhibition Goya - Grosz. The Sleep of Reason, open from September 23, 2022 to January 13, 2023. An exhibition on the two floors of Palazzo Pigorini in which Francisco Goya ’s Caprichos dialogue with the drawings and paintings of George Grosz, two of the greatest draftsmen of all time.

Their works, united by their disruptive social satire, political engagement, moral relief and extreme formal innovation, reveal the extraordinary ability of two artists capable of revealing profound truths with a few strokes of ink or brushstrokes of color, as well as the extreme relevance of their poetics.

Francisco Goya y Lucientes (Fuendetodos, 1746 - Bordeaux, 1828) and George Grosz (Georg Ehrenfried Gross; Berlin, 1893 - 1953) are separated by 150 years of history, but both decided to investigate the reality of their time by innovating art: Goya’s Caprices can be considered a prodrome of modernity, in which the artist gives free rein to the representation of his own condition and at the same time his own nightmares. Grosz is one of the most obvious epigones of the Spanish master, partly because he was long considered, like Goya, a caricaturist.

Nevertheless, caricature is the only way for these artists to depict the “monstrous verisimilitude,” a dissimilar and upside-down world, making interior what is exterior and displacing above what is below: a carnivalesque reversal of reality in which satire and drama coexist.

Goya and Grosz are artists deeply involved in the reality of their time, with more or less explicit but extremely clear political positions, which are accompanied by innovative aesthetic practices. The exhibition aims precisely to emphasize this link, already declared by Grosz in 1933, the year in which he was forced to move to the United States where he would have great success with the public and critics. In a letter to publisher Wieland Herzfelde of Malik - Verlag, in which he commented on the searches the Nazis made of his homes in Germany, he wrote: “Without a doubt, my sheets are among the strongest things that have been said against this particular German brutality. Today they are truer than ever and in the future -- in times, pardon the word, more ’human’ -- they will be shown, just as Goya’s works are shown today....”

The idea of the exhibition Goya - Grosz. The Sleep of Reason was born in 2019 and is meant to appeal to current events, as the two curators Didi Bozzini and Ralph Jentsch point out: “Current events have cast a different light on each of the works on display and on the exhibition as a whole, because all the vices and perversions painted by Goya and Grosz have certainly not disappeared, but they still and always poison our days. In fact, everything changed so that little or nothing would change. Goya’s engravings and Grosz’s paintings do not tell us about an ancient history, but about the one we are living daily. The sleep of reason and the monsters it produces are still the same, in Madrid in 1799 as in Berlin in the 1920s or in the entire West today.”

The exhibition, which presents all eighty engravings of the Capriccios dated 1799, builds on Goya’s two self-portraits included within the series: the one in panel no. 1, drawn in profile and with eyes open, in which in fact the painter does not portray his face but his mask, and then Capriccio 43 - El sueño de la razon produce monstruos - the one with eyes closed in a sleep populated by monstrous creatures and nightmares. They are echoed by the self-portrait painted in 1940 by George Grosz, in which a bird of prey flies menacingly over the figure of the artist.

Goya, appointed First Court Painter in the same year that the Caprices came out, expresses through his art-particularly graphic art-his personal view of the world, not only with this series, but also with the cycle of The Disasters of War, some plates of which are on display in the exhibition. Similarly, Grosz, founder of the Berlin Dada movement, prophesied the advent of Nazism and World War II in his works, moving with great ease from satirical drawing to the drama of certain paintings in the exhibition, such as A Piece of My World II/The Last Battalion, in which in 1938 he depicts a desolate and destroyed land over which a desperate contingent of soldiers trudges in search of food.

“There is a profound sense of the contemporary,” comments Parma Mayor Michele Guerra, “that runs through the close relationship between the works of Goya and Grosz that Didi Bozzini and Ralph Jentsch have chosen for this splendid exhibition at Palazzo Pigorini. The different historical times, held in the distorted forms of these two artists, reveal the same propensity toward a dissimilarity of the real from which emerge fears and awarenesses that have continued to excavate modernity and that do not cease to interrogate the present. A unique opportunity, the one we will have in Parma, to encounter some masterpieces that are not so easy to see in our country.”

“I want to address,” adds Lorenzo Lavagnetto, councilor for culture, “a heartfelt thanks to all those who contributed to the realization of the exhibition. In particular, to the curators, lenders and sponsors who helped us bring the works of the two extraordinary artists to the city. The exhibition offers us keys to society characterized by social satire and political reflections, for a reflection involving our contemporary time, marked by pandemic and war. An exhibition that ’GOYA-GROSZ The Sleep of Reason’ can today, running through the worst fears of our time, become topical and subversive by shaking our consciences.”

The exhibition is realized with the contribution of the City of Parma and the Committee for Parma 2020 and thanks to technical sponsors Gruppo Spaggiari Parma S.p.A. and Agenzia CFC - Reale Mutua Assicurazioni.

In the image, left: Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Los Caprichos, 43, El sueño de la razon produce monstruos, 1799, Photo credit Elizabeth Krief. Right: George Grosz, Self-Portrait with Bird of Prey and Rat, 1940, Photo credits George GroszEstate, courtesy of Ralph Jentsch Berlin.

An exhibition in Parma compares two giants of satire: Goya and Grosz

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