Jake and Dinos Chapman This article is more than 6 years oldChapman brothers reunite with Goya's art 16 years after defacing it
This article is more than 6 years oldWorks by the enfants terribles of Britart form part of Spanish exhibition exploring enduring influence of Francisco de Goya
The sleep of reason produces monsters and, if you are Jake and Dinos Chapman at least, an enduring obsession with the works of Francisco de Goya.
Sixteen years after the brothers famously took their pens to 83 prints of the Spanish artist’s bleak and ultraviolent series The Disasters of War, the trio are to be reunited in an exhibition at the Goya museum in Zaragoza.
Goya’s etchings, created between 1810 and 1820, show the horror, squalor and extreme cruelty that marked the Napoleonic occupation of Spain and its aftermath.
His depictions of torture, rape, starvation and execution have long fascinated the British artists, informing their work and eventually leading them to inform his.
The idea, according to the exhibition’s curator, Lola Durán, is to illustrate just how profoundly Goya has influenced artists from Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí to the Chapmans.
The brothers’ 2001 work, The Disasters of War IV, is being shown alongside pieces from the museum’s collection, which include the original sketch for the Charge of the Mamelukes.
“It occurred to us that the Chapmans are the artists who have best captured and reflected the artistic and ethical criticisms contained in Goya’s prints,” Lola Durán.
“They’ve taken Goya’s message – that war can’t be justified, that violence can’t be justified – and transformed it and built on it.”
The graphic images of rape and impalement, she added, were meant to fascinate and appal the viewer.
“These are really unpleasant scenes, which, like those of the Chapmans, are intended to hit us right in the conscience and make us realise the terrible consequences of war: disease; exile and abandonment,” said Durán.
“The message that the Chapmans have taken from Goya is that today we’re still living in the midst of violence – just turn on the TV news. It’s mean to make us think about the senselessness and confusion of war.”
Jake Chapman, who flew to Spain on Thursday to attend the opening of the exhibition, said he and his brother had been drawn to the tension between The Disasters of War and how the pictures have traditionally been viewed and interpreted.
“There’s a tug of war between how it is institutionally framed as a humanist work of art that is simply there to depict a moral outrage over man’s inhumanity to man – which is the most hackneyed statement always associated with the Disasters – and the degree to which this work undermines the morality that is been forcibly set to be iconic of,” he said.
Chapman said the “ferocious detail” with which Goya had shown the castrations and amputations made a moral reading rather paradoxical, adding that while he and his brother’s “obliteration” of the prints had been disrespectful it had been intended as a “kind of antagonistic catalyst” to the series.
“[It’s] a way of gouging out something that has kind of been censored by a complacent notion of a moral reading.
“The thing we objected to was not so much Goya’s meaning – we’re actually trying to gouge them from this moralistic framework and maybe release its libidinal economy to show that these works are much more radically unhinged and unstable and they don’t deserve to be accumulated to some sort of post-Christian redemption.”
Asked whether he feared any kind of backlash in Spain, Chapman replied the controversy said to envelop the siblings’ work invariably had more to do with journalists than genuinely irate public hordes.
“In terms of the reformational violence of Isis, I think the last thing we’re scared of is a bunch of bourgeois art lovers coming and complaining about our slightly antagonistic, tantrumic attacks on fucking Goya,” he said.
“Controversy is one thing but I think the seriousness of the work will go unnoticed. That’s the thing. One of the things that’s never discussed is the seriousness of the work.”
Chapman said he hoped visitors would not be distracted by “personality antics” and would focus instead on what had brought him and Dinos to The Disasters of War in the first place – “but, having said that, of course it’s going to be amazing to see”.
And then, in words likely to chill the staff of the Goya museum, he added: “I’ve brought some felt tips with me, so … ”
- Disasters of War: Jake and Dinos Chapman on Goya is at the Museo Goya Fundación IberCaja in Zaragoza until 11 February
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