Great art has no expiration date.
It only grows more powerful and influential with the passage of time. It speaks in new ways to succeeding generations, influencing and inspiring later artists in unforeseen ways and refusing to be ignored.
So it is with Francisco Goya’s “The Disasters of War,” a series of 56 etchings that offers a frank, unflinching look at the horrors of the Peninsular War in Spain in the early 19th century. These images turn the stomach and puncture the soul nearly two centuries after their creation.
Simon Zalkind, director of exhibitions at the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, asked 25 artists to contribute contemporary takes on the same theme that inspired Goya; 22 took him up on the offer. The resulting exhibition, “(New) Disasters of War,” runs through April 6.
Such group shows can seem scattered and disconnected despite an overarching theme supposedly relating them. But this one manages to achieve a relative cohesiveness, and, more imporant, a kind of emotional critical mass.
While a few pieces inevitably fall flat, the overall exhibition is engrossing and thought-provoking. It does what it is meant to do: cause viewers to stop and reflect on the essence of war and its consequences on both a personal and global level.
At the heart of this show lies an extraordinary suite of 10 prints by San Francisco artist Enrique Chagoya that respond directly to Goya’s “Disasters of War,” with easily identifiable reinterpretations of specific images for the 19th-century series.
A nationally known artist and top- flight printmaker, Chagoya succeeds in re-creating the basic look, feel and craftsmanship of the originals, giving his new takes a subtly contemporary bent and adding his own distinctive stylistic touches.
“My etchings result from a kind of reverse science-fiction question: What would Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’ look like if some of our modern technology and contemporary political figures had existed in his day?” Chagoya writes in an accompanying statement.
In answering that question, he creates a virtual copy of Goya’s grisly scene of mutilated and dismembered bodies, “An heroic feat! With dead men!” with the tiny addition of Mickey Mouse looking on in one corner. In his reinterpretation of “Against the common good,” the winged figure looks suspiciously like Ronald Reagan.
Potent as the social and political commentary in these works is, Chagoya acknowledges his limitations with a touching print that shows a tiny foot trying to fill a giant shoe, an obvious metaphor for the inadequacies the artist feels in living up to Goya’s example.
Two of the show’s most powerful images – hung adjacent to each other, appropriately enough – are bold, semi- abstract works dominated by an ill-defined ghostly figure, a kind spectre of death.
Turning for inspiration to the Holocaust, which took the lives of many of her forbears, and specifically the mountain of shoes exhibited at the United States Holocaust Museum, Denver artist Margaret Neumann has created a stark 4-by-6-foot acrylic dominated by a haunting red background with a pile of loosely delineated shoes.
In the foreground is the black silhouette of a seated figure with his or her head floating above the neck. The deliberate ambiguity and bold juxtaposition of these images create a disturbing whole – a painting that lingers uncomfortably in the memory.
Equally unsettling is “Knowledge is Bad, Birth is Dirty, Death is Holy (after Goya’s ‘This is what you were born for’),” a deliberately crude, collaged painting by the always surprising and consistently under-appreciated Denver artist, Steven Altman.
Using what looks like rough sections of dried paint that have been glued to the canvas, Altman has constructed a forbidding figure, a kind of boogeyman, surrounded by collaged images of war machines. Like Neumann’s work, it packs a dull, painful punch.
In a time when the United States is involved in an ugly war that has outlasted the country’s engagement in World War II, this probing and provocative exhibition seems especially timely.
“(New) Disasters of War”
ART EXHIBITION
|Contemporary reflections on war by 22 artists|Singer Gallery, Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, 350 S. DahliaSt.|FREE |9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 1-4 p.m. Sundays; through April 6; 303-316-6360; mizelcenter.org.
