A timely exhibit that sounds interesting. I didn't know about the delay with the Goyas.
Art in a Time of War
The images produced by artists historicize war’s sick seductiveness while concentrating the mind on past, present, and, ineluctably, future calamity.
The “Disasters” are philosophically dire like nothing else in art history. Derived partly from Goya’s personal observation of battlefields, they begin soon after the onset of the Peninsular War, launched by Napoleon in 1808 with a misbegotten invasion of Spain, and proceed to gruesome renderings of war-induced famine and subsequent collisions of Royalist and liberal Spanish factions. They include instances of torture that make death seem merciful. Each of the plates zooms in on what the artist deemed an innate human capacity for savagery that never expires, persisting at a simmer in peacetime. What is it like to suffer atrocity and, alternatively, to perpetrate it? Goya generally plays no favorites among the parties to his nightmarish scenarios.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...-a-time-of-war
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