Goya's 'Majas"

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30332, 7 January 1964, Page 3

Goya's 'Majas"

(By a Special Correspondent of “The Times") With the first rumours or the Prado’s decision to lend the “Maja Desnuda” and “Maja Vestida” to the Royal Academy’s Goya Exhibition various old legends connected with these pictures were, in the nature of

things, revived. We heard again, for example, the story that the model was a Spanish lady in high society who was Goya’s mistress at the moment; and that when the “Maja Desnuda”—a nude reclining among pillows on a sofa — had just been completed, a proximate visit from the lady’s husband was announced, and Goya produced the “Maja Vestida”—where the figure is clothed in a white frock, pink sash, and miatadior’s gold bolero—to show him on his arrival

Internal evidence gives some support to this story because the clothed version was obviously painted at great speed in “direct’’ technique with fluid pigment, whereas the flesh-tints in the nude version are clearly the result of very careful painting and numerous sittings. There is moreover circumstantial evidence to support an elaboration of the story which named the Duchess of Alba as the sitter, because Goya and this lady were, almost surely, at one time, lovers. The Duke of Alba had married Dona Maria del Pilar Cayetana when she was 13 and he was six years older. By 1795 when Goya first met them and painted portraits of them both (Goya being then 49, the Duchess 33, and the Duke 39), the marriage had long been a failure, as the Duke was a sick man, exclusively devoted to music, painting, and a sedentary life, while his wife had soon become an attractive, uncoventional and capricious leader of Madrid society. This situation is, as it were, underlined by Goya’s pictures; for the husband’s portrait (now in the Prado) places him at home in his study, with piano and violin, perusing the score of some songs by Haydn; and the portrait of his wife, known as “The Duchess of Alba with a red sash” depicts her unattended in a landscape, wearing a muslin gown, scarlet sash, coral necklace and heavy gold bracelets, her

face framed by a mass of unbound dark hair, and pointing with her right hand to Goya’s dedication of the painting to her.

About eighteen months later Goya painted another full-length portrait of this lady, known as “The Duchess of Alba with a black mantilla.” The Duchess was by that time a widow living in retirement at Sanlucar, near Seville—the Duke having died in Seville in June, 1796, Goya went down to Sanlucar from Madrid at the widow’s invitation; and this second portrait is a strangely compromising document as the Duchess, in mourning with a black mantilla over her cascading hair, stands again in a landscape, her hand bearing rings where the two names “Alba—Goya” can be read, and pointing to the floor where “Only Goya” is inscribed. Other indications of this liaison have been left us by Goya and these records—and still more the two superbly characterized full-length portraits referred to abovemake it certain, I should say, that the Duchess was not the model for the “Majas” pictures.

For, thanks to Goya’s two great portraits, we have a clear and unforgettable image of Dona Maria del Pilar Cayetana—tall, elegant and assured. But the girl who posed for the “Maja Desnuda” and the “Maja Vestida” was evidently a common little person with short legis and scarcely any neck—probably a professional model; and the “Majas” pictures were in fact listed in 1808 as fancy subjects titled “Gipsies.” The “Maja Desnuda” and “Maja Vestida” remain, nevertheless, most intriguing pictures. No-one reality knows either when or where they were painted. For my own part, when I first saw these “companion pieces” in the Prado I explained to myself the difference in style between them by assuming an interval of some years between their execution; and I was certain (as I still am) that the “Maja Vestida” was painted not from life but from the “Maja Desnuda” (a procedure responsible perhaps for the legend recounted at the beginning of these comments).

Gaye, bora in 1746, spent, we must remember, more than half his working life in the eighteenth century and the first of these two pictures accords with his eighteenthcentury productions. “Maja Vestida” on the other hand, has the' qualities of his later technique, recognised by all artists as pathcutting for Delacroix and his descendants. In other words, Goya with the “Maja Vestida” was taking an old “tight’,’ painting and converting it, as a technical experiment into a “loose” one.

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of William Steinberg, will represent the United States at five music festivals in Europe ana the Near East next summer, including the Edinburgh Festival. It will also perform at the festivals of Baalbek, Damascus, Athens and Lucerne. Afterwards the orchestra will make a seven-week tour of Europe. The Beethoven Prize for 1963, bestowed by the city of Bonn (the composer’s birthplace), has gone to the Jugoslav composer and conductor, Milko Kelemen. Bom in 1924, Kelemen is the founder of the Zagreb Biennale for Contemporary Music. He received the prize for his "Transfigurations for Piano and Orchestra,” a piece he completed in 1961.