Self-Portrait While Painting

Who was Goya?” asks a wall text in “Goya: Order and Disorder,” the illuminating survey of the enigmatic Spanish master’s achievement at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.1 “An unflinching eye,” we are told. “An expert at captions and wordplay. A master of diverse genres and media, whose technical innovations spurred his imagination.” The beautifully presented, thoughtfully paced retrospective, jointly organized by Frederick Ilchman, chair of the Art of Europe Department and the Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings at the MFA, and Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, the museum’s Curator of Prints and Drawings, gives us all of these aspects of Francisco José Goya y Lucientes and more. We are introduced to him not only as a sought-after portrait painter, an inspired decorator, a creator of dark fantasies, a maker of religious images, and a brilliant inventor of still-life compositions, but also as a chronicler of daily life, a moralizer, a wit, and an acerbic political commentator; we meet a master of both refined and roughly expressive paint-handling, a trenchant draftsman in many media, and an inventive printmaker. Arranged thematically and orchestrated in intelligent, informative groupings, the show presents Goya whole, allowing us to understand both his consistency and the breadth of his approach, and encouraging us to note his fidelity to particular themes. At the same time, we are made aware of the many ways he came to terms with those themes in a variety of media and at different scales.