Why is Carl Jung dancing in the Streets of Death? Because one of his favorites among the living--artist James Magee, the creator of the colossal desert stonework, The Hill, and "the alleged" anima incarnate of the mysterious artist Annabel Livermore--has concocted this brew of poems and letters from the lands of Ordinary and Surreal. The poems flutter like butterflies from his imagination as he creates large steel assemblages. Weirdly, "Letters to Goya" are found pieces from 1955, from the rickety typewriter of the Duchess of Alba, who in (sur)real life is an old lady who wheel-chairs around the Waikiki Trailer Park in Sweetwater, Texas. Are the letters real? Well, yes. And no Tonight a cold rain falls in Tucson. Under an overpass I see you standing stark-naked, Juan, headlights streaming by, you toweling off with a wing of a blue and yellow bird found moments ago near a storm sewer, as if water were confessing of white tile, a room without walls, really where earlier you had imagined yourself as a bearded ancient, a Mesopotamian Lord kneeling down in the wet grass near the freeway to sing to an open field. James Magee and his partner, actress Camilla Carr, live in El Paso, Texas, in the home of Annabel Livermore. Kerry Doyle is the Director and Curator of the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts (University of Texas at El Paso), and a widely published scholar and respected curator of Latin-American and United States/Mexico Border arts.

Goya corresponded regularly with members of the aristocracy and the monarchy, as well as with friends. His surviving letters reveal a highly emotional man, prepared to state his feelings as passionately to the authorities of a cathedral as to a close friend. His letters make few concessions and are literary works in their own right. --book cover.

In the Letters to Goya section are "reproduced" letters from the 13th Duchess of Alba (living in a Sweetwater, Texas trailer park) to her artist friend Francisco Goya at the Spanish royal court; in the Titles section are Magee's poems to some of his sculptures.

Francisco Goya's correspondence to Martin Zapater establishes a connection between Goya's private life and his work. The correspondence reflects the painter's daily life in Madrid during the period from 1775 to 1800; he refers to friends and colleagues, entertainers, bullfighters, and work in progress. The letters are translated within the context of their time, with provides biographical data and notes.

The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern era The life of Francisco Goya (1746–1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country's politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and an ensuing period of political instability. In this revelatory biography, Janis Tomlinson draws on a wide range of documents—including letters, court papers, and a sketchbook used by Goya in the early years of his career—to provide a nuanced portrait of a complex and multifaceted painter and printmaker, whose art is synonymous with compelling images of the people, events, and social revolution that defined his life and era. Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death, showing how Goya's likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery—from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist's personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya's late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the "black" paintings. A monumental achievement, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist is the definitive biography of an artist whose faith in his art and his genius inspired paintings, drawings, prints, and frescoes that continue to captivate, challenge, and surprise us two centuries later.

Richly imagined portraits celebrating three historical women—including Goya’s muse—by an “outstanding writer” (Vaclav Havel). In “a unique voice that owes as much to Kundera as to Flaubert, to Hasek as to Tolstoy,” Czech writer Monika Zgustova brings to life the stories of three remarkable women in different countries and eras who defied the social restrictions of their day to find freedom of creative and personal expression (Juan Goytisolo, author of Exiled from Almost Everywhere). On her deathbed in the royal court of eighteenth-century Madrid, the Duchess of Alba, lover and portrait subject of Spanish painter Francisco Goya, recalls the passions of her youth. Living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century, Bozena Nemcova defies the protocols of her arranged marriage and pursues love and the life of a published writer—until her readers condemn her as a danger to society. In 1922, writer Nina Berberova escapes persecution during the Russian Revolution and flees to Paris with poet Vladislav Khodasevich, where the intelligentsia naively covet the promise of the Soviet Union. Each woman attempts to pursue a life of passion, intimacy, and creativity in worlds that rarely accommodate female desire and ambition. In praising Goya’s Glass, Vaclav Havel said: “Monika Zgustova’s concerns are close to my own: the fate of the individual in the hands of totalitarianism. She is an outstanding writer whose fiction invokes the politics and culture of people throughout history.”

One of Pierre Michon's most powerful works, this book imagines decisive moments in the lives of five artists of different times and places: Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Antoine Watteau, Claude Lorrain, and Lorentino, a little-remembered disciple of Piero della Francesca. Michon focuses on particular moments when artist and model collide, whether that model is a person or a landscape, inner or outer. In the five separate tales he evokes the full passion of the artist's struggle to capture the world in images even as the world resists capture. Each story is a small masterpiece that transcends national boundaries and earns its place among the essential works of world literature.