Visual indictment of war's horrors, modeled after Spanish insurrection (1808), the resultant Peninsular War and following famine. Miseries of war graphically demonstrated in 83 prints.

Over three centuries, the three artists in this collection--Callot, Goya, and Dix--produced sets of etchings that rendered the experience of war into wrenching detail. Here, their prints are reproduced together, showing the changing techniques of printmaking, as well as the horrifying sameness of war.

In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima’s Ground Zero, comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Investigating how hand-drawn comics has come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war. Hillary L. Chute traces how comics inherited graphic print traditions and innovations from the seventeenth century and later, pointing out that at every turn new forms of visual-verbal representation have arisen in response to the turmoil of war. Modern nonfiction comics emerged from the shattering experience of World War II, developing in the 1970s with Art Spiegelman’s first “Maus” story about his immigrant family’s survival of Nazi death camps and with Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa’s inaugural work of “atomic bomb manga,” the comic book Ore Wa Mita (“I Saw It”)—a title that alludes to Goya’s famous Disasters of War etchings. Chute explains how the form of comics—its collection of frames—lends itself to historical narrative. By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. Aggregating and accumulating frames of information, comics calls attention to itself as evidence. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness.

This book draws on the most recently scholarship by art historians and historians on the context and meaning of Goya s series of eighty aquatint etchings, the Desastres de la Guerra, much of it made available for the first time in English. Goya scholar Janis Tomlinson re-orders the sequence of the posthumously published 1863 edition to illustrates the artist s stylistic evolution as well as the etchings relation to their historical context. Kathleen Stewart Howe discusses the enduring influence of these prints in contemporary art. All eighty etchings of the first edition (1863) are reproduced in full-page, color illustrations."

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.

Francisco Goya has been widely celebrated as the most important Spanish artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the last of the Old Masters and the first of the Moderns, and an astute observer of the human condition in all its complexity. The many-layered and shifting meanings of his imagery have made him one of the most studied artists in the world. Few, however, have made the ambitious attempt to explore his work as a painter, printmaker, and draftsman across media and the timeline of his life. This book does just that, presenting a comprehensive and integrated view of Goya through the themes that continually challenged or preoccupied him, and revealing how he strove relentlessly to understand and describe human behavior and emotions even at their most orderly or disorderly extremes. Derived from the research for the largest Goya art exhibition in North America in a quarter century, this book takes a fresh look at one of the greatest artists in history by examining the fertile territory between the two poles that defined the range of his boundlessly creative personality.