Goya’s Last Works will be the first exhibition in the United States to concentrate exclusively on the final phase of this artist’s career. It is the third in a series of critically acclaimed presentations focused on Spanish art at The Frick Collection, following Velázquez in New York Museums (1999) and El Greco: Themes and Variations (2001). Organized by Jonathan Brown, Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts, New York University and Susan Grace Galassi, Curator at The Frick Collection, the exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue published by Yale University Press as well as a series of lectures.
The Frick’s 1824 portrait of a woman identified as María Martínez de Puga is the starting point of this exhibition. The show focuses on the years from 1824 to 1828 which Goya spent in Bordeaux in a community of fellow Spanish exiles seeking refuge from the absolutism of Fernando VII and his vengeful purge of liberals, as well as on the years in Madrid shortly before his departure. Though aged, in poor health, and long deaf, Goya produced a remarkable body of innovative work in his late seventies and early eighties. The aim of Goya’s Last Works is to bring this little-known final phase of his art, and the circumstances in which it was created, to the attention of the American audience.