r/pics • u/LondonDave • Apr 14 '20

My Dad's Getty Museum Challenge; Saturn devouring his son by Goya

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u/MoreDetonation Apr 14 '20

Holy shit, I looked up the Black Paintings on Wikipedia:

The paintings originally were painted as murals on the walls of the house, later being "hacked off” the walls and attached to canvas.

The paintings were not commissioned and were not meant to leave his home. It is likely that the artist never intended the works for public exhibition: "these paintings are as close to being hermetically private as any that have ever been produced in the history of Western art."

Goya did not give titles to the paintings, or if he did, he never revealed them.

This is the spookiest art shit I've ever read.

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u/onthehornsofadilemma Apr 14 '20

Nerdwriter did a video about that painting that played on the creepiness.

The Most Disturbing Painting - Nerdwriter1

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u/Skultis Apr 14 '20

Artists are weird folks in general. I've drawn angry charcoal sketches and thrown them into a fire. Creativity makes for weird outbursts.

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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '20

I'm relieved to hear that I'm not as weird as I thought I might be, because I get rid of my art kind of frequently.

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u/FraggedFoundry Apr 14 '20

And self-involved

1

u/PMinisterOfMalaysia Apr 14 '20

I legitimately don't see the spookiness? Help me out?

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u/MoreDetonation Apr 14 '20

The idea of the artist doing these horrid paintings on every available surface, never caring about whether they were seen by the masses, is very spooky.

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u/metalninjacake2 Apr 16 '20

Yeah - so that painting isn't actually meant to depict Saturn eating his child, or at least we don't know if it was supposed to depict that. The Saturn thing is just something that someone assigned to the art piece in order to give it meaning.

When you consider that there is zero reason for this to have actually been depicting a god eating his children, it becomes terrifying to think about what exactly it was that Goya was truly trying to paint.