FORT WORTH, TX.- Francisco de Goya y Lucientes is, with El Greco, Velázquez and Picasso, among the best-known figures in the history of Spanish art. Celebrated as one of the greatest painters of all time, he is also revered as one of history’s greatest draftsmen and printmakers. Goya in Black and White, on view in the Kimbell Art Museum's Renzo Piano Pavilion from October 7, 2018, to January 6, 2019, will showcase more than 85 of his greatest works on paper from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, renowned for their depth and richness in the graphic arts.

Goya began as a painter, justly admired in his early days for the ease with which he picked up the lighthearted and delicate style of the international Rococo. It was as a master portraitist that he achieved fame, though he never abandoned the painting of life around him, even as his imagination led him towards exploration of dark and tormented subject matter. In his later years, his free brushwork and inventive compositions were an inspiration to the Romantic artists of France, who passed on their admiration of Goya to a succeeding generation—to painters such as Manet and Degas.

In conjunction with his efforts as a painter, Goya was an assiduous draftsman and printmaker. His first efforts at etching include the copies after masterworks by Velázquez that he began to distribute in the late 1770s, including royal portraiture and grand subject paintings such as the Feast of Bacchus. Some 20 years later, working from drawings in black ink and red chalk, Goya etched and published (1799) his Caprichos, a group of 80 prints satirizing—gently or scathingly—the social mores of his time. Included in this group is one of the artist’s most famous creations, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. His Disasters of War, the Disparates and Tauromaquia were executed in the teens and were based, in turn, on his experiences of war and its aftermath, on the absurdities of outmoded Spanish customs or follies and on the history and art of bullfighting. Etched by 1816, only the scenes of the bullfight could be published in his lifetime. Because of their subversive subject matter, the other series were not issued until the 1860s. Goya’s final sequence of prints, known as The Bulls of Bordeaux, marked an audacious turn to lithography at the end of his life.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, owns more than a thousand works on paper by Goya, constituting one of the world’s most distinguished collections of his graphic oeuvre. Goya in Black and White will take full advantage of that richness, exploring the evolution of the artist’s graphic work in all media. The importance of black and white will be shown throughout the exhibition—not only literally, in black ink on white paper, but also figuratively, as in the oppositions of night and day, the balance between menacing shadow and hopeful light, that pervade the artist’s imagination. In the Kimbell’s exhibition, a select group of drawings and Goya’s principal series will be represented in detail, some works in multiple impressions, to reveal the creative evolution of the artistic process of a genius.