Tomlinson-whose authority Hughes acknowledged-prefers to let the facts speak for themselves. Tomlinson does not believe Matheron’s inventions, or those of subsequent scholars, but she is interested in them and they inform her own portrait of Goya. Learned and deeply personal, the latter was enjoyable for the fascinations of its subject and, equally, for Hughes’s company, which fills any documentary void. While “The Shock of the New” (1980) and “The Fatal Shore” (1986) remain Hughes’s highest achievements-along with, perhaps, his 1987 review of Julian Schnabel’s memoir (“a stew of mixed metaphors and rhetorical gristle, thickened with unparsable gibberish that would break the point of any editorial pencil”)-“Goya” (2003) is not far behind. Nearly 20 years ago, Robert Hughes reflected on the head-on car accident that almost killed him: “It was through the accident that I came to know extreme pain, fear, and despair,” he wrote in the introduction of his biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, “and it may be that the writer who does not know fear, despair, and pain cannot fully know Goya.” I will henceforth rationalize the last nine months as elaborate preparation for Janis Tomlinson’s new “Portrait” of the artist.
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