Today, Mozart is viewed as an exemplar of Classical idealism whose world of powdered wigs, waistcoats, and courtly manners is light years away from our own. Goya, by contrast, was a Romantic pessimist whose extreme self-expression makes him the first modern artist in the minds of many. Yet these two essential, antithetical figures find common ground in the imagination of contemporary artist William Kentridge.

For anyone with a passing knowledge of the work of Goya, Kentridge’s suite of eight intaglio prints, Little Morals (1991), should have a familiar ring. InNegotiations Begin, one of the most caustic images of the series, Kentridge lifts two figures from Plate 12 of the Spanish artist’s Disparates (Follies, also known as Los Proverbios, ca. 1820) and drops them, virtually wholesale, into his circle of fools riotously dancing in sight of a naked body tied to a stake. One of those dancers, a fellow in a bulky overcoat with a megaphone where his face ought to be (perhaps prefiguring the artist’s designs for Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1930 opera The Nose), reappears in another of the Little Morals prints, Procession of the Delegates. This time, however, his flung-apart arms recall the central victim in Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814).

 by: William Kentridge’s Black Box: Mozart, Goya, and the Darkening of the Enlightenment

Published on November 2nd, 2010 by Thomas Micchelli

In this picture, It shows the emotion of sadness. It is a simple picture but when we look, we can see the emotion that standout from the eyes.