Thanks to Vanderleun�for linking a review of a new book on Goya by Robert Hughes.�A quote from the excellent article:
(The black paintings)�are the climax of Goya's work as a painter. We sense this even though we don't really know what the hell they are about. If one of the characteristics of modernism, and modernism alone, is its privacy, its lack of public address, then Goya's Pinturas Negras are just about the first paintings by any great artist to fulfil that criterion. Goya painted them for himself, and himself alone - an audience of one. If anyone outside his small family did see them, no mention of them, no commentary, survives. Here it is, one of the weirdest and scariest image-cycles in all art history, and nobody wrote a syllable about it.
The Black Paintings obey no perceptible narrative. But they sum up certain obsessional themes of his art - pilgrims on the march, dances, demonic events -but now pushed to the orgiastic limit, and rendered in terms of the broadest, quickest gestures of the brush. Sly, autistic, crazy, leering, howling, glaring . . . a world of moral chaos, evoked in radical slashes and alla prima daubs of paint.
Image is Goya's Christ on the Mount of Olives, 1819