Goya, the Dark Side of Modernity

With The Four Major Print Series of the Spanish Master, Goya, the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum brings together the four great print series by Francisco Goya in a single exhibition that spans the artist’s entire creative trajectory. On view from 7 February to 22 March 2026, the exhibition presents 215 prints from the museum’s collection, one of the most significant holdings of Goya’s graphic work in Japan. At the core of the exhibition are the Caprichos, The Disasters of War, the Tauromachia and the Disparates. Across these series, Goya uses printmaking as a radical laboratory, free from the constraints of official painting and capable of addressing themes ranging from social satire to the violence of war, from superstition to collective madness. In the Caprichos, published in 1799, his critique of Spanish society takes the form of grotesque and nocturnal figures that turn the ideals of the Enlightenment into an uneasy vision, where reason, once abandoned, gives rise to monsters. With The Disasters of War, produced during the conflict against Napoleon’s occupation, representation becomes stark and stripped of rhetoric. Goya records violence without heroes or victors, anticipating a modern, disenchanted view of war. The Tauromachia, often read as a celebration of Spanish tradition, emerges here as a meditation on risk and the fragility of existence, while the Disparates, a late and ambiguous series, mark a definitive rupture, populated by images suspended between dream, nightmare and absurdity. Within the context of the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, an institution committed to dialogue between Western art and Japanese visual sensibilities, the focus on Goya’s prints carries particular weight. Printmaking emerges as the language through which the Spanish artist most directly articulated his critical view of power, society and the human condition. The exhibition offers a compact and intense reading of Goya at his most radical, far removed from the image of the court painter, restoring the urgency and disturbing force of his vision.