Goya

Comics trips are very much in fashion. With nearly 5000 publications every year in France, it can surely cover a wide range of subjects. The life of great artists or their models seems to have become a profitable vein. Picasso has been sketched by Birmant and Oubrerie, Pascin by Johan Sfar, andt Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray’s muse, by Catel and Bocquet. Glénat enters the sector with great ambitions, and foresees a series of thirty albums to draw up another history of art. Results of course are not all the same but one of the first volumes, dedicated to Goya, lets the reader into the darkest corners in the creation of a sour-tempered old man, thanks to the allusive, non-finished trait of Benjamin Bozonnet. Goya was then 73 years old and isolated himself in a farm near Madrid to generate his diabolic Pinturas negras in front of which the peasants crossed themselves. These works were done on the walls in 1819, and could have disappeared since they were only removed in 1874 when the baron d’Erlanger bought Quinta del Sordo and had them mounted on canvases to sell them to the Universal Exhibition in Paris. He did not succeed and finally gave them to the Prado museum, thus putting an end to a strange episode in Spanish art.

• Goya, by Olivier Bleys (scenario) and Benjamin Bozonnet (drawing), Glénat, 2015, 56 p., €14.50.