Francisco Goya, “Fight with Cudgels,” (1820-23)

It’s not the most famous, but it is, I think, the best of Goya’s malevolent paintings. The genius of the painting is its sheer strangeness: at first sight, it seems commonplace, but on second glance, something about it seems off, and that second glance provokes questions. The two fighters are stuck in the ground. How did they get that way? They’re too close to each other to fight effectively. How did that happen? Their situation seems one of bizarre, malign happenstance. But then why fight? They’ve evenly matched, and in the nature of the case, neither can win. So their fight seems senseless. But how sensible is any fight? Whatever the reason, the fight is utterly personal, even intimate; somehow, the two of them have decided to meet up and fight in the middle of nowhere, with no one else around.

Contrary to some interpretations, the landscape doesn’t mirror the fight but contrasts with it. The fight is bleak, the landscape, surreally beautiful. That fact accentuates both the absurdity of the fighters’ venture, but also their resolve. They’re willing to fight to the death despite the vastness of a landscape that in some obvious sense affords a multitude of escape routes–if only they were in a position to take one. But there’s some elusive sense, beyond being physically stuck, in which they’re not.

The essence of war is the apparent paradox of a chosen compulsion to fight. That’s what Goya captures here, but at the expense of the humanity of the two adversaries, who’ve been transformed into inhuman fighting machines or animals. We can’t tell, simply by looking at the scene, which fighter has justice on his side, or whether justice even has application. It could be a fight over something, or a fight over nothing. We don’t know. Goya gets something profoundly right here, but still leaves the viewer unsatisfied. It’s not clear whether that’s a weakness in the painting, or something inherent in the subject-matter. Either way, there’s genius in this painting, but also something depressing to the point of enervation. We want more than that from the painting, as we want more than that from war. We get neither, and are left wondering whom to blame.