Contra el bien general (Against the common good), plate 71 from the series Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War)

Goya’s bat-eared politician in Contra el bien general (Against the Common Good) purses his lips in concentration as he records laws upon the pages of a massive book. Presumably representing the corruption rampant in the government of King Ferdinand VII following the Peninsular Wars, this vampirelike demon seems oblivious to the clamoring figures behind him, whose lifeblood he seems poised to suck dry.Contra el bien general was also the first of Goya’s prints that Chagoya appropriated and adapted into what would eventually become the Homage to Goya II series; he created the etched plate for a final assignment for Robert Flynn Johnson’s class at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1983. Sporting the same billowing robe, bat ears, and menacing talons, the gaunt face of Goya’s original has morphed into that of former president Ronald Reagan. Like many Latin American–born artists and activists of his generation, Chagoya felt a strong sense of solidarity and support for leftist movements in the region, including the 1959 Cuban Revolution and subsequently the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which toppled the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979 and fought bitterly for control against the U.S.-funded Contras until 1990. Chagoya cleverly riffs on Goya’s title by alluding to the Contras, whose ascent was backed by Reagan’s administration. By comparing the nineteenth-century Spanish context to the twentieth-century trend of U.S. intervention in Latin America, he underscores the cyclical nature of corruption, greed, and inequality in the political sphere. (“This is no Less Curious: Journeys through the Collection” cocurated by Sonja Gandert, Alexandra Palmer, and Alana Ryder and presented at the Johnson Museum January 24 – April 12, 2015)