FRANCISCO DE GOYA — Les Désastres de la guerre. Centre d’Art Présence Van Gogh, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 2001

Centre d’Art Présence Van Gogh, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 4 August–4 November 2001. Exhibition invitation. Double-sided offset print on textured card, 19.5 × 15 cm. Recto reproduces Que valor! (What Courage!), plate 7 from The Disasters of War.

Condition: Very good. Light handling, faint surface marks and minor wear to the edges and corners.

The exhibition presented the first published edition of the eighty plates that form The Disasters of War. Goya began the series in response to the French occupation of Spain and the Peninsular War, but the prints remained unpublished during his lifetime. They were finally issued by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid in 1863, thirty-five years after his death.

The invitation reproduces plate 7, Que valor!, showing Agustina de Aragón operating a cannon during the first siege of Zaragoza in 1808. Goya removes the conventional structure of a heroic battle scene: the figure is seen from behind, standing among bodies and artillery, while the caption supplies the only declaration of courage.

The exhibition took place at the Centre d’Art Présence Van Gogh in the Hôtel Estrine. The building had opened as a centre for modern and contemporary painting and graphic art in 1989; in 2007 it became a Musée de France under the name Musée Estrine. The card therefore retains the institution’s earlier identity, before its conversion from centre d’art to museum.

The image occupies one side without institutional text. Dates, edition history, opening time, address and public funding are transferred to the reverse, returning an image of war to circulation as an invitation.

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