Discuss The Controversy Surrounding The Chapman Brothers Rectified Essay

Discuss The Controversy Surrounding The Chapman Brothers Rectified Works of Francisco Goyas Disasters of War Series - Essay Example The best in Goya came during the period of war in Spain and this shows that wars really bring out the best in men. The controversy that surrounded the rectification of his work by the Goya Brothers was borne out of the love that this critics had for this great artist and his art work. The Chapman brothers have been accused of defacing the etchings they purchased from Goya’s Disasters of War as the Chapman Brothers’ Insult to Injury had some funny faces that made their collections controversial in nature. The Brothers have been accused of intentionally defacing the appearance of Goya’s Disasters of War and some have even said that they used their Insult to Injury to mock Goya’s works. Although the Chapman Brothers have claimed that Francisco Goya was their model, the fact however remains that the rectification of his Disasters of War actually disproves this notion if one considers the fact that they tried to transform the work of their so called ‘mode l’ in order to produce their own work that is different from his work in several ways (Chapman). The Chapman Brothers succeeded in transforming Goya’s work into sheer pornographic Surrealism but it should be underscored that Goya was more into Romanticism. The issue that has been raised by the critics is that the Chapman Brothers bought a set of 83 etchings from Goya’s Disasters of War and vandalised it. The critics have claimed that the Chapman Brothers were aware that this great art work by Goya is one of the most venerated series of prints in existence (Mey, 2007, p.1). The Chapman Brothers have not only made attempts to erase the memories of the artists from the hearts of men, but they have also destroyed and obscured a great artwork, thus attracting lots of controversies to themselves and their rectified art work. Controversy based on Semiotics The Chapman Brothers unscrupulously rectified the works of Francisco Goya’s Disaster of War Series, which G oya himself used to represent the horrors of the war between 1810 and 1820. In the original work of Goya, he used symbols of humans as an allegory to the sufferings of humans during the war and to express his dissatisfaction and horror at the disgusting lunacy of war. In rectifying the works of Francisco Goya’s Disaster of War Series, the Chapman Brothers used cartoon images to represent the sufferings of humans that Goya was trying to depict through his images and the fact that Chapman derailed from the original message of Goya made people to criticize the revised works of the Chapman Brothers. â€Å"Typical in their broad-brush detestation of Enlightenment tradition are Jake and Dinos Chapman, postmodern artists most famous for ‘Insult to Injury’, their vandalized or ‘rectified’ appropriation of Goya’s Disaster of War prints, in which they pasted fiendish clown and puppy heads over every victim’s grimace....† (Broderick, 2005, p.9). The controversy that surrounded the works of the Chapman Brothers was caused by the cartoon images that they superimposed in their work as they used the symbols of puppies or clowns as figures to represent the human sufferings that Goya intended to show people through his Disaster of War