Enrique Chagoya

This aquatint is a near copy of the print to the left. The bulbous shape in the sky is a nuclear mushroom cloud—an addition that brings modern-day fears to Goya’s timeless image. The red stamp featuring cartoonish mushrooms is a humorous counterpoint to the bleak implications of the print.

Chagoya has made more than 30 prints after Goya, often inserting a modern element into the older images. Both artists engage with themes of greed, injustice, and the ravages of war; it is merely the contingent circumstances that change. Chagoya has described replicating these images as a kind of “communication with Goya’s
ghost.” At the same time, as a Mexican artist incorporating the imagery of a Spanish predecessor, Chagoya purposely reverses the historic direction of colonial appropriation.