During the fifteen years I lived and worked in Canberra - click here - I would occasionally escape its Albert Speer-like pomposity by driving across the border into New South Wales and to the little-known backwater of Captains Flat.
There I would while away the hours at the Captains Flat Hotel, drinking beer with the locals under a huge replica painting of "The Naked Maja" which hung over the bar. In 1815 the painter of the original, Francisco Goya, had been subpoenaed by the Spanish Inquisition "that he might acknowledge and declare the works to be his, why he created them, at whose request and to what end." A similar fate must've befallen the replica because on my last visit to the hotel it had been removed. Someone must've been easily offended or, worse, easily aroused.
All this came back to me as I visited the local Vinnies last week and saw an albeit smaller replica hanging on the wall. Its price tag was a mere $15. "I really want that!" I said to Padma, pointing to no particular part in the painting. "Over my dead body" or something similarly appropriate was her reply. Discouraged but not dissuaded, I drove back into town the next day - alone! - but the painting was no longer there. Apparently, another customer had overheard our exchange and bought it after we had left. "Just to piss off my wife", he explained to the staff.
Perhaps I would've had better luck if I had tried to buy a replica of "The Clothed Maja". Perhaps it's time to watch the movie which is a kitschy mishmash of the painter's life but Ava Gardner makes it worth watching.
P.S. Bozenna from Athens emailed: "As for the film 'The Naked Maja', it is, in my opinion, only for hardcore fans of Ava, one of the most beautiful women in the world. Milos Forman's 'Goya's Ghosts' is a far better film and much closer to historical fact."
Thanks, Bozenna! I shall look for it.
