Francisco Goya began work on the portfolio of etchings titled Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of war) two years after the Napoleonic invasions of Spain in 1808. Ten years latter, at the age of 75, the plates were completed. Desastres is generally thought to be an allegory inspired by the themes of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: conquest, war, famine, and death. It has become something of an icon for antiwar activists and a benchmark for so-called politically engaged artists, who claim Desastres exemplifies an esthetically competent, highly emotive, and politically effective art.

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The four paintings of collections of plates in this exhibition might seem at first to be characteristic of Lisa Milroy’s work. In fact, both the subject matter and the principles by which it is organized on the canvas are very different from her earlier work. A degree of randomness has appeared in Milroy’s new paintings. They are still surfaces showing things that have been, in one sense or another, ordered, but now the vagaries of nature are seen to have had a hand in their organization. Whereas the earlier paintings depicted commodities and the values associated with their conspicuous consumption,