The Death of Beauty: Goya's Etchings and Black Paintings through the Eyes of André Malraux

Modern critics often regard Goya's etchings and black paintings as satirical observations on the social and political conditions of the time. In a study of Goya first published in 1950, which seldom receives the attention it merits, the French author and art theorist André Malraux contends that these works have a significance of a much deeper kind. The etchings and black paintings, Malraux argues, represent a fundamental challenge to the European artistic tradition that began with the Renaissance, an essentially humanist tradition founded on the pursuit of a transcendent world of nobility, harmony and beauty—an ideal world outside of which, as Malraux writes, ‘man did not fully merit the name man’. Following the illness that left him deaf for life—an encounter with ‘the irremediable’, to borrow Malraux's term—Goya developed an art of a fundamentally different kind—an art, Malraux writes, ruled by ‘the unity of the prison house’, which replaced transcendence with a pervasive ‘feeling of dependence’ and from which all trace of humanism has been erased. Foreshadowing modern art's abandonment of the Renaissance ideal, and created semi-clandestinely, the etchings and black paintings are an early announcement of the death of beauty in Western art.     

The Growth of the Evaluation Tree in the Policy Analysis Forest: Recent Developments in Evaluation

The practice and profession of evaluation is continually evolving. From its early origin in the Great Society years of the 1960s, through its golden years of the 1970s, its transformation under the fiscal conservatism of the Reagan era in the 1980s, and in its maturation during the performance and results era of the 1990s, the field of evaluation continues to evolve in response to broader trends in society. This article examines recent developments and trends in the practice and profession of evaluation. Structured around the evaluation theory tree, the presentation of these developments elaborates on the three main branches of evaluation: methods, use, and valuing. The concluding discussion briefly addresses the central role of evaluation—and other types of knowledge production—in providing actionable evidence for use in public policy and program decision making.     

Peonage, Power Relations, and the Built Environment at Hacienda Tabi, Yucatan, Mexico

The social and material conditions of postcolonial haciendas in Yucatan, Mexico, were greatly influenced by power relations intrinsic to the institution of debt peonage. Although landowning elites exercised enormous control over debt peons, hacienda social relations involved continuous negotiation between master and servant. Recent investigations at Hacienda Tabi, a sugar hacienda in southern Yucatan, explore the interplay between power relations and the creation and maintenance of the built environment. The evidence from Tabi suggests that during the Porfiriato (1876–1911) hacendados manipulated the settlement landscape to emphasize an order of social inequality. The spatial and structural elements of the hacienda's settlement reflected and supported the owners' attempts to control resident peons. However, those attempts were challenged by the resident Maya community, who defined the hacienda landscape imposed on them in alternative ways.     

Spatial Modelling in Decision Support for Land‐Use Planning: a Demonstration from the Lal Lal Catchment,Victoria, Australia

The outcomes of selected, contested development permit appraisals in a Victorian water catchment show that implications regarding the development status of other land parcels were not examined during negotiation and/or appeal. Given access to an adequate spatial data base, Geographical Information System (GIS) technology can be used to model such implications rapidly enough to be useful in decision support, thereby significantly widening the common ground that can be sought while seeking resolution to land‐use planning conflicts.