Old Man Goya
Julia Blackburn
239pp, Cape, £16.99

Old Man Goya is very nearly a biography of the artist. Based on what we know of the artist's life, via the documents and letters, the secondary material of art history and the evidence of the works themselves, Blackburn has gone in search of the man. She follows him from middle age to death, through his deafness and frequent illness, and contextualises him within his society, his relationships, his offices and the backdrop of the Peninsula war.

It is also a travelogue, following the artist from Zaragossa to Madrid, from Irun to Bordeaux, where he died in exile. Assisted by what she calls her "fluent pidgin Spanish", she finds traces of Goya in a folkloric, picturesque Spain of arcane customs, fiestas and cruelties, setting Goya down on a bench at a bullfight between a woman wearing a mantilla and a blind man. I find this evocation of a persistent "deep" Spain irritating, not to say shallow. But when she lets go, and would have Goya sit beside her to watch Todd Browning's 1932 film Freaks , her writing gets better, more edgy, more stretched. Trouble is, she can't always tell the spine-tingling from the toe-curling.

Blackburn wants us to know how close she has come to Goya, so she tells us about herself as well as the artist, beginning with a book of Goya prints on her mother's bookshelf. Her quest for Goya is frequently waylaid by memories of her late mother, also a painter, though not a well-known one. This shadowy autobiographical subtext is jarring in a book of less than 250 pages, not least because it feels self-serving.

Blackburn has made the Goya she wants "as he hurtled relentlessly through the years". Surely Goya never hurtled anywhere. He was a stoic and an ironist. She tells us that he was so consumed by his work that he left nothing over for those who shared their lives with his. Wanting to be with Goya - or with her mother, perhaps; I get confused - she seems resentful about this, as though expecting the dead to have something left over for her too.

Dead artists and their works are not owned solely by academics, historians, other artists and art professionals. Fiction is fine. But to my mind, Blackburn hasn't added much to the vast corpus of writings on Goya and his works. If you are going to discuss the works themselves - and especially the mysterious Black Paintings - you need to recognise their place, not just as images on the walls of The House of the Deaf Man outside Madrid, but as extreme formal innovations. Recognising in the Black Paintings what one English 19th-century commentator called, deprecatingly, Goya's "filthy colours and vile style", one also recognises a kind of terrible beauty - which turns out to be nothing less than anguish, particularly as these paintings were made for the artist alone. As Antonio Saura rightly recognised, they are not so much "art for art's sake" as "art for oneself".

Blackburn tries to get close to that self, but misses the painter. She sees his images - drawn, etched, painted - but she can't capture his line, his light and shadow, the essential, critical, magnificently awkward paintedness of his pictures. She uses Goya's works as though they were documentary footage. She has also chosen to illustrate her text with photographs of his etching plates, rather than with the prints themselves - the grounds dark rather than light, Goya's scratched and acid-etched line silver on the page. She wants us to see what he saw as he worked: his images in negative, their tonalities reversed and further distorted by layers of stop-out varnish.

Goya, then, inside out and back to front. Startling as these reversals may be, they are not terribly useful in this context. The author is translating Goya for her own ends, but missing the translation the artist himself performed, between art and life, the plate and the print, the world and what he made of it in his work.

Art cannot be savoured only for itself. It becomes part of the mind of the viewer, an experience like any other, to be forgotten or to be in some way used. Images give birth to images, and they also demand words, interpretations, speculations, even stories. There is no staying true to the artist when his intentions are obscure. But a deep affection for an artist's work can also lead to a false sense of possession; this is dangerous, especially when, as is usually the case, that artist is stronger and more commanding than you are. This chimeric spirit won't put up with meekness or subservience. Ultimately, Blackburn lacks the requisite literary power, in the sense that her observations cannot compete with Goya's visions, his artistic language, that fierce visual intelligence.

· Adrian Searle is the Guardian's art critic.