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I think that works pretty well," says Chapman. (Dinos did not want to be interviewed, and, it later turns out, is busy colouring in the final artwork for this week's opening of their Whitechapel Gallery show.) Aren't these images too disturbing for children? "Nope: there's nothing we've done here that can rival the darkness of the imaginations of children. They aren't the innocents that adults want them to be." ake and Dinos Chapman have long been fascinated by Francisco de Goya’s depictions of rape and torture. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer There wasn’t a whole lot of good art coming out of the UK in the nineties. The landscape was dominated by the YBAs – the Young British Artists, mostly graduates of the posh Goldsmiths college, all of them very comfortable with self-promotion and massive quantities of cocaine. Some of the art they made was striking, some of it was at best memorable, but real capital-A art was thin on the ground – unless it was being made by Jake and Dinos Chapman. Because Goya was the first artist to reveal the gross face of war stripped of all chivalry, romance and idealism, because he captured something quintessential about modern war, all succeeding generations of artists have seen war through his eyes: they have recognised in the Disasters of War a template for their own nightmares.

By bringing together Goya's eighty-three part series of etchings into one entity, in which all parts are simultaneously visible, the Chapmans' Disasters of War suggests a reduction and encapsulation of events of momentous emotional impact. The tiny size and anodyne manufactured appearance of the figures transform the horror of the original material into the representation of a war among toys, a comic-strip rendition of brutality. Both the large white plinth, which provides a broad margin between the figures and the viewer, and the perspex box, which seals the figures off from the viewer, add to the reductive and distancing effects of the work. The Chapmans have said: 'We fantasise about producing things with zero cultural value, to produce aesthetic inertia' (quoted in Unholy Libel, p.149). This work, like their subsequent Hell 2000 (Saatchi Collection, London), stages a neurotic fixation with an ironic edge: the hours of careful work required to cut up and reconstitute the little figures to represent grotesque human acts in a time of social uncontrol. Disasters of War reflects the detachment of Western societies from the realities of war-time killing, both through computer and missile technology (which have produced weapons that fire long range and permit operational distance) and through the comfortable spectatorship provided by television and the film industry. Our next Artists You Need To Know are Jake and Dinos Chapman who are known as the Chapman Brothers. Children who visit the gallery will get some protection from the Chapmans' more grotesque imaginings. "We're scatter-hanging the gallery," explains curator Selina Levinson, "so we can put the most upsetting images higher up." How does Jake feel about this cunning if sanitising hang? "In this case we have been relaxed about it. We have to be respectful of [the gallery's] thoughts about what the public and the trustees will find acceptable."Reading this, I burst out laughing at the thought of two strange men sitting on my daughter's bed at dusk reading such risibly ghoulish stuff. What would the second prize be? Two bedtime stories from Jake and Dinos, at a guess.

The Chapman Brothers have embraced this role as provocateurs, with an energy and humour that makes their works alternately affronting and highly amusing. In their words: “If you look at the genealogy of our work beginning with the first Goya prints we used, we got the book, we chopped it up, then we got the little soldiers and we chopped them up. It’s art as a creative and a destructive act, but, in our case, it’s definitely more destructive.” Jake, inevitably, has an explanation. "People confuse us with our work," he says. "In our view, no work of art has ever been personal. There's neither of ourselves in this work." Aside from a shared art practice, each brother also has an extracurricular activity. Jake is, apparently, an enthusiastic writer of philosophical and critical texts; Dinos, meanwhile, is an unexpectedly accomplished recording artist. Last year saw his debut, Luftbobler, released on the Vinyl Factory label. A kind of techno album, Throbbing Gristle, Autechre and Aphex were all audible, luftbobbling around. It’s disarmingly good.Ultimately, she says, "What I think this work is all about is waking us up, so we don't sleepwalk our way through 21st Century life." The connection between making toy soldiers and making mannequins seemed to be the only way to maintain a relationship between found objects or readymade, which we could manipulate … Disasters of War … was made with the intention of detracting from the expressionist qualities of a Goya drawing and trying to find the most neurotic medium possible, which we perceived as models. It gave us a sense of omnipotence to chop these toys up. in luc tuymans’ vision, caravaggio was the first to transcend classical and mannerist tradition thanks to the psychological realism expressed by his innovative pictorial language; he also embodied the spirit of the baroque artist and the wish to communicate with the public through the power of representation. They are the cleverest of the YBAs (Young British Artists)," says the art critic Matthew Collings. But Julian Stallabrass, lecturer in art history at the Courtauld Institute, has something far more withering to suggest. In his book High Art Lite: British Art in the Nineties, he talks about something that "looks like art but is not quite art, that acts as a substitute for art". The majority of artists purveying this, he writes, "have been content to play the well-remunerated role of court dwarf" while at the same time claiming they are engaged in some ironic exposure of the pretensions of old-style art.

Significant exhibitions of their work include the Young British Artists (YBA) showcase exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation. They were nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 2003 but lost out to Grayson Perry. In 1863, the very year the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid published the first edition of Los Desastres de la Guerra, French modern artists watched appalled as the cynical regime of Napoleon III installed and then betrayed a puppet government in Mexico; the great modern painter Edouard Manet's painting of the end of this squalid imperial episode, The Execution of Maximilian (1867-8), emulates Goya's cynical delineation of war atrocities in its icy, close-up depiction of a firing squad killing at embarrassingly close range. This question goes to the heart of their art, and explains a lot about those cuddly images of children and cutesy animals. The adult insistence that children are innocents corrupted by civilisation is a presumption the brothers want to subvert. "It's a will to believe, as Nietzsche would have put it. You can see it in Picasso, where he has this idea of getting rid of nasty adult instincts and seeing like a child. We don't believe in the idea of innocence, in the same way we don't believe in beauty in art. Celine [the French writer] said beauty is for poodles. He was right."The thing we objected to was not so much Goya’s meaning – we’re actually trying to gouge them from this moralistic framework and maybe release its libidinal economy to show that these works are much more radically unhinged and unstable and they don’t deserve to be accumulated to some sort of post-Christian redemption.” A more complete listing of their exhibitions – with links out to documentation of the same – can be found here. Unholy Libel: Six Feet Under; exhibition catalogue, Gagosian Gallery, New York 1997, reproduced (colour) fig.xvii [pp.98-9] The message that the Chapmans have taken from Goya is that today we’re still living in the midst of violence – just turn on the TV news. It’s mean to make us think about the senselessness and confusion of war.”

This work is an assemblage of eighty-three small mixed media sculptures composed of bought, reformed and modelled elements. The sculpture is made of a variety of materials, mostly plastics. The brothers will also be running drawing and poetry workshops. "Another idea we had is a colouring competition, where the winner would have me and Dinos come round and read them a bedtime story." What would they read? Quite possibly something from their soon-to-be published collection of reworked fairytales, entitled Bedtime Tales for Sleepless Nights. It's a book that begins:Controversy is one thing but I think the seriousness of the work will go unnoticed. That’s the thing. One of the things that’s never discussed is the seriousness of the work.” Jake Chapman, who flew to Spain on Thursday to attend the opening of the exhibition, said he and his brother had been drawn to the tension between The Disasters of War and how the pictures have traditionally been viewed and interpreted. For some critics, this is all a callow waste of energy. It seems pathetic to take the most powerful of all artist-moralists, an artist who needs no apology or explanation and for whom the deadening phrase "old master" seems utterly inappropriate, and make these sterile simulacra, these crass copies. The critic Robert Hughes, who is writing a book on Goya, has dismissed the Chapmans' translations of his images as superficial exercises. Such an appropriation of a known artist's work is nothing new. In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg removed every trace from a crayon, pencil and charcoal sketch to produce Erased de Kooning Drawing. In doing so, he explored how far one could push an object from its origins and still have it retain its power. He took the work of one of his idols and literally erased it in a way that questioned whether art could be created through the act of destruction. With this act, Performance Art was born, and here the Chapmans do the same, reframing Goya's etchings for a contemporary audience. In altering the work of another artist, the brothers are realizing the destructive element that they believe is at the heart of artistic progress. They said: "All works of art are destructive by their nature, because they destroy what precedes them". The Chapmans have remade Goya's masterpiece for a century which has rediscovered evil. And I have fallen into their trap.