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."

The individual works draw on a range of sources, one of the carvings, for instance, mimics Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column (1938), but here it is topped by a red-haired mask of Ronald McDonald. This can be interpreted as a comment on Modernism's appropriation of so-called "primitive'" art. As with all the Chapmans's works, it is full of contradictions and the installation can be interpreted in a number of ways - for example it can be read as a critique of the display of ethnographic items as aesthetic objects rather than pieces imbued with social and historical meaning. In a wider sense it can also be seen as a criticism of colonialism and globalization, although this could be an over-simplification as the brothers have declared that the world is "a shitty place in which capitalism and the production of art are not separated".

Sunday Mix: Jaakko Eino Kalevi

It's all very sophisticated. The next day I see the images. I think they are brilliant and profound. Oh dear. Somehow, they do not destroy, but find something new in the Disasters of War. The Chapmans use the word "evil" to describe the atmosphere that pervaded their recent ethnographic show; there is a wild sense of evil in what they've done to Goya. The altered prints make you think a serial killer with an addiction to drawing psychotic clown faces has got into the British Museum's prints and drawings room - like the killer in Red Dragon who eats an original Blake. Many of the brothers' works have their basis in the art of others, of particular inspiration are the etchings of Goya, which the Chapmans recreated in miniature in Disasters of War (1993) and as a life-size sculpture in Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994). Later, they directly appropriated original artwork, adding to and painting over the etchings of Goya, watercolors by Adolf Hitler, and 18 th and 19 th century oils. The Chapmans have spent years reworking Goya's most disturbing images; they even bought a set of his prints only to deface them. "Like us, Goya had a heretical approach to the body," Jake explains. He cites one of the most upsetting prints from Goya's series The Disasters of War, created between 1810 and 1820, a work entitled A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men!, in which three hideously butchered corpses hang from a tree. It's a work the brothers recreated in three dimensions, in their 1993 work of the same title. Why does it resonate for them? "When Goya put three mutilated bodies in a tree, it was read as echoing Christ's crucifixion, suggesting that some kind of redemption is possible. But you can see it another way. Goya is being quite cruel about Christian redemption, shifting the Christian iconography to show there's nothing beyond. That what you're looking at is dead bodies. There is nothing to be optimistic about. It's just aestheticised dead flesh. He looks to be giving a moral demonstration, but he's not."

Whilst initially repulsive, Sturm und Drang in fact manifests a kind of bathos the Chapmans have been riffing on throughout their career. Its grotesquery is reminiscent of 80s splatter films, campy and melodramatic. The pop-cultural cliché of the scary clown further serves to distance the sculpture from true horror; it is outdated and loud. 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: His depictions of torture, rape, starvation and execution have long fascinated the British artists, informing their work and eventually leading them to inform his. References to the pervasiveness of brand names, consumerism, and globalization feature in much of the Chapmans's work. Sometimes this is overt as in The Chapman Family Collection (2002), in which Ronald McDonald is presented as an ancient deity, or more subtle such as the inclusion of Nike trainers in many of their sculptural works involving child mannequins. Goya's modernity has never exhausted itself; he was as immediate to Picasso and Dali as he was to Manet; of all pre-modern artists, he is the one who most resembles a modernist. This is who the Chapmans have victimised.

Chloé Caillet

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. 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.” 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.”

The new works are not in the studio when we talk about them. I feel I have a pretty good idea of the Chapmans' approach to Goya, so I don't worry too much about this. We talk about criticism and the way it resorts, always, to the humanist rhetoric of moral, emotional and political meaning. We laugh at the pious things the art critic of the Sunday Times said about them. 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. Apart from Goya's surviving proofs - above all, a unique album with his handwritten captions in the British Museum's prints and drawings collection - there are no entirely "original" sets of the Disasters; published posthumously, it does not even have Goya's original title - he called the etchings "Fatal consequences of the Bloody War in Spain against Buonaparte and other Emphatic Caprichos". The original watercolor, painted by Adolf Hitler, shows a picturesque scene of civic architecture and is thought to have been produced in the years between 1908 and 1914 when he tried to forge a career as an artist, with little success. The work has been embellished by the Chapman brothers who added the sun, clouds, and brightly colored sunbeams that fill the sky. This is one of 13 watercolors by Hitler that they treated in this way in a bid to "prettify" them.

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So we've gone very systematically through the entire 80 etchings," continues Dinos, "and changed all the visible victims' heads to clowns' heads and puppies' heads." The Chapmans have remade Goya's masterpiece for a century which has rediscovered evil. And I have fallen into their trap. 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. Martin Maloney, 'The Chapman Bros.: When will I be Famous', Flash Art, no.186, Jan.-Feb. 1996, pp.64-7, reproduced (colour, detail) p.67