TUI University

Module 2 – SLP

ART101 – Art History

Jean-Louis Andre Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) was a very prominent French artist, painter, and lithographer. He was considered a pioneer of the Romantic movement even though he lived such a short time. He was born in Rouen, France. He studied for a time under Pierre-Narcisse Guerin but soon left to study at the Louvre. He was influenced by his life – his military career, his time at the Louvre, his time at Versailles and the horse stables, a trip to Italy, etc. (1) He was known as a chaotic and tempestuous person but an almost obsessive artist. Gericault would do intensive research on his art – studying, interviewing people, recreating events, etc. He would check out body parts from the local morgue and keep them in his apartment to study them at various decaying stages and sketch them. (2) He also painted a series of portraits of the insane from patients of Dr. Etienne-Jean Georget, a pioneer in psychiatric medicine. (1) Romanticism focused on the soul. It went beyond logic and went to emotion. It focused on the fantastic and wild. It was about the artist feeling and expressing in a way that the observers could also relate. Brush strokes were quick as opposed to the methodical preciseness of Neo-classical works. The Romantic period was influenced by the Age of Enlightenment and the Revolutions. “Orthodoxies were gone, old certainties were undermined, philosophy questioned the logical order of the universe; new doubts were raised and left unsolved. By the close of the eighteenth century, it gradually took its toll on the artists and society in general. The logic, ordered, rational was gradually replaced with the magnitude of the imagination, the possibilities of intuition, the importance of emotions, and the uniqueness of the individual. “ (3) One of Gericault’s most famous paintings is “The Raft of Medusa”. It is an over-life-size painting that depicts a moment in the aftermath of the wreck of a French naval ship frigate Meduse. The ship ran aground on July 5, 1616. Plans were drawn to ferry the passengers and cargo off the ship until a gale created panic. The raft that had been designed to move cargo off the boat was instead used to move passengers pulled by the ship’s longboats. The crew on the boats soon realized the impracticality of this and feared that the people on the raft would drag them down, so they cut the ropes attaching them and left them to their own demise. The raft had no water and little rations. Fights broke out. People died from getting killed, falling overboard, starvation, suicide, etc. Gericault depicts the moment when the only remaining survivors saw a ship go by, tried to signal it, the ship kept going by, and they thought that all was hopeless. (4) Gericault was drawn to this incidence because it involved a government vessel and as a liberal he opposed the monarchy at the time. He studied corpses, performed interviews, and even recreated the ship. You feel the raw emotion of death, struggle, and hopelessness. The bodies laying in agony on top of one another show that their death was not peaceful. The water and clouds show the storm that has come through. The people frantically waving hoping in desperation that someone will come to their aid. (3) This image caught my eye because of the struggle you see the characters going through. It is something that has happened more than once in history. There is an agony of imagining people facing their death and everyone deciding different courses for their fate.

References 1) Theodore Gericault. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Théodore_Géricault. Accessed 16Sep12. 2) Koudounaris, Paul. Morbid Anatomy – Surveying the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture. Theodore Gericault’s Morgue-Based Preparatory Paintings for “Raft of the Medusa”. http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/2012/02/theodore-gericaults-morgue-based.html. Accessed 16Sep12. 3) Anonymous (n.d.). Lecture:”Enlightenment and the Romantic Era.” Retrieved 16Sep12 at : http://www.stockton.edu/~fergusoc/romantic/romantic.htm 4) French frigate Meduse (1810). Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_frigate_Méduse_(1810). Accessed 16Sep12.