Exhibitions
Gericault 1791-1824 (Grand Palais, Paris, till 6 January)
Greater than the myth
Elizabeth Mortimer
`A sad dialogue took place, around 1823, at the door of the Bal de l'Opera,' wrote Michelet many years later, 'between one of my friends . . . and a young man, a tall man, who in seeking pleasure seemed to seek to hasten his death. I speak of the greatest painter of our age, the unhappy Gericault . . . The infinite sweetness of his powerful gaze had given way to the harsh expression of the terrible mask that you have all admired. ... ' Theodore Gericault did indeed die the following year, aged 32, and by 1848 when this anecdote was relat- ed the romantic myth of the artiste maudit was firmly established. It is now 200 years since he was born into a prosperous family 'Monomane du vol, from Gericaules series of portraits of madmen of Rouen lawyers, and the time has come to examine his life and work, and see what lies behind the stereotype. A comprehen- sive exhibition has accordingly been mounted in the gloomy halls of the Grand Palais, its avowed purpose to 'deconstruct the myth'. It consists of more than 300 autograph works in all sorts of media, rang- ing from life-size equestrian portraits to tiny doodles, and a good number of works by teachers and contemporaries to set the scene. The event has provided a focus for research, so that the catalogue includes a careful reconstruction of the artist's life and all the somewhat scanty documents it
is based on. The huge and famous painting of 'The Raft of the Medusa', for which he is best known, remains in the Louvre, the object of a separate pilgrimage made on the same ticket.
There seems to be a suppressed conflict between those engaged in deconstructing the myth, who have set up the exhibition and written the commentaries in each room and also the general chapters of the catalogue, and those who have been study- ing the documents and compiling a picture of the artist. For instance, the organisers make much of the mise en scene: 'the dark painter of violence and drama' is deemed to require a deep green in his early phases, suggestive of the 'glaucous depths where the smoke of gunfire mingles with the clouds', flecked with a lighter green as a hopeful sign of 'rebirth after the hell of destruction'. We are steered towards cer- tain key works as we pace through Geri- cault's career, steeped in a laboriously evoked ambience and harangued by notices written in the breathlessly sensational lan- guage of advertising and liberally scattered with italics like an old-fashioned French textbook.
None of this can dim the freshness and vigour of the painting. Although the cata- logue unaccountably calls him 'tin artiste audodidacte', Gericault received the usual academic training, first with the fashion- able academician Carle Vernet, then at the Beaux-Arts under Guerin, David's power- ful rival. The works from his student days consist of dashing oil sketches of horses and soldiers in brilliant uniforms, studies after the male nude and small versions of works by Titian and others, which show an interest in modelling with light and shade. The most unexpected are two beautiful pic- tures of rows of horses in their stalls, one showing them from the front, the other their hindquarters as they stand at rest In different positions, each one clearly paint- ed from life.
Then there is a sudden and dramatic change of gear as Gericault plans an, assault on the Salon of 1812, the year 01 Napoleon's invasion of Russia. His offering is the `Chasseur de la garde', a life-size painting of a solitary anonymous cavalry officer on his rearing charger, the battle raging in the near distance as he looks back over his shoulder. The sombre resignation of his expression and the frenzied terror of his horse mark the difference between the thinking and the intuitive being. The virtu" osity of touch and the energy of the move- ment aroused great interest among his peers, but the picture was ignored by the critics on the grounds that it was a portrait, not a history painting as Gericault intend; ed. An officer friend called Dieudorine posed for the face, and in a spasm of ety- mological fervour the commentary claims that as the name means the same as Theodore this must also be a self-portrait; Its companion piece, the 'Cuirassier blesse quittant le feu', painted in 1814 soon after
Napoleon's defeat, is less successful, with uncharacteristic infelicities in the anatomy of the horse.
Despairing of success, Gericault joined his friends in the newly formed Mousque- taires du Roi, but returned to his studio a few months later, when they were disband- ed after Louis XVIII's ignominious flight, in which Gericault loyally followed him. He made a bid for the Prix de Rome but, fail- ing to qualify, travelled to Italy anyway. There he made many drawings in pen and wash, some of nymphs and satyrs with a powerful erotic charge, others of contem- porary peasant families. The most fully worked are the richly coloured and beauti- fully lit series of oils showing the start of the race of the riderless horses that formed part of the Roman carnival, in which the powerful energy of the horses is just con- tained by the grooms.
Gericault was constantly in search of a subject which was noble in conception with the power of moving the viewer to pity and terror, but based on direct experience and observation, not filtered through classical literature as required by the art establish- ment which commanded the patronage in Paris. He thought he had found it in the shipwreck of the Medusa, a real event which combined a political scandal of incompetence in the navy with horrible suf- fering, including cannibalism. Although he rejected academic decorum, he subscribed wholeheartedly to academic methods of preparation. In planning the painting he made many life studies of the few survivors and visited a nearby hospital to observe the physical effects of suffering on people in their last agony. He was allowed to take severed limbs and heads away to paint in his studio, and these studies are among the most interesting in the exhibition. The sad remains are painted with a sympathetic detachment which is hard to describe, in a way that arouses pity, not disgust. The final canvas is a magnificent composition, and makes the surrounding works in the Louvre look tame and stilted in comparison.
This still did not gain Gericault the recognition he had hoped for, but it was seen in the Salon of 1819 by an English entrepreneur, who showed it in London and gave him a third of the proceeds. Geri- cault stayed in London for at least a year, painting horses and street scenes, and refreshed by the humbler, less dogmatic attitude of the English art establishment. Many lovely watercolours record the life of working people and their horses, and he became absorbed by lithography, producing many prints which sold well. The mood of the pictures, even those of animals, is often highly charged with feeling. The horses have expressive faces, and respond to their masters and circumstances, and the skies are almost always stormy.
It is painful to read of the painter on his deathbed in a state of the most profound discouragement, exclaiming, 'If I had but made five pictures; but I have done noth-
ing, absolutely nothing'. His many friends watched with admiration and despair as he drew his own left hand, all his strength would allow. These moving but unsenti- mental sheets are displayed in a room with other relics, portraits which show his daz- zling good looks in health alongside his ter- ribly emaciated death mask, and a cast of his right hand. His fellow artists, among them Delacroix, Gros and Ary Scheffer, were convinced of his genius, and if that means giving art a new direction they were proved right and the official art establish- ment wrong. Gericaules clear-sighted, introspective vision was eventually taken up by Courbet and the realists and became the foundation of modern artistic sensibili- ty. Indeed, no portrait has yet been painted more perceptive than his series of portraits of madmen, the sad prisoners of their own states of mind, that were discovered 40 years after his death. There is no need for a myth: the truth is sufficiently impressive.
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