标题: Gericault's Equine Passions and Anxiety [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 9-10-2018 10:55 标题: Gericault's Equine Passions and Anxiety MJ Andersen, Gericault's Equine Passions and Anxiety. Wall Street Journal, Sept 10, 2018 https://www.wsj.com/articles/mut ... nxieties-1536404400
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(a) "Cambridge, Mass. No one will ever satisfactorily explain the human fascination with horses. Yet when it takes hold of a gifted artist—Théodore Géricault, in this case—it becomes something more than a simple component of human nature. In Gericault's work, horses filter the passions and anxieties of an age.
(b) "Géricault was born in Rouen in 1791. He came of age during the Napoleonic wars, primed to glorify soldiers. 'Portrait of Olivier Bro' (c 1818) captures the young son of a cavalry officer who was knighted by Napoleon. Painted in somber tones, the boy sits astride a snarling dog and appears ready for action.
"Géricault had the heart of a dramatist, and was as schooled in the costs of war as in its splendors. The early lithograph 'Return From Russia' (1818), one of the more powerful images in the exhibit, captures two officers retreating through the snow after Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign. One, badly injured, rides an exhausted horse that competes for our pity.
(c) About " 'The Raft of the Medusa.' Géricault based his painting on the scandalous case of a French ship that foundered off the coast of Africa in 1816. Only a few of the Medusa’s passengers survived after being cut adrift on a makeshift raft. Depicted on the verge of rescue, Géricault’s heroic survivors were seen as a rebuke to the ship’s captain and the restored government of the Bourbons.
(d) "Ms Andersen is a former member of the Providence Journal's editorial board and the author of 'Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner' (Thomas Dunne/St Martin's)." (2005)