Theodore Gericault
dal 17/10/2013 al 25/1/2014
Segnalato da
17/10/2013
Theodore Gericault
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
Images of Life and Death. Sixty-two works by Gericault are thus juxtaposed with works by Francisco de Goya, Eugene Delacroix, and Adolph Menzel
Images of Life and Death is the first solo exhibition on Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) in Germany. The short-lived painter was one of the great masters of 19th-century French painting, and is considered a forerunner of French Romanticism. Gericault's pictures exude an almost ebullient force of life, which always stands with one foot next to the abyss. With roughly 130 loans from Paris, Lyon, Montpellier, Ghent, Brussels, London, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere the wide-ranging Frankfurt exhibition focuses on two of the French artist's core thematic complexes: the physical suffering of modern man, most impressively expressed in his pictures of severed heads and limbs linking life and death, and his psychic torments, masterfully illustrated in Gericault's portraits of monomaniacs. Sixty-two works by Gericault are thus juxtaposed with works by Francisco de Goya, Eugene Delacroix, and Adolph Menzel. The exhibition, curated by Gregor Wedekind, presents Gericault's novel, observant vision of the fate of modern man, and gives an impression of the artist's radical realism, which assures him a crucial position in the history of European art.