Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France

From Library Journal
It is Grigsby's notion-not surprising on the face of it-that some of the great French paintings of the period between 1794 and 1826 ought to be examined against the hectic background of national colonial aspirations and the politics of slavery. Along with extended studies of Gros's "Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa," Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa," and Delacroix's "Massacres of Chios" and "Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi," there are equally elaborated essays on Girodet's lesser-known "Portrait of Citizen Belley" and "Revolt of Cairo." Each of these six investigative meditations manifests the author's superb understanding of the historical and cultural environment in which the paintings was executed and a real sensibility to its figurative properties. Yet at the same time the author distances us from them by a veil of arcane theory and psychosexual assertion. Thus, for example, Grigsby (history of art, Berkeley) forges a nuanced reading of the politics and art criticism surrounding Gros's "Plague" victims while propounding an array of dubious notions about its latent eroticism. Similarly, the exfoliation of Gericault's "Raft" is illuminated in terms of contemporary colonial and racial ideology and yet is befogged by lucubrations on cannibalism and bizarre intimations of sexuality. In short, a volume destined for controversy and yet requisite for advanced art history libraries.Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Choice
Powerfully argued, eloquent, and exciting...An original contribution, and a touchstone for future studies of the period.

Book Description
In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists-Girodet, Gros, Géricault, and Delacroix-painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events and issues in faraway, colonial lands. This highly original book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France's empire and colonial politics. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists' longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty's antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial differences. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.

About the Author
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is associate professor of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley.


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It is Grigsby's notion-not surprising on the face of it-that some of the great French paintings of the period between 1794 and 1826 ought to be examined against the hectic background of national colonial aspirations and the politics of slavery. Along with extended studies of Gros's "Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa," Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa," and Delacroix's "Massacres of Chios" and "Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi," there are equally elaborated essays on Girodet's lesser-known "Portrait of Citizen Belley" and "Revolt of Cairo." Each of these six investigative meditations manifests the author's superb understanding of the historical and cultural environment in which the paintings was executed and a real sensibility to its figurative properties. Yet at the same time the author distances us from them by a veil of arcane theory and psychosexual assertion. Thus, for example, Grigsby (history of art, Berkeley) forges a nuanced reading of the politics and art criticism surrounding Gros's "Plague" victims while propounding an array of dubious notions about its latent eroticism. Similarly, the exfoliation of Gericault's "Raft" is illuminated in terms of contemporary colonial and racial ideology and yet is befogged by lucubrations on cannibalism and bizarre intimations of sexuality. In short, a volume destined for controversy and yet requisite for advanced art history libraries.-Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York


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