![]() ![]() ![]() Photo (right) John Beard with art historian Sir Charles Saumarez Smith CBE in front of ‘After Whistlejacket’ which will also be featured in the exhibition. His work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in the collections of major gallery museums and institutions including The Tate, The National Gallery of Australia, The Art Gallery of New South Wales and The Gulbenkian’s Centro de Arte Moderna in Lisbon, Portugal. Beard travelled extensively, living and exhibiting in New York, Madrid, Lisbon and London before establishing a Sydney base in 1997. he resigned from teaching in order to devote his full attention to his practice. He has had a distinguished teaching career throughout England and Australia co – producing and appearing in a series of art programmes, Monitor, for BBC 2 television. The thunderous skies giving way to a flash of sickly light in the left-hand corner of the original painting are turned into a grisaille of subtly nuanced shades in Beard’s.īorn in Aberdare, Wales in 1943, John Beard studied at the University of London and the Royal College of Art. The people in the picture form a wave that contrasts with the volume of the sea beneath them, moving from left to right to form a crescendo in a wavy rag. Beard’s version is not so much a reproduction as a reflection of Gericault’s original the monochrome tones of the picture makes it look contemporary – echoing photographic images – but retains all the theatre of the kinds of horrors that, until recently, we believed were stuck firmly in the past. The original painting is an astonishing 491cm x 716cm (16 feet by 24 feet). To draw the viewer into and through the surface.’ It sail close to the African shoreline to outpace. To demand more attention from of the viewer. To depreciate the romanticism. Medusa was a ship that the British gave to the French, King Louis XVIII as a sign of a good relation ship. It was being ship wrecked so all the High Class passengers boarded the smaller escape vessel, however 147 men couldn’t fit or wasn’t Classy enough to board. This actually seems like a myth, but history say its true. ‘To make quieter it’s loudness,’ he says. Answer: France sailed a Ship named the Medusa off the coast of Africa. His intention he says is to ‘dissolve’ the horrifying, almost uninhabitable Romantic grandeur of the original masterpiece to comprehend its powerful beauty better. John Beard’s version, After The Raft of the Medusa, allows one to inhabit its mesmerising bleakness but through a veil of distance. There is a black hole of horror at its heart,’ is how the art critic, Jonathan Jones described the original picture. Elegantly written and illustrated with details from the painting as well as rarely seen comparative illustrations, this is a provocative new look at a work which remains central to the history of modernity in art.‘Darkness is literally eating up this painting a deathly shadow seems to suck you into it. These ambivalences, he argues, reveal as much about Gericault's artistic brilliance as they do about the advent of abolitionism in the turbulent society in which he lived. Here Alhadeff revises the standard reading of The Raft as a realistic depiction of a tragic event, highlighting instead the ambiguities Gericault has woven into the scene. Since its unveiling in 1819, this masterpiece has been decried and admired for its unrelenting realism and for its ground-breaking portrayal of the ship's survivors. The painting depicts the wreck of a French government ship off the West African coast, and its passengers' desperate struggle to survive. In this dramatic reexamination of one of the most influential paintings of the Romantic era, Albert Alhadeff shows how Géricault's seminal canvas was a reflection of early abolitionist sentiment, as well as one of the first uses, in European art, of a black figure to symbolize the hopes of all humanity.īased on a controversial and politically charged event, The Raft of the Medusa is Théodore Géricault's most ambitious work. ![]()
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