Insane with military megalomania
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| Insane with military megalomania |
|---|
| Théodore Géricault , 1819/22 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 81 × 65 cm |
| Oskar Reinhart Collection |
Mentally ill with military megalomania is a painting by Théodore Géricault from around 1819/22.
history
Between 1818 and 1822 Géricault painted a cycle of portraits of Monomaniac . It may have been commissioned by Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol . The definition of the monomaniac goes back to Esquirol as a person who can only be considered crazy in one point, but is inconspicuous in every other respect. In addition to the portrait of the military monomaniac , the cycle also contained, among other things, a portrait of a kleptomaniac , one fixated on child robbery and a pathologically envious woman.
Esquirol believed that it was possible to infer possible mental illnesses from the physiognomy of the people. He was the teacher of Étienne-Jean Georget , the chief physician of the Salpêtrière , in whose possession the original ten portraits of Monomaniac were initially. Of these ten paintings, five have survived or have not been lost, including the portrait of the mentally ill with military megalomania .
The picture is now in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Winterthur .
description
The portrait in portrait format shows the patient not entirely from the front, but seen slightly from the right, in front of a brownish-gray dark background. The light falls from the left onto the gaunt face of a no longer young man with a long nose and a short beard, who looks towards the right edge of the picture as if he could not see the painter or viewer in the face.
In front of his forehead, a dark red tassel hangs down from his slanted headgear. The collar and sleeves of a wide white shirt can be seen under a dark robe, which is referred to in a catalog of the Reinhart collection as a “fantasy uniform”. A large hospital identification tag, which looks like an order or a medal, hangs around the sitter's neck.
According to the catalog text, Géricault “painted this astonishing portrait with free, loose brushwork without preparatory studies and probably in just one session.” For him, as for many romantics, madness and death have become the counter-image of a world geared towards functional rationality . What interested him in the monomaniac was walking on the border between reason and madness.
In 2013, Klaus Hammer wrote about Géricault's “mad portraits”: “They seem to be deliberately intended as pathological analyzes, as precise studies in which art flowed naturally.” Hammer focuses particularly on the gaze of the patient portrayed: “His It is the eyes that betray the madman: the unsteady look flees, is unable to fixate. The same intangible and at the same time lurking eyes “can also be found in the other portraits of the mentally ill.
Part of the cycle, but not the mentally ill with military megalomania , was shown in 2013 at the first Géricault solo exhibition in Germany. It took place in the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main .
reception
Alfred Hrdlicka quoted the painting in his Hommage à Géricault , in which he staged himself as the subject. In his work Faces. Hans Belting also goes into a history of the face in Géricault's patient portraits. These are, so to speak, counterparts to what has long been understood by a portrait, namely "the representation of a person in the context of that society [...] to which the person belonged [...] a mask that they used to be Image, that is an object, to be present and to remain. ”In contrast, Géricault's paintings only had the“ case ”and not a“ subject ”as a theme and documented the loss of identity of those represented. The mentally ill with military megalomania got lost "with his unsteady gaze [...] without noticing the painter, in another world", his "self" was therefore not represented in this picture.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Mariantonia Reinhard-Felice (ed.): 100 masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart collection “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur. Basel 2008, ISBN 978-3-7965-2244-4 , p. 98 f.
- ↑ a b c Klaus Hammer: Géricault or the sufferings and torments of modern man. In: The paper. 16, No. 26, December 23, 2013 (digitized version)
- ↑ Alfred Hrdlicka. Sculptor, painter, draftsman. An excellent present for the artist's 80th birthday , on funkfeuer-verlag.de
- ^ Hans Belting: Faces. A story of the face. Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-64430-6 , p. 136. (Digitized version ) ( Memento of the original from September 20, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
