Water Graves - Raft of Medusa
12:00 AMWater Graves
Reflections on the Illusions of Drowning in Art
Curated by Taylor Schwartz
Gericault’s figures in The Raft of Medusa are drowning. Not in their subconscious or any other metaphorical substance as discussed in prior analyses, but physically drowning. I have examined many illusions of this type of death in my previous posts, but none have dealt with the tremulous fear of an actual drowning. Confronted with cannibalism, rotting flesh, and fading hope on a life-sized canvas, the viewer himself feels as if he is struggling to stay alive on the condemned Méduse. This canvas is not an illustration of a piece of literature, a mythological interpretation, or a projection of the creator’s fantastical mind. Gericault, after months of intense research, recreated the historic wreck of the frigate Méduse. All of a sudden, the viewer is forced to grasp that Gericault’s shipwreck hanging on a red wall in the Louvre, a monstrous amalgamation of rotting flesh and salty water, happened. Drowning, and in a more general sense, death, becomes instantly palpable, as the eye moves across dismembered limbs and green bodies up to a wind blown piece of fabric floating in a dark and shadowed sky.  |
| Théodore Géricault, The Raft of Medusa, 1818-1819 |
I have seen many disturbing paintings as an Art History student, but for me, Gericault’s Raft of Medusa is perhaps the most unsettling. I assume my fear of it comes from my own diluted aquaphobia. Who else would focus an entire collection around drowning? This collection has allowed me to investigate the cruel, yet at times forgiving, nature of the sea, and how artists and fictitious characters entrap themselves in illusions of drowning. The ocean can be a marvelous place, but with beauty always comes sadness.
The arms of the ocean, so sweet and so cold. All this devotion I never knew at all. And the crashes are heaven, for a sinner released, let the arms of the ocean deliver me.
Never Let Me Go, Florence and the Machine
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