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Saturday, February 11, 2006
Girodet: Romantic Rebel
The Art Institute of Chicago: February 11-April 30, 2006
Girodet: Romantic Rebel, the first retrospective in the United States devoted to gifted French painter Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824), assembles more than 100 seminal works (about 60 paintings and 40 drawings), demonstrating the artist’s impressive range--from mythological subjects to portraits and representations of Napoleon’s military triumphs. Profoundly shaped by the dramatic social and political upheaval brought about by the French Revolution, Girodet early on veered away from the rigid Neoclassical style then prevalent in France, interpreting his subjects in an evocative and dreamlike manner, often adding a strange, erotic charge. Increasingly he explored themes of a more Romantic nature, taking up subjects that involved irrational emotions and the exotic, as in his pictures representing the biblical deluge, the legends of Ossian (a fanciful Nordic mythology contrived by a contemporary writer), and the tragic story of the American Indian woman Atala, based on the eponymous novel by the artist’s friend, the writer Chateaubriand. ...