.jerrysaltz on what 'The Raft of the Medusa' reveals about contemporary political art
Nina Simone singing “Strange Fruit,” and Francis Ford Coppola’sall make you experience alienation, rage, horror, revulsion, love, grace, ugliness, absurdity, hopelessness, bloodlust, bleakness, memories of meetings and partings, nightmares, phantoms, cultural dysmorphia, shapeless inner shadows, the shattering collapse of moral order, and the decay of the soulThe painting I saw that day at the Louvre had its origins in a real-life story of the recolonizing of Africa.
With that, everything fell apart. Violence erupted; people panicked. Many filled themselves with wine, water, and food and threw the remainder overboard. People jumped off the ship to board the raft. One hundred forty-seven people, including one woman and a 12-year-old boy, crowded onto the unsteady raft, which had sagged two feet deep in the water when only 40 had boarded. Many had to stand. In the light of early morning, one of the boats tied a line to the raft.
On the morning of July 17, a tiny white speck was spotted on the horizon: a sail; survivors gestured wildly for help. Then the sail began to disappear. This is thethe one survivors said was darkest of all: a tableau of souls being cast into hell. This is the deep content of the painting — the moment when all hope is lost.is a story of abject human failure.
At first, the painting was mounted high on a wall, but Géricault soon got the painting moved closer to eye level. It was presented under the generic title ofin order to disguise the painting’s political subject, but everyone who saw it recognized what they were looking at: the raft, the faces, the flesh, the horror. One reviewer lambasted the scene as “monstrous” with “nothing touching, nothing honorable.” Many were disturbed by its gruesome imagery and dark implications.