Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy Trioson (1767-1824), commonly known as Girodet, was one of Jacques-Louis David's most remarkable pupils. He distinguished himself as a painter of the Napoleonic epic and as a portraitist of Chateaubriand. He put a visceral independence and an unlimited imagination at the service of an art that was often strange, sometimes misunderstood by his contemporaries, but always conducive to the maturation of new historical paintings. From Ossian to Pygmalion and Galatea, including the Flood Scene and Atala's Funeral, Girodet created a complex body of work whose great formal qualities are matched by the refinement of its moral and autobiographical content.
Girodet's style has often been described as pre-romantic, especially in regard to The Sleep of Endymion, which indeed shows an original version of the ancient fable. However, his work also has many classical characteristics, as he was a late adherent of academic doctrine, drawing most of his subjects from the table or from history, such as Hippocrates and depictions of contemporary events such as the Cairo Revolt.
For fifty years, the artist has provoked an abundant critical discourse that always brandishes the same prism of originality to apprehend his work, whereas a thorough knowledge of his production forces to conceive other readings. The descriptive and conceptual notion of otherness, understood in its broadest dimension, cultural and racial, but also familial, sexual and artistic, reveals a coherent and unusual creative universe.
Thus, this new monograph on the painter-who had not been the subject of one for thirty years-visits, for the first time, the family, genetic and cultural questions posed by this multiple work.
French language
143 pages
Rmn - Grand Palais Publishing
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