Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France

Abstract

BOOKExtremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary FranceDarcy Grimaldo Grigsby https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00220 Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20652Copy In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists—Girodet, Gros, Géricault, and Delacroix—painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events and issues in faraway, colonial lands. This highly original book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France's empire and colonial politics.Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists' longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty's antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial differences. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*AuthorDarcy Grimaldo GrigsbyPublisherYale University PressPrint publication date May 2002 (out of print)Print ISBN 9780300088878EISBN 9780300259100Copyright© 2002 by Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbyIllustrations 221Print Status out of print Publisher (out of print) WorldCat Google Books

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