The short-lived painter Théodore Géricault (1791--1824 ) was one of the great masters of nineteenth-century French painting, and is considered a forerunner of French Romanticism.
Géricault's pictures exude an almost ebullient force of life, which always stands with one foot next to the abyss. The catalogue focuses on two of the French artist's core thematic complexes: the physical suffering of modern man, most impressively expressed in his pictures of severed heads and limbs linking life and death, and his psychic torments, masterfully illustrated in Géricault's portraits of monomaniacs. In a focused overview these two groups of works are placed in the context of his œuvre as well as in the art of his time, thus shedding new light on Géricault's intellectual assumptions and his connection to the history of medicine and illustrating the reciprocal relationship between art and science.
The works by Géricault are thus juxtaposed with works by Francisco de Goya, Eugène Delacroix, and Adolph Menzel. Situated midway between the unsentimental perspective of science and the Romantic fondness for the unfathomable, Géricault's profoundly human pictures call into question our traditional understanding of realism and Romanticism as mutually exclusive styles of his epoch.