The Brilliant and Provocative Works of Girodet Come to Chicago in New Exhibition

Girodet: Romantic Rebel on view February 11-April 30, 2006
Louvre hit makes Chicago its first North American stop

January 11, 2006

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Chai Lee
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Visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago will have a rare opportunity to view the imaginative, unconventional, and provocative works of the late 18th-century French painter Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767-1824) when his first retrospective opens here February 11, 2006. Girodet: Romantic Rebel, which is on view in the museum's Regenstein Hall through April 30, 2006, covers more than 35 years of the remarkable career of this artist, bringing together more than 100 paintings and drawings from public and private collections worldwide. This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition sheds light on one of the most intriguing artists of the French Revolutionary era.

Girodet: Romantic Rebel was initiated by the Cleveland Museum of Art and organized by the Musee du Louvre and the Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in cooperation with the Musée du Girodet, Montargis. The exhibition comes to the Art Institute following a highly successful run at the Musee du Louvre, Paris, September 19, 2005-January 2, 2006. After its Chicago showing, Girodet: Romantic Rebel will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it will be on view May 22-August 27, 2006; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, October 12, 2006-January 21, 2007.

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, or Girodet as he is commonly referred to, was much admired in his own time, although he is not especially well known to the American public. Girodet was a painter of genius, but also a rebel bent on confounding expectations. His preference for the bizarre, his ambiguous eroticism, his literary sophistication, not to mention the mysteries surrounding his life and relations, have remained a source of fascination or bewilderment. Girodet created a painting style very much his own-combining intellectual refinement and sensuality.

Girodet's career was profoundly shaped by the dramatic social and political upheaval brought about by the French Revolution. A rebellious pupil of Jacques-Louis David, Girodet early on developed his own idiosyncratic style. David's Neoclassicism, the prevalent artistic movement of this period, was intended in its antique subjects and rigid style to invoke the stoic ideals of Republican or Imperial Rome. The young Girodet approached such subjects and worked in this manner on propagandistic history paintings. After a period of study and practice in Rome, Girodet broke free of his teacher's influence, creating highly imaginative compositions that he hoped would surpass David in their intensity of artistic expression. As he veered away from orthodox classicism, Girodet made his subjects increasingly evocative and dreamlike, sometimes adding a strange, erotic charge. Increasingly he explored themes of a more Romantic nature, taking up literary subjects that involved the irrational and the exotic. He executed pictures representing the legends of Ossian (a fanciful Nordic myth contrived by contemporary writer James MacPherson) and the tragic story of the American Indian woman Atala, based on the eponymous novel by his friend, Romantic writer François-René Chateaubriand.  

The exhibition features a broad range of Girodet's work beginning with paintings and drawings from his student years that emulate his master's Neoclassical model and those that signal his break from David, notably the daring, seductive mythological painting Sleep of Endymion (1791). The show also presents his fanciful painting Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes (1801) and related drawings. The artist's oriental fantasies, replete with exotic costumes and dynamic imagery, culminated in his spectacular Revolt of Cairo (1810), a depiction of a mameluke rebellion in Cairo during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign in 1798. Two related works from the Art Institute's collection will be featured to evoke this major work: a beautiful sketch for Revolt of Cairo, indicative of Girodet's fascination with the fervor of the Muslim insurrection, and Portrait of Katchef Dahouth, a Christian Mameluke. Girodet's admiration for the courage and passion of the Egyptian Mamelukes caused him to portray them with an impassioned dynamism that would strongly influence Eugène Delacroix and other French Romantic artists. Highlighted in the exhibition are Girodet's lesser-known but immense talents as a draftsperson. A wide selection of his preparatory drawings for paintings and his highly finished sheets for book illustrations--such as Virgil's Aeneid and Racine's Phaedre--are featured.

Girodet: Romantic Rebel is organized by Sylvain Bellenger, chief curator of the National Patrimony, the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, Paris. Curators for the Chicago presentation of the exhibition are Douglas W. Druick, Prince Trust Curator of Prints and Drawings and Searle Curator of European Painting; Larry Feinberg, Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Curator of European Painting; and Jay A. Clarke, associate curator of prints and drawings.

Girodet: Romantic Rebel is accompanied by an extensive scholarly catalogue published by Gallimard that includes several essays by leading authorities and catalogue entries on each work. It is available at the Museum Shop and online.