by Peter Weiss
In this first encounter, in those heavily darkened colors—mixed in with asphalt, turned mute and blotchy—I tried to find a trace of those first signs of luminosity that had been present during my conversation with Ayschmann. Gradually, on the seemingly monochrome surface of the image, some yellowish, bluish, greenish tones became discernible. No longer was the feeling of an extremely heightened tension upon discovering the ship on the horizon predominant, but rather an anxiety, a feeling of hopelessness. Only pain and desolation could still be read in the oppressively restrained composition; it was as if, with the sloughing and scabbing of the surface of the paint, everything with a tangible, documentary quality had drained out of the image, and only a mark of the personal catastrophe of the painter had been left behind. But more than disappointment over the dullness of the painting I felt sympathy for Géricault, whose achievements had been surrendered to weathering and decay. The haziness of the picture also led me to planes on which vision had not yet solidified; the appearance of the individual figures spoke of the brooding preparations, and through the shrouding of completion, effervescent, dreamlike elements emerged. The painter had spent a long time in the turmoil of the many, then among the dead and the fading. He saw the solution he was seeking emerge in that second when, with the shrill cry at the appearance of the brig, a complete turnaround occurred, and the bodies, which had been ready to surrender to their demise, sprung back up once more, becoming a wedge against the world of annihilation. He was already close to this conclusion as he read how the castaways, in the midst of the horrors, had been capable of joking, how they forgot their situation for a moment and broke into laughter. If the brig is sent out after us, said one, may God grant it Argus eyes, a play on the name of the ship they were hoping would help them. This showed the painter that even in the most extreme despair, as long as a breath could still be drawn, a will to live persisted. And if he did ultimately end up under the yoke of Hades, and the strain of rebellion passed away, leaving only a necrotic husk, this made his determination, which had cost him all his strength, only greater still. His undertaking had been to paint the final few who had still been able to rise up. And while the raft was being swept around in the frothing, blue-green water, lifted slightly by one wave and drenched by the heavy swell of the next, in the perpetual to and fro, the day of the twenty-first of September intruded upon me from outside. Suddenly, my efforts to understand the image became stuck; it seemed to contain too much of the painter’s being, of the uneasiness, the dissatisfaction that ate away at him, it was as if he were somewhere out in the city, as if I had to find him, to interrogate him about the meaning that he had invested in his work, and I left the palace and its imaginary riches. In my attempt to get closer to this tarry scrap of cloth, the inner conflict within me was reactivated. Géricault, son of the fourteenth of July, was familiar with the forces that needed to be directed against ruin, against disintegration; the revolution had been inscribed in him, like a scar; he had striven for the ability to be able to contribute to the establishment of a dominion of the common good, yet he possessed nothing but his artistic language, and even more than this language served him to represent the infirmity of an epoch, it marked the martyrdom that his own exposed nerves were suffering. During the years in which Géricault had developed his craft, the old conditions had been reinstated; in the time of the Restoration, nobody still asked about the First Republic. A passing glance at David’s paintings sufficed to confirm how, following the classicist spirit of the revolution, after those soaring idealistic heights, the path to the megalomania of empire had immediately been found. That which was vital in Géricault stood on the side of renewal, which was expressed in his choice of subject matter, in his technique, in the application of paint, the treatment of forms; however, his life was that of someone who was pushed into a corner, isolated; his hatred of haughtiness and the vanity of society drove him to a breakdown. If in the end he spent his time almost exclusively in prisons, madhouses, and morgues, it was because he could only bear to be among the ostracized. They were his kin. Staring into the disillusioned face of the thief, studying the yellowish, pallid skin, the red-rimmed eyes of the madwoman, things fell into place, and his addiction to death found reflection in the sight of the dismembered limbs on the dissecting table, in the bloody heads, severed from their torsos. The rupture within him called up something of the fragmentation to which my generation was also subjected. It was as if we had a gag in our mouths that turned every word we wanted to utter about Spain into a sinister moaning. For more than two years—an eternity for us—people had been fighting there; but here, every thought about the distress in which the Spanish Republic found itself disappeared into padded indifference, dull silence; here, the unspeakable effort of resisting the enemy was covered over by the husk of a false peace. This peace had become a kind of mystical bliss whose preservation lay in the hands of a few people who were equipped with supernatural abilities. The city was indeed pervaded by a tension that encompassed world affairs; people clustered together on all sides discussing the latest news, but the reports they were following with such excitement were nothing more than the story of their own plight distorted into a cheap thriller. Spellbound, the mysterious intrigues kept them on tenterhooks, they were instilled with hope; awaiting a solution, they didn’t notice that the threat to Czechoslovakia was a result of the ignorance shown toward Spain; beguiled by the speeches declaiming the honorable character of England and France, they didn’t see how interwoven the crimes were. Spain was written off, the threat to Czechoslovakia made into an isolated problem. While in the Spanish vacuum the outcome was still being contested, the mass media of the West served up the maneuvers and countermaneuvers to their audience as a sensational game in which the heroes were the diplomats; they robbed the militant vanguard of the working class of its impact and assigned influence only to the cardboard cutouts of the governing politicians, with no mention of the powerful forces of high finance behind them. The impending advance of a popular movement was drowned out by the flood of rhetoric from the consolidation process of the reactionary forces; the struggle against enslavement was left atrophied beneath distortion and lies. Only recently it had still seemed as if insight and reason could prevail over the forces of destruction; now, dark-clad gentlemen were solemnly and corruptly determining the fate of the nations. They had rejected any and every offer of collaboration from the Soviet Union, had ignored their appeals and warnings, yet they had hurried to the head of the Fascist League, willing to make any concession to avoid getting a raw deal in the redistribution of the markets. Even in the uncertainties and missteps that had been made in Spain, in the doubts and weaknesses that may have overcome us there, for us, that which had been attempted in the Republic took on a luminosity that ought to have singed the rest of Europe; but here, people allowed themselves to be blinded by the salacious reports of shady business dealings, betrayal and plunder were deemed magnanimous efforts to maintain peace. On every street corner we were confronted with the glorification of cynical self-interest; why, we asked ourselves, didn’t the workers take to the streets with their flags to express their rage about the betrayal they had been subjected to. Perhaps, we said, they had been exposed to the same shock, the same powerlessness as we had, having been cut off from our tasks, perhaps they too were only now beginning to realize how maliciously their actions had been undermined and weakened over the last few years. Exposed to the forced contingencies of exile, among the escalating instability and panic, we discussed places to which we could emigrate. If you were presented with the chance of getting to Mexico, North America, Scandinavia, it came with a ban on political activity; you either had to find external support, a guarantee, in order to vegetate abroad with reduced rights, or you had to creep into an unknown country on your own via an illegal border crossing, with counterfeit papers, and then go underground. Beneath the candelabras, the lead-lined windowpanes, at the exquisite tables, the groups sat discussing, gesticulating. The host, with an oddly radia
nt, satisfied face, paced back and forth among them. For a moment, Hodann could be seen talking to Branting, the Swedish politician; Hodann was viewed with suspicion now, it was known that he was friends with Münzenberg, and though no one knew whether Münzenberg was still a member of the Party or had already been expelled, nor even what he had been accused of, anyone who still had anything to do with him was cut off, neutralized in some vague way. In the upstairs rooms of the house, despite this friction, the Committee for the Foundation of a German Popular Front was meeting, chaired by Heinrich Mann. Since the government would not go along with any Communist initiatives, the gatherings of this small, seclusive circle had something unreal about them, and yet this was the only place where an attempt was being made that could have had any effect on the catastrophe which cast a pall over all of our emotions. Merker, Dahlem, Ackermann, and Abusch were among the spokespeople of the Communist Party; Mewis was in Czechoslovakia at the time; of the Social Democratic functionaries, Braun, Stampfer, Breitscheid, and Hilferding were in attendance, though without authorization to make decisions, unless of course they had been tasked with delaying every possible decision. The structure of the Social Democratic Party, with its executive committee members in Prague and London, had become just as faceless and formless as the French and Spanish socialist parties. It only remained tangible in its craven commitment to the interests of capital. If the Communist Party appeared more amorphous still, it was out of the need for camouflage, the continuation of the struggle in the underground; at the same time, though, for all the emphasis it placed on the efforts to form a united front, it was riven by internal strife. A general mobilization in Czechoslovakia was to be expected; swastika flags, which had been hoisted in Bohemian cities, were taken down; weapons that had been amassed in apartments were seized. I saw before me the kitchen in Warnsdorf, tried to imagine the room empty, in the hope that my parents had gone to Prague. With Katz, Münzenberg’s former employee, I discussed whether I should sign up for military service at the Czechoslovakian Embassy, but he advised me to wait. He was living in Paris, and at first I saw him as my father had described him, invoking Wehner’s account, but after a short while that description lost all force, the elegance of his clothing inspired no antipathy in me toward him, they seemed to offer him a kind of protection. He was in the city at the behest of the Comintern, among his many tasks was to tend to the members of the International Brigades as they arrived in Paris. In conversation he seemed open, experienced. I had told him about my wish to join the Party, and also mentioned that my awareness of the urgency of the practical issues that needed to be resolved did not preclude my desire to engage in artistic or academic work. Géricault united us. In the afternoon, we walked from Boulevard de Clichy, at the foot of Montmartre, down the narrow yet busy Rue des Martyrs and stepped into the doorway of the building at number twenty-three. The entranceway led us to a paved courtyard. The walls of the formerly elegant building were of a worn gray, the plaster was riddled with cracks; windows, doors, and thresholds were set askew in the masonry. The side wings of the building extended past the garden, which adjoined the courtyard and was populated with a few tall acacias, a copse of maples, and a fence entwined with ivy. Between the iron gates was a fountain with a short trough extending from it for the horses whose stables had been added on the left-hand side at the beginning of the previous century. Katz pointed at the two arched windows and the central, square window in the floor above; there, from November of eighteen seventeen until the autumn of the following year, Géricault had sketched out his picture; to execute the large-scale painting he moved over to a workshop on Rue Louis-le-Grand in Faubourg-du-Roule; then, following the exhibition and his two-year stay in England, he returned to the garden cottage where, on the twenty-sixth of January, eighteen twenty-four, he died as a result of riding accidents. Back then the street had been located in a rural area on the outskirts of the city: passing gardens and scattered country houses, the livestock market and farmsteads, it continued on to the ruins of the Benedictine monastery, to the mills, vineyards, and chalk pits on the Mont des Martyrs. It wasn’t until a few decades later that the sprawl of the city reached over the hills, but right up until the early twenties of our century, between the houses in the coiled alleyways and steep steps stood sheds and shacks, shoved on top of one another on the scrubby slopes: this was the Maquis, the sanctuary of the most impoverished. Not far from Place Blanche, Géricault’s horse had shied at a fence and thrown him off. The abscess which he developed through the injury burst a few days later when, despite his condition, he took part in the derby at the Champ de Mars and fell once more. The infection attacked his spine, the vertebrae began to disintegrate, his living body rotted away from within. There he lay, stretched out flat on the bed, partially curtained off in the room with its arched ceiling, surrounded by his paintings and drawings; The Raft of the Medusa, taken out of its frame, filled the longer wall; no one had wanted to buy the work, a dealer had suggested cutting up the canvas to sell off the parts as freestanding studies. When Delacroix visited him at the end of December of ’23, Géricault weighed no more than a child; the head of the thirty-two-year-old, however, was that of an old man. He had sought out this death as if he had wanted to punish himself, the drive to annihilate himself also made itself evident in his remarks about his work: bah, a vignette, he responded to praise, turning his skeletal face toward the castaways. And yet, right up until his final seconds, he was planning great compositions dealing with the horrors of slavery, the liberation of the victims of the Inquisition. And though the only thing that remained tangible to him was enduring pain and suffering was the only thing that still seemed real to him, he had nevertheless repeatedly overcome death by devising images and had extracted the most acute fervor from his infirmity. Standing under the blackish mass of his work once again on Thursday the twenty-second of September, I noticed how the facial features and gestures of the group, which seemed to meld into a single entity, gradually emerged out of the surrounding darkness. Even though none of the castaways turned their gaze toward the viewer, the painter had intended for the viewer to feel as if they were right next to the raft, it should seem as if they were hanging, with cramped fingers, to one of the boards jutting out from the raft, too exhausted to live to see the rescue. The events taking shape above him no longer concerned him. You who are standing in front of this picture, said the painter, are the forsaken ones, hope belongs to the ones you’ve abandoned. The arm of the corpse on the left had originally extended right to the foot of the perished youth on the foremost edge; traces of the painted-over forearm and hand could still be made out. Beneath the ribs, the torso seemed to be torn off: either he had been caught between the planks, folded back into the cavity, or half of him had been devoured. Four corpses lay up front in a row; behind them, three figures were crouched, facing away from the rest; one by the mast, his face buried in his hands, followed by four bodies, half-upright, intersected by one who had fallen back down, then four standing up, huddled close together, and then the last three, two of whom were holding up the one who was highest of all. A greenish-yellow shimmer lay over everyone’s skin. As I had examined the reproduction of the painting with Ayschmann in Valencia, much of what was now revealed had already been discernible, but it wasn’t until I was confronted with the work, when I became an eye-witness and took in the event in its original character, that I came to comprehend the magnitude of the act of painting it. I began to understand how the arrangement of the forms resulted from creating balances within a process of intensification, how the unity was pieced together out of contrasts. Precisely drawn, dark met with light: the illuminated contour of a profile, a back, a calf muscle, always led to fabric, wood, or flesh lying in shadow, or the black outline of a head, a hand, a hip was set against shimmering cloth, sky, water. That which was contained, controlled in this entanglement conveyed a sense of endurance, this quality being amplified by the fact that the perseverance seemed to be at the same time enveloped by a heavy sorro
w. This emotion, the most abiding of all because of its connection with the irretrievable, found expression in the foreground in a full figure, and appeared here and there with its shimmer on a brow, on a temple, a thrown-back cheekbone. And now the expression that had turned toward the possibility of survival with so much energy changed as well; the expectation of rescue was marked by apprehension, waiting held sway, as in the situation in which the anxiety of a dream is to be broken through and waking induced. Those who believed they had seen what was approaching were turned away from the viewer; the few recognizable faces bore the rigidity of inward contemplation. The only one who presented himself entirely to the outside world, who had open space in front of him, was the dark-skinned man, the African; here, the outline also vibrated, the lines of the shoulder, of the cheek seen from behind, of the hair, were in the process of flowing into the cloud, at its outermost, highest point, the dissolution, the dispersion of the group began. As far as I could discern, this light blurring, this shaking of the outline wasn’t to be found anywhere else; the blurring must have been applied deliberately as a scarcely appreciable sign of the transgression of the limits of the perceptible. Here, where the transcendence began, the corporeal was also sculpted most starkly, the black colonial soldier Charles was the strongest of the castaways, though according to the reports he was one of the first to die in Saint-Louis after their rescue by the Argus, along with the sergeants Lozack and Clairet, the cannoneer Courtade, the artillery sergeant Lavilette, and an unknown sailor from Toulon. Géricault had lived among these people while completing the preliminary studies, during the hot summer. Before he began transferring the composition to the canvas, he often felt as if he were in Saint-Louis, that small city on that island at the mouth of the Senegal River, where the rescued were hauled off the ship, hollow-eyed and bearded, and placed in a corner of the military hospital. Perhaps the painter asked himself if he shouldn’t have just started here, with the continuation of the agony on land. The isolated ocean journey was over, and they now found themselves back among sedentary people, in a continuity. The English, who still had control of the garrison, didn’t provide them with any help at all. After the weakest had died, the nine survivors—the geographer Corréard and the surgeon Savigny, the captain Dupont and the Lieutenant Heureux, the functionary Bellay and the ensign Coudin, Coste, the sailor, Thomas, the pilot, and the nurse François—prepared themselves for a long period of imprisonment. Géricault lay among them, crawled about on the filthy floor, tried a couple of wobbly steps, then, together with the few who were still able to walk, ventured out onto the street, begging for alms. The flimsiness of the contracts had already been made evident. Since the French occupying troops didn’t show up as announced, the English officers and officials saw no reason to leave the village. It wasn’t until weeks later that the miserable heap of colonizers arrived after having landed farther north, unarmed and almost without clothes. While Géricault imagined being in Saint-Louis, the great theme of the confusion of an epoch once again began to take form in his vision of the painting. The white race, greedy, beset by violent antagonisms, came crawling onto the shores of Africa; here and there, conquerors had set up shop; following the shipwreck, the dispersed schlepped their emaciated bodies through the sand, dragging their contamination into a black culture already left shaken by centuries of the slave trade. The soldiers, sailors, and passengers, led by the governor and frigate captain, who after the stranding of the Medusa had abandoned the raft, had traipsed through the desert into the country of King Zaide. What the painter learned about the arrival of the caravan in the tent city of the regent tore open a new breadth of perspective. After the privations of the march, the French had to rely on the hospitality of the Moorish tribes. They remembered Napoleon. For Géricault as well, the thought that the ousted emperor was still alive on that remote British island was almost a surprise. With the mention of his name, the miserable conquerors sought to lend luster to their origins. Humbly kneeling before the carpet of the king, ringed by spearmen and camel drovers, they traced out the contours of Europe and the north of Africa in the sand, and then their route across the seas. With amazement, the Mohammedan king connected the identity of General Bonaparte, whose army he had seen during a pilgrimage to Mecca, with the world ruler Napoleon. A long thin stroke led from the island of Elba past the columns of Heracles, over the equator, to a point in the South Atlantic, where the great reformer was languishing, unreachable, disempowered, embittered. The strangers received bread and drinks in return for their fabulous account. Thus they reached Saint-Louis, that city that had nothing remarkable to offer. The island was two and a half kilometers long, two hundred meters wide, barely a meter high. The streets strung out in straight lines, the houses uniform, with meager gardens, behind a group of palms the fort with mortars and an arsenal, a few mud huts on the headland at the outlet of the river, named the Point of Barbary. The English politely told the new arrivals that they hadn’t yet received an order from their government to decamp from the garrison. Mr. de Chaumareys, dressing himself up with a tricorne and a few salvaged aiguillettes, called in on the infirm and half-starved in the sick bay, promised them better accommodation, care, and food just as soon as the Medusa’s cash chest, containing a hundred thousand francs, had been retrieved. He made an agreement with the British representatives to share the goods left behind on board; ships set sail, but scavengers had already found the wreck and taken the safe with them. Whatever had been left behind was sold in the city. For a few days, the dull town became the site of a delirium. Flour barrels were rolled through the swirling dust, bungs were beaten out of the wine barrels, the liquids poured into the gaping mouths of people lying on the ground. Géricault and his companions, haggard, covered in lesions, roaming around barefoot in the chaos, had ocean maps, blankets, hammocks thrown to them. Nautical instruments were taken apart and stuck in the hair of the women as decoration. Children made off with knapsacks and suitcases, dug through papers and books. Ornaments from cabinet fittings were attached to the doors of the huts. Sails, bedsheets were cut up, rigging snaked along the paths. The Africans placed themselves in the role of their masters, kitted themselves out in vests, pantaloons, gilets, rapiers, and large gray overcoats. They brawled over watch chains, jackboots, hung epaulettes and medal ribbons on their glistening skin. In the wild procession, some could be seen firing silver-plated rifles into the air, or keeping watch on the ape-infested thicket through a telescope. Traders didn’t want to give the governor the flag, that proud tricolor; blathering, he threw himself onto the sand while the cloth was torn up, and with its blue, its red, it was soon adorning the hips of the dancing villagers. The French were driven off with swinging rapiers, oars, boat hooks. They set off on their ignominious retreat toward Dakar. Until the end of November of that year, the survivors of the raft expedition were left behind in exile, reliant upon handouts from sympathetic locals, until people remembered them back in France, and the Loire was sent after them. It was fitting for this time, overloaded as it was with phantasmagoria, that at the end of August Géricault’s son was born, whom he named Hippolyte. The child being registered as descending from unknown parents, the mother being shipped off to the countryside, the child handed over to foster parents, the family’s efforts to conceal the scandal from the outside world, all of this contributed to him withdrawing deeper and deeper into his failure, his negation of life. In Roule, where he worked near the Beaujon Hospital, he began to live among the dead. There, in the mortuary, he immersed himself in the study of extinguished flesh. By the time the painting made it into the Louvre for the exhibition, he was living in profound distress. In the Salon Carré, he went unrecognized among the festively dressed ladies and gentlemen, the royal household, the pack of critics; but as he heard the cries of dismay over his coarse and naked attack on all conventions, as he saw their horror in the presence of this naked desperation and heard the disparaging remarks about the colorlessness, the clayey drabness of the painting, he was filled with satisfa
ction, with pride; it couldn’t be more perfect, he thought, the more black contained in it the better. This deep black, this dark gray, as if charged with electricity, these dull umber tones contained the calamity that he sensed with every breath, they predominated even in his juvenilia, the impulses to paint emerged in the strata in which the intolerability of life was rooted. As a twenty-one-year-old he had painted the Flood, which would also ultimately bring down the Medusa. In this work, rain sheeted down from low-hanging clouds, the churning water was breaking upon the jagged rocks onto which a few people had clambered; from the sinking raft, a woman was lifting up a child to a man while a youth kneeled on the boards; further away, the hands of a drowning man could still be seen clinging tight to a sinking boat, and a swimming horse, with flared nostrils, carrying a corpse. With this subject matter the young painter had made a variation on a work by Poussin. His predecessor had also foregone all of the typical elements of landscape painting, made the rocks and trees into skeletal forms, and the fall of the water, the stormy skies, into an apocalyptic union; nevertheless, traces of a natural disaster could be made out in the picture. In Géricault, one vision alone was present, a mental apparition; what was lacking was the ark that in Poussin’s work promised salvation, floating calmly behind the roofs protruding from the surface of the water; and the moon and lightning of Poussin had given way to a storm, a terror, the likes of which are only to be found in inner turmoil. Poussin had still lent his colors—sparingly applied in a blackish gray—a melodic note, an almost mellow light fell on the figures in their sequence around the boat, the blue and white of the old man by the rudder, the washed-out red of the figure clambering up the side of the boat, the white, yellow, and blue of the woman holding the child swaddled in reddish cloth to the man in the blue shirt on the boulder, and the same red and blue, only more muted, led across to the color sequence of the robes of the figures hanging from the neck of the horse, the drifting plank of wood. Despite all the hopelessness, the damnation in Poussin’s painting, the viewer was left with a melancholic prayer; Géricault compelled us to surrender all forms of support, forced us into his fearful dream. Poussin’s world was also peculiar, yet in the face of its serenity we kept our composure; Géricault sent us into a panic through which he permitted us to peer into the process of a passionate psychological event. From the same year we have the head of the white horse, resembling the portrait of a person, of a woman; a touch of pink was placed around the vibrating nostrils, the downy skin, the soft swell of the mane, the lock of hair that fell over its brow had been traced with such tenderness, the darkly glimmering eyes bearing the gaze of a lover. And behind this face stood blackest night. On Montmartre, during his final year, he had painted the workshop with the kiln. The dilapidated building, high above the level of Saint-Ouen, had been pushed out to the edge of the world, the clouds mingling with the smoke billowing out of the sheds on the hilltop. With his goat-hair robe and broad slouch hat, the farmhand sleeping between the sacks in the oversized cart, half driven out of the entrance, resembled death, the unharnessed horses stood unguarded in the thunder on the clayey, wheel-shredded path. He had not been able to change his life through painting, even that which could be surveyed from his oeuvre showed no developmental arc, no decisive stylistic transformations, the ten years of his artistic activity were from the outset characterized by the same condition of captivity and by the same intensity with which he sought redemption. There was no help or salvation for him, the tremendous energies which were stored up within him could only find intermittent relief in the pictures he produced; during his brief stay, with madness hanging over him all the while, painting was the instrument with which he confronted the excess pressure building up within him as a revolt against entropy. He who wanted to interrupt the system of oppression and destructiveness saw himself dying a defeated man. And yet it had never before been so clear to me how values could be created in art which could overcome a sense of being penned in, being forsaken, as in his attempts to remedy his melancholy by giving form to his visions. Perhaps he didn’t understand what these forces were that were holding him down, perhaps he was so broken that he denied himself the key to interpretation for the signs he had laid bare; in his craft though, he proceeded with enough awareness to realize that with his painterly language he was laying the path for others. As he himself had carried on lines issuing from Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, with the strokes of their brushes Daumier, Courbet, Degas, even van Gogh, in his way, pointed toward Géricault. Suddenly solving the riddle of his life no longer interested me. I knew everything I wanted to know. With his giving and taking, he formed part of the universal relationship and connection which constitute the background of artistic activity.
