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Abstract
While referring to the grim realities of the Restoration guillotine as an instrument of government repression, Géricault's paintings of severed heads and limbs more ambiguously explored the taste for the macabre and the uncanny rampant in the popular terror novels, horror shows, and tear-drenched melodramas of his time. Ultimately, this pairing of social and aesthetic horrific obeyed the Romantic modernists' call for artistic and political renewal through a rejection of academic decorum, which Géricault, in his contempt for academic classicism and the conservative ruling classes, embraced.
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Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer
Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer studied art history at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and Princeton University. The author of French Images from the Greek War of Independence 1821–1830: Art and Politics under the Restoration (Yale, 1989) and Eugene Delacroix: Prints, Politics and Satire 1814–1822 (Yale, 1991), she is presently working on a book-length study of the art and politics of French Romanticism [Department of Art History, University of Delaware, Newark, Del. 19716].