by Jon Lackman | 5 October 2007 | Modern
The July-August issue (no. 20) of FMR (available online) includes stunning photographs of Géricault’s 1819 Raft of the Medusa. The subject of a new book by Jonathan Miles, the painting has also appeared recently (in one form or another) on the covers of The New Yorker and Harper’s, freshly relevant in the wake of the American government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. FMR has also published essays by art historian Bruno Chenique and novelist Toni Morrison, who writes that
… The painting provokes many other understandings, such as the consequence of the Enlightenment project of reason entrusted only to the priviliged; how the final composition of the painting encourages a democratic impulse and invites us to join the survivors and insist the ship on the horizon be not mockery but portent.
