The Shape of a Pocket

painted some time in the early 20s of the nineteenth century. The portrait was the image on the posters, at every street corner, announcing a large Géricault exhibition at the Grand Palais.
    The painting in question was discovered in an attic in Germany, along with four other similar canvases, forty years after Géricault’s early death. Soon afterwards it was offered to the Louvre who refused it. Imagined in the context of the denunciation and drama of the
Raft of the Medusa
, which had already been hanging in the museum for forty years, the offered portrait would at that time have had a nondescript air. Yet now it has been chosen to represent the same painter’s entire
oeuvre.
What changed? Why has this frail portrait become today so eloquent, or, more precisely, so haunting?
    Behind everything that Géricault imagined and painted – from his wild horses to the beggars he recorded in London – one senses the same vow: Let me face the affliction, let me discover respect and, if possible, find a beauty! Naturally the beauty he hoped to find meant turning his back on most official pieties.
    He had much in common with Pasolini:
    I force myself to understand everything,
ignorant as I am of any life that isn’t
mine, till, desperate in my nostalgia,
    I realise the full experience
of another life; I’m all compassion,
but I wish the road of my love for
    this reality would be different, that
I then would love individuals, one by one.

    The portrait on the poster was once entitled
The Mad Murderer
, later,
The Kleptomaniac.
Today it is catalogued as
The Monomaniac of Stealing.
Nobody any longer knows the man’s proper name.
    The sitter was an inmate of the asylum of La Salpétrière in the centre of Paris. Géricault painted there ten portraits of people certified as insane. Five of these canvases survived. Among them is another unforgettable one of a woman. In the museum of Lyon, it was originally entitled
The Hyena of the Salpétrière.
Today she is known as
The Monomaniac of Envy.
    Exactly why Géricault painted these patients we can only guess. Yet the way he painted them makes it clear that the last thing he was concerned with was the clinical label. His very brush marks indicate he knew and thought of them by their names. The names of their souls. The names which are no longer known.
    A decade or two earlier, Goya had painted scenes of incarcerated mad people, chained and naked. For Goya, however, it was their acts that counted, not their interiority. Before Géricault painted his sitters in La Salpétrière perhaps nobody, neither painter, nor doctor, nor kith, nor kin, had ever looked for so long and so hard into the face of someone categorised and condemned as mad.
    In 1942 Simone Weil wrote: ‘Love for our neighbour, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.’ When she wrote this she was certainly not thinking about art.
    The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled ‘unfortunate’, but as a man, exactly like we are, who was one day stamped with a special mark of affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable to know how to look at him in a certain way.

    For me, Géricault’s portrait of the man with tousled hair and disarranged collar and with eyes which no guardian angel protects, demonstrates the ‘creative attention’ and contains the ‘genius’ to which Simone Weil refers.
    Yet why was this painting so haunting in the streets of Paris? It pinched us between two fingers. I will try to explain the first finger.
    There are many forms of madness which start as theatre. (As Shakespeare, Pirandello and Artaud knew so well.) Folly tests its strength in rehearsals. Anyone who has been beside a friend beginning to fall into madness will recognise this sense of being forced to become an audience. What one sees at first on the stage is a man or a woman, alone, and beside them – like a phantom – the inadequacy of all given explanations to explain the everyday pain being suffered. Then he or she approaches the phantom and confronts the terrible space existing between spoken words and what they are meant to mean. In fact this space, this vacuum,
is
the pain. And finally, because like nature it abhors a vacuum, madness rushes in and fills the space and there is no