The Art of Disaster​, by Jonathan Hirschfeld, Translated from the Hebrew by Janice Weizman

The Raft of the Medusa, by Theodore Gericault (France) 1819

The Art of Disaster

The war with Iran has given me cause to reflect on the history, philosophy, and art of disaster, and The Raft of the Medusa by the French painter Théodore Géricault, is widely known as the work on the theme. Like Picasso’s Guernica, it depicts a specific event which takes on an eternal and universal meaning. Some read in it a metaphor for Modernism, and others see it as symbolizing the human condition. Still others understand it as a discourse on the state of Western painting at the moment of the birth of the modern museum, and the transfer of works of art from the walls of the palace and church into the public sphere. 

Let’s begin with the fact that the star of the 1819 Paris Salon was Ingres’s Odalisque. It is difficult to think of a picture that contrasts more strongly to Ingres’s tranquil, neo-classical, indulgent and indulging Odalisque than the painting which Géricault purposely hung high over the passageway at the salon, and presented under the title, Scene from a Disaster at Sea. 

Visitors to the exhibition quickly identified the story which had dominated the headlines three years earlier, a horrific story about the shipwreck of La Meduse which ran aground onto a sandbank in the ocean. The survivors left without lifeboats put together a raft, and when it became clear that they were adrift at sea with no hope of rescue, some killed themselves, others died of hunger and thirst, and some grew drunk with despair. The survivors slowly lost their humanity. On their fourth day at sea, in the freezing water and with no sign of rescue on the horizon, the survivors began to consume the bodies of those who had died. When they were finally rescued by a passing ship, only 15 of the original 149 survivors remained.

Gericault’s creative gambit here is amazing. He structured the painting based on the flood scene in the Sistine Chapel and invited the carpenter who built the raft and was among the survivors to reconstruct that same raft in his studio, just as in the psychotherapy clinic, the reconstruction of a trauma is akin to the creation of a work of literature. Except that in this case, the patient wasn’t a passive victim but the one who directed, produced, and performed all of the roles. You can see the same logic in the movies of Quentin Tarantino, when the Holocaust, or slavery, or the murder of Sharron Tate are reproduced, but with full control and a sense of redemption. Tarantino murders the Nazis in Inglorious Bastards in the movie house. In this way art, as a retelling of trauma, becomes a site of redemption. This is apparent in the fact that in Gericault’s painting, there are no wounded, and even the corpses look fairly healthy.

The siren wakes us at 5:00 in the morning. We gather up our sleeping child and descend three flights down into the shelter. Our building trembles above. For two years now we’ve felt like Roberto Benini in Life is Beautiful, producing a lifelike semblance of a game for our daughter, going down to the bomb shelter and then back upstairs without letting on, for even a moment, a sense of the horror. 

The disaster has been postponed. It will truly appear in our lives when, like the survivors of the Medusa, we lose our humanity. Maybe we’ll rejoice in the deaths of others, maybe we’ll eat corpses, maybe we’ll create beautiful art from disaster, and hang a beautiful disaster in the salon. And perhaps, as Walter Benjamin prophesized, we’ll start to enjoy the aesthetics of our own destruction. In the meantime, we are Gericault’s pupils. Ingres’s Odalisque and the comfort of Netflix are not for us, nor are paintings of heroic battles and the government’s propaganda. But neither do we turn to Goya’s regions of depressing realism and engravings that portray the horrors of war. We remake the disaster as a painting, a song or a column in the newspaper, while our true mission is to take control of our lives and stories and preserve our humanity, to feel sorrow for each and every death, to love life and protect our little girl.
 
Jonathan Hirschfeld
Translated from the Hebrew by Janice Weizman

This essay first appeared in the 13.3.26 edition of Ha’aretz.

Janice Weizman is the author of The Wayward Moon and Our Little Histories, which was named a finalist for the 2025 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ha'aretz, World Literature Today, Consequence, and other places. Born in Toronto, she has lived in Israel for over 40 years.