The first time the power of art pulled the rug out from under me, I was nineteen years old. It was the early 1970s. I was in Europe for the first tim… - Jerry Saltz

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The first time the power of art pulled the rug out from under me, I was nineteen years old. It was the early 1970s. I was in Europe for the first time, on my way through Paris to Warsaw with my Polish girlfriend, on a bizarre quest to sell blue jeans behind the Iron Curtain. On that day, during my first pilgrimage to the Louvre, I laid eyes on a painting that seemed the sum of all things. It was a cosmographic perpetual motion machine, a purgatorial charnel house — as far from the warmth of any human sun as anything I’d ever beheld. The moment I saw it, something like Krakatoa went off within me. That painting was Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Standing before it, I felt the gravitational field of my life shift forever. The Raft of the Medusa is massive in scale, yet its subject matter is as simple as cows in a field, bathers by a river, or a birth in a manger. We see a large raft bearing a crowd of male figures, at the mercy of heaving seas. Their poses suggest a classical frieze, like Elgin marbles from hell — a collective ash heap of individually vivisected souls stripped bare of humanity. Each of the men is marked by a distinct, unforgettable gesture. Some are reckoning with their wounds; others seem to be coming to terms with death; some seem closer to damnation than to life. Every one of them appears hopeless. Our eyes are compelled by shafts of flickering phosphorescent light that rake at angles across the figures in the painting’s foreground, tracing its dark pyramidal structure. It’s a vision of jagged complexity and somehow also of profound grandeur.