|
|
50 mins
|
49 hits |
| Topic: |
Imaging the Beast: Emmanuel Fremiert, Gorilla-Sculptor |
| Speaker: |
Ted Gott Lecture plus Q and A |
| Outline: |
The Joseph Burke Lecture 2006
In 1859 the French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet (1824-1910) alarmed the jury of the Paris Salon, by submitting a greater than life-size plaster composition, Gorilla Dragging Away a Dead Negress, a work that was found to be too confronting for both its graphic violence, and its proximity to current debates about evolution, in the year in which Charles Darwin published his landmark 'On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection'.
Frémiet's sculpture, which was destroyed in 1861 and is known from surviving photographs, stands as the first major representation in Western art of the primate that would soon be claimed as 'man's brother' in the evolutionary debates that erupted in the wake of Darwin's publication.
With all the current attention on the gorilla being created by the release of the blockbuster remake of the 1933 film King Kong, this lecture reminds us of the long visual lineage that lay behind the immortal cinematic imagery of Fay Wray in the arms of the beast Kong. |
|
| Streaming: |
|
QuickTime
|
|
|
|
|
Report a problem with this recording
|