(Better late than never... well that's our story anyway) In the past we'd have simply assumed this poster
was another lookalike of Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa but this time we
figured it was more likely to have come via Louis J. Steele and Charles F. Goldie’s effort in the Auckland Art
Gallery The Arrival
of the Maoris in
New Zealand. It turns out
that the choreographer Neil Ieremia of Black Grace was in fact inspired by something
else. A 2004 Bill Viola work called The Raft but of course that was itself
inspired by the G Théodore Géricault’s painting along
with the Steele Goldie version.
You can see an excerpt from Viola’s work
here and some other stuff that sprang out of Géricault’s
original here.
Image: Top the Black Grace poster and
bottom a scene from Bill Viola’s video The Raft
