Chasing Napoleon: Forensic Portraits Book

As a young boy, the painter Tony Scherman was taken to see Napoleon Bonaparte's tomb in Paris. Comparing the tomb to the appearance of the first atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, Scherman felt the tomb, like the bomb, "was awesome, yet at the same time there was something revolting about it". Nearly 50 years later, still meditating on the ambivalent legacy of Napoleon, Scherman has published Chasing Napoleon: Forensic Portraits, containing his series of monumental portraits of Bonaparte. At first, these intense, intimate, "forensic" portraits in encaustic (a mixture of pigment and wax) look like frenzied parodies of 19th-century paintings of the great man, homages to earlier chroniclers of power and ambition like Goya. However, upon closer inspection it becomes clearer that, as Jacques Henric points out in his (at times rather portentous) introduction, Scherman is dealing with the charismatic but also terrifying legacy of Napoleon's actions: "Here is power derived of power; here is glory from which the glory has melted away, weighed down by its burden of foul deeds, whether it is called Robespierre, Marat, Napoleon, David, Speer, Goebbels, Himmler...here is what Tony Scherman has been painting for the last few years and what you have before you in this book". Taking Walter Benjamin's dictum that every document of civilisation is at the same time a document of barbarism, Scherman connects the violence and terror associated with Napoleon and the French Revolution with Nazism, claiming in an interview with Sanford Winter and Bruce Mau that "images make it possible for anyone in history to talk to anyone else." Lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed, Chasing Napoleon is a fascinating consideration of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. --Jerry BrottonRead More