Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism

The MIA teams up with Britain’s Tate Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for this 150-work exhibit, a major collection intent on revealing the creative give-and-take between painters on either side of the English Channel during the tumultuous decades of post-Napoleonic Europe. Crossing will feature plenty of rare treats for us Yankee audiences, including masterworks by artists like Eugene Delacroix and J.M.W. Turner rarely shown outside their home museums. The flagship here is Theodore Gericault’s massive “Raft of the Medusa,” the scandalous 1820 work capturing the survivors of a real-life shipwreck just at the moment of rescue, but too late to save them from cannibalism—sometimes considered the definitive painting of its era. It also showed up later as the cover of a Pogues record, which can only be an added bonus. (We won’t be seeing the original painting, too fragile and too jealously guarded to leave the Louvre, but the Tate’s 1859 reproduction has been called “spine-chilling.”) MIA, 2400 3rd Ave. S., (612) 870-3000, artsmia.org


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