Description:

inscribed on label (centre): Moby Dick; inscribed (lower centre): La baleine blanche – Moby Dick; signed lower centre
wax crayon, red pastel
480 x 355 mm

Note:

Born between the wars in the rural commune of Fumel, Lot-et-Garonne, Georges Bru was a French draughtsman, engraver, and painter, who spent the entirety of his life in southern France.

Through his drawings Georges Bru created a quiet, dream-like universe, populated by unspeaking actors, staged between waking and sleeping, and monsters, unconscious of their own monstrosity. Here, Moby Dick, the eponymous antagonist of Herman Melville’s classic 1851 novel is shown in atypical fashion. Wounded, wrapped in bandages, and labelled with a calligraphic plaque like a living artefact in a museum display, Bru’s illusory whale lies on a beach, a shower forming above its blowhole, as if stranded in the aftermath of its confrontation with Captain Ahab. Drawn in subtly shifting shades of black and grey, the soft forms of the crystalline whale emerge from a heavy fog of chiaroscuro, a single chink of red blood serves as Bru’s only nod to additional colour.

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