Militaristic Monomaniac

In the artist Marlene Dumas's studio can be found books on physiognomy (the belief, previously presented as a science, that facial features reveal a person's psychology), featuring images that have occasionally been departure points for her works. On several occasions, she has drawn on art history sources, including the portraits of old women and the delusional by the painter Théodore Géricault. 

In 2013, as it was not possible to display the canvas Man with Delusions of Military Command (1823) at a Géricault retrospective in Germany, the museum commissioned a free interpretation of it from Marlene Dumas. Taking the master's canvas as a life model, she tried in turn to capture, in an enlarged closeup view, the facial expression that Géricault had before his eyes.