Goetz stands there like a messenger, a herald, and his posture seems to hold a message.
One hand on the banister, wearing an open coat with wide lapels, and a collared white shirt. His head slightly tilted, and with his gaze, he leads me to the place where he formerly resided… Paris, the very place where Théodore Géricault also lived and worked a century before Goetz lived there.
'Time is no criterion', words I knew would stay with me forever when I heard them.
Time is no criterion
Around 1819, Géricault painted a boy, leaning slightly back on a rock, with one hand resting on the rock. He wears an open coat and a white collared shirt. He holds his head slightly tilted and looks at me with this gaze…
In 1922 this painting was titled 'roi de Rome', painted around 1819 by Théodore Géricault
Géricault must have sat on his knees to be able to paint this boy from this perspective. Low horizon, the child high, with his head in the clouds and looking down slightly. By subtly manipulating the canvas with his brushstrokes, Géricault creates respect for this child, and he compels me to look up…to this child, a person.
This child looks everyone who looks at him straight in the eyes, unprejudiced. And he looks at me and seeks, with this gaze, whether I, too, can look without prejudice.
And there stands Richard Goetz; he has the same gaze; not questioning, not judging, but looking back.
Richard Goetz saw...
He recognised, unprejudiced, perhaps with wonder, with eyes that could truly see. Carefully studying, deducing, and analysing, he discovered important works of art, including an El Greco and a Tintoretto, and it was this man who also developed an erudite passion for the works of Géricault.
For it was he ‘der Götz’, long before this photograph was taken, who was the owner of the Géricault portrait titled 'roi de Rome'.
Time is no criterion (Tijd is geen criterium) words spoken by JCJ Vanderheyden during a round table discussion at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on October 22, 1995, where he stated that every artist has the freedom to create his own timelines in art history.
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