How Banksy Saved Art History

Art critic Grovier (A New Way of Seeing) offers an admiring survey of artist Banksy’s provocative dialogues with some of history’s most famous paintings, sculptures, and murals. With a mural unveiled in 2015 in Calais, France, Banksy updated Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa—a “tragic seascape” featuring starving survivors of a shipwreck—with a luxury yacht in the distance and the tagline “We’re Not All in the Same Boat.” It was a rebuke, according to the author, of the French government for the “squalid and overcrowded” conditions in the country’s refugee camps. Turning a critical eye to the links between modern religion and capitalism, Banksy drew on Plautilla Nelli’s The Crucifixion to wryly critique capitalism in the 2004 mural Christ with Shopping Bags—in Banksy’s rendering, Jesus levitates in a crosslike pose weighed down by shopping bags in each hand, suggesting that Christmas consumerism distracts from “the visceral horror at the heart of the Christian story.” Though Grovier overstates his case at times, his conceit, which features side-by-side reproductions of the works discussed, is effective, and the point that art “alters the past every bit as much as it shapes the future” is well-taken. The result is a captivating if overly effusive celebration of an enigmatic artist. Photos. (Oct.)