A Study in Exegesis:
Adam Grant's Pale Horse
Elizabeth Genovise- February 13, 2006

Adam Grant’s oil painting Pale Horse, created in 1970 as the final painting in his Holocaust series, is meant to portray the artist’s feelings about World War II. As could be expected, the painting is a study in pressing exegesis, its design reflecting a myriad of sentiments and carrying an overarching tone of powerful, negative emotion. The central image of the painting is the pale horse itself, a massive figure painted in gray and white tones and strangely skeletal in appearance as a result of sweeping brushstrokes, particularly around the rib cage of the horse. These sweeping brushstrokes also give a sense of motion to the horse, although that motion seems to be more a quivering of muscles and a deep tension than an actually dynamic movement. The tension in the horse’s body, echoed in the horse’s expression (one that seems both outraged and panicked at once) might reflect a similar tension in the artist regarding his reaction to World War II. The horse, while fairly realistically depicted, takes on an almost mystical quality as a result of these traits, and also stands in an unusual space, much larger than any other image in the painting, and seemingly poised in midair, since there is nothing solid beneath his figure.

Behind the horse is a complicated backdrop, an enmeshment of colors that begin as blotches of dark orange and red on the horizon and then become a confused mixture of lighter reds, olive green, sickly yellow, and black as the eye progresses toward the lower frame of the painting. The reddish colors suggest violence, and the ensuing chaos of juxtaposed, mismatched colors suggests confusion and a great disturbance. As a result of heavy, fast brushstrokes, these colors leap off the canvas, making it impossible for the viewer to distance himself from the emotions behind the painting. Off to the left side of the painting is a curiously displaced image of the ruins of a building—a crumbling stone building with an arch similar to that of Auschwitz. This ruin, standing shakily to the side, contributes a sense of hopelessness to the atmosphere and also stands as a motif representing death or perhaps the decay of humanity. Accordingly, Grant paints the ruin in gray and red, so that it is both fading in the background and yet maintains the color of violence in its façade.

A third and equally disturbing image calls attention to itself near the center of the painting, taking up a great deal of space and yet, like the ruins, maintaining a sense of utter displacement: a branch of what appears to be petrified wood, but bears a striking resemblance to a skeleton with its grayish tones. This image again conveys a sensation of barrenness and of death as a result of its colors, as well as a sense of menace as a consequence of its sharp, jagged lines, thereby contributing to the apocalyptic feeling of the painting as a whole. Once this image is taken into account, the painting it its entirety reminds one of another artist’s response to the agony of war: T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, composed in 1922 and reflecting the poet’s thoughts about a postwar world. Like Grant’s painting, Eliot’s poem is a morass of seemingly unrelated images, all of which come together to project the motifs of chaos, hopelessness, and destruction. Grant’s techniques are parallel to Eliot’s: he creates powerfully vivid images and then places them in juxtaposition, allowing the resulting friction (both visual and emotional) to convey his own disquiet.