There is no doubt in my mind that art changes the way we think about and perceive the world. But can a painting turn us into a revolutionary Citizen? The all-encompassing mass culture of the 21st century is not an invention of capitalism; contrary to what we might assume, our visual culture has its roots in revolutionary France and possibly in the totalitarian regimes of the 1820s and 1830s. The Terror in France that followed the revolutionary spirit of freedom, as well as communism, made radical use of the transformative power of art. Medeleine Gera writes
1750. Paris is one of the largest European capitals, yet the threat of famine and disease is never far away, especially for the poor. The rich are different and are preoccupied with their own privileged lives. By 1788, workers are standing idle in all the major French cities and towns while the wealthy do everything in their power to distance themselves from the poor. Boucher, with his vast canvases of frolicking pink bottoms romping on fluffy clouds, dominates the art world. Such was the mood of Boucher’s aristocratic clients in pre-revolutionary France. Jacques Louis David, as we shall see, would have none of that.
David was by far the most formidable painter France had ever seen. The task he set himself was “moral salvation”. He wanted his paintings to change people’s lives so that they became inspirational citizens for the French Revolution. Did David achieve his goals in the long-term? Well, his undisputed genius certainly got him noticed. But historians such as Simon Shama claim that David ultimately betrayed art by depicting Marat the way he did. Nevertheless, The Death of Marat is David’s masterpiece and plays an important role in French history.
Social realism is also part of Soviet history and cannot be erased from memory. An exhibition of Russian painting from Stalin to Perestroika in Gallery Jesche- Van Vliet, Berlin, has heralded a revival of social realism that, until recently, was dismissed as art for propaganda. In 2009, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution, we can ask ourselves if J.L. David’s legacy can be found in Russian social realism. Does a swaggering, revolutionary portrait of Lenin entitled “Lenin in October” by Lyubov Pribluda echo The Death of Marat?
In his essay entitled Air Brushing the Revolution, Simon Shama takes us to Brussels. It is 1833. A funeral procession passes slowly through the streets of the city. J.L. David, the famous painter of the French Revolution, has died – away from France. Following his cortege, his students and loyal followers hold placards of his famous paintings – all except one, which is the greatest of all David’s oeuvre. It was a picture – both beautiful and foreboding – that had been kept out of the public eye for some 30 years. And no wonder! The painting in question was shrouded in guilt and was the very reason why David was refused burial in France. Here it is – ‘À Marat’, painted by Jacques Louis David in 1793 – in The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.
What was it that made this painting David’s most memorable masterpiece and his most unpardonable crime? Meet Jean-Paul Marat: balloonist, failed inventor, newspaper editor, leading light in the National Convention. What more could you want on your CV? Oh! Perhaps that you had also worked for Louis XVI’s brother, Artois, but that was before Marat spiralled out of control and became a hard-liner for the Revolution. Here is “the friend of the people” depicted in his bath – the only place he could get some respite from the psoriasis that tormented his skin. “There are plots everywhere!” he screams and the streets devoured the conspiracy theories that Marat churned out.
Quite understandably, the hopes of the people were raised after the Tennis Court Oath and the formation of the National Assembly of the French People. How could they not be? The National Assembly was a direct challenge to not only the First and Second Estates, but also to the King. However, after harvest wipeouts, hunger is rife, the streets are packed with the dispossessed and the unemployed. You can’t eat votes! Emotions had reached fever pitch, compounded by hunger and desperation.
July 1789. The King sacks Necker as his chancellor and replaces him with the unpopular Baron de Breteuil. Soon afterwards, Les Invalides was raided for munitions and an angry and mutinously dangerous armed people’s army marched to the Bastille. The governor of the Bastille tried to negotiate his way out, but late in the afternoon he ordered his troops to open fire on the crowd – a fatal mistake. After the storming of the Bastille, the hated symbol of royal tyranny, De Launay’s head was sliced off by a kitchen boy called Desnot, who paraded it around the streets of Paris on a pike. Whoever said revolutions were not bloody?
In the meantime, Louis XVI was under the impression that all was well. When he heard about the dramatic turn of events he asked his chief adviser if this was just another revolt. “No, your Majesty,” came the reply, “it’s a revolution.”
Two centuries and four months later, on the evening of 9 November 1989, in a televised conference in East Berlin, a party hack named Günter Schablowski replied to a question about the regime’s new, liberal travel regulations. Asked when they would take effect, he shrugged and replied: “immediately”, sending thousands of East Berliners to a wall in a human tide that the German Democratic Republic could not control. Soldiers and Stasi agents did not shoot into the crowd, though it could have been different. The Berlin Wall came down not because Ronald Reagan stood up and demanded it but through force of circumstance. The revolutions of 1989 were made possible by a multiplicity of coincidences; the fall of the Berlin Wall is one such example. It also had to do with the courage of Eastern Bloc dissidents and the hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens who joined them.
1791. Back in 18th century France. The royal couple are caught trying to escape from France and join the other émigrés. Prussia declares war on France. In no time at all, the royal couple are perceived as the enemy within. Now fighting for France meant fighting an external and internal enemy. Up until 14 July 1789, David, like several other Frenchmen, believed that Louis XVI could still become Citizen King. Marie Antoinette? No chance; she was perceived as a bad influence on the King, a malevolent presence in France. Up until now, David was very much a political ingénue and must have shared the same views on the monarchy as the ordinary man in the street. However, all that changed when David met Marat and became a hard-liner for the Revolution.
David votes for the death of the monarchy. The decision to kill the King was reached by several stages, each more radical than the one before, and in a series of movements driven by people who had previously been outside the political process. The King’s position had been made more precarious after the Prussian invasion and the royal couple’s failed attempt to escape. That was exactly the sort of excuse needed by the extremist group to take action. The Jacobins numbered no more than 3,000 but soon controlled all of Paris. Most prominent among them were George Danton, Marat, and Antoine Saint Juste. The group advocated total democracy and, paradoxically, endorsed revolutionary violence and dictatorship in order to attain it.
1795. Louis XVI is publicly executed on 21 January 1793. A military dictatorship, with Robespierre and Marat at the helm, is formed. Several people were denounced and thousands went to their death. The dictatorship makes a mockery of liberty. Someone has to stop the bloodbath, and that some one is Charlotte Corday – certainly no Royalist, but a Republican.
On 9 July 1795, Corday arrives in Paris from Caen, buys a six-inch knife and heads for Rue des Cordeliers, where Marat lives. She arrives at his front door but access to Marat is denied. She returns, and this time gets past his guards. Marat, the Friend of the People, is in his bath. It’s a hot July day and his psoriasis has broken out into red blistering sores. He sits in his bath, using an old wooden box as a writing desk. He doesn’t look up as she enters his chamber and tells him she has a list of traitors’ names in a letter, hoping he won’t realise she is setting him up. He carries on writing, his eyes cast down. “I will have them guillotined within a week,” he says. And that was it: out comes her knife, straight into Marat’s chest. Corday is arrested and subsequently executed by guillotine.
The National Convention meets after Marat’s assassination. They want him back, and emotions run high. A state funeral is organised, and people file past Marat lying in state, paying their last respects. The corpse is decaying fast in the sweltering heat and has to be doused in perfume to drown the stench of decay. David is summoned by The Convention. There has to be something they can do to immortalise their leader. David is given his brief. He agrees to immortalise Marat.
The memory of Marat’s funeral begins to fade, but the painting survives. It is Marat’s last revenge.
What can be said about this painting? It is very beautiful and would very poignant were it not for the fact that David has painted a terrible lie.
This is a painting of J.P. Marat, the most lethal of revolutionaries for who there could never be enough killing. But David has not painted him as the monster he was, but as a saint! He has transformed him into a paragon of virtue; it is astonishingly beautiful but also a little mad! The ‘Death of Marat’ by David also set a precedent for all revolutionary art that followed. Who knows how many dubious portraits of disfavoured revolutionaries gather dust in museum vaults, begging the question of why a revolutionary regime suppresses revolutionary art and enforces propaganda? Yet by all accounts, David wasn’t a menacing lunatic, in the same way that the official Soviet artists who painted for the state in Russia from Stalin to Perestroika were not delusional, but chose to paint for a totalitarian regime. This was unequivocal. Artists who had their own ideas had to paint in secret or leave Russia.
David was a propagandist for the French Revolution. Not only has he given Marat the air of a martyred saint but also his skin here is the colour of warm limestone – with no sign of the skin condition that tormented him. The sheet wrapped around his body echoes Christ’s shroud and the knife wound inflicted by Corday is now a neat incision suggestive of Christ’s wounds.
But David’s genius lies in the fact that the À Marat painting is primarily a story for the people. For once, the hero isn’t an obscure figure from mythology or Roman history, but one of us. We can imagine parents taking their children to see it:
“Look at his inkpot!”
“Oh! Look at the letter from the wicked Corday!”
Finally, it is the simple wooden box that speaks most eloquently in the story that David is telling his audience. The old wooden box says: “Marat was a simple man; he was poor, just like you, he suffered, just like you do.”
The background of the painting is created with soft, feathery brush strokes. Gone are Marat’s guns and ominous sign – La Mort! Instead, an eloquent empty space fills the background.
If you happen to be in Berlin in time, check out the exhibition on Social Realism – from Stalin to Perestroika.
And when you are next in Brussels, drop in to The Royal Museum of Fine Arts and have a look at J.L. David’s À Marat. Perhaps J.L. David has triumphed for longer then we all realised.
Concluding comments
The American War of Independence was a precursor to the French Revolution. Several French soldiers helped the Americans fight against British colonialism.
The Napoleonic Army came to Malta and put an end to almost 200 years of theocratic rule.
By 1848, the chain of revolutions had spread across Europe from Paris to Milan to Vienna, bringing an end to absolutism in Europe.
1989 saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nobody expected the world to turn inside out in Eastern Europe when it did, bringing an end to the Cold War.