Public Programs @ the Institute
Series: Close Reading: Authors at the IFA
Thomas Crow
Making Sense of Marat
Monday, September 22, 2025 at 6:00pm
The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David is one of the best known, most memorable, and widely reproduced paintings in the Western canon, its fashioning in the early autumn of 1793 inseparable from the wave of Revolutionary ardor that brought down the French monarchy and secured the foundation of a new Republic founded on the rights of man and citizen. Its enduring stature arises from the immense dignity and composure with which David invested the “Friend of the People” as martyred exemplar of those ideals. In light of how little we see of Marat’s body, that tribute relies as much on the framing constellation of accessory objects, interlocked within an austerely rectilinear order, as isolated in the replica painting on the cover by Yue Minjun, who removes the corpse of Marat entirely. Thomas Crow’s new book, Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution, unbundles this apparently solidified matrix. Successive alterations of the original canvas generate a gallery of incomplete versions, each isolating an element essential to the powerful yet obscure force that David’s Marat exerts on its viewers. And each of these successive states in turn launches an inquiry into one more interwoven strand of historical events. The book’s punning title evokes Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of the detective story: fittingly so, in that a towering crime, accomplished by means of pitiless deceit and horrific violence, lies at the core of David’s aesthetic triumph.
Prof. Crow’s talk will take the audience through these transformations of David’s original canvas and what they might freshly disclose concerning the Revolution from which it was made. Thomas Crow is Roselie Solow Professor of Modern Art History at the Institute-NYU, where he has taught since 2007. His related previous books include Painters and Public Life in 18 th-Century Paris; Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France; and Restoration: the Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art.
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