Thomas Crow’s Radical Political Art History

Some years ago, I was obsessed with Thomas Crow’s impressive first book, Painters in Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1987). I even read the PhD thesis which is its source. Because I was interested in the birth of the Louvre as a public art museum during the French Revolution, I wanted to to understand this period just before that Revolution. Painters in Public Life, a classic, made Crow’s reputation. Now his newest book is Murder in the Rue Marat. A Case of Art in Revolution (2026) extends his analysis of French visual culture into the era of the Revolution. In this extraordinarily personal account, Crow tells how in the 1970s he became an art historian. He describes the era when Peter Weiss’s play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade was famous. When R. D. Laing, Timothy Leary and Michel Foucault were very influential, it’s unsurprising that an artwork from the French Revolution spoke to young political activists. At that moment of intense political activity, many future academics were inspired by leftist culture. For art historians, that could be awkward, for, as Crow notes, their discipline was typically politically conservative. Insofar as art history is concerned with understanding precious artifacts, the art closely guarded in our museums, it’s possible, even likely that art historians will think of themselves as custodians of those posh objects. That certainly was my experience, coming to art history from philosophy, which has different political concerns. Now, of course that situation has changed drastically, for the leading contemporary art historians dealing with modernism and contemporary art are associated with October, which is a left-wing journal. (Its title ‘October’ refers to the Russian Revolution, as shown in Eisenstein’s film of that title.)

Crow’s focus in this new book is on Jacques-Louis David’s painting, usually called Death of Marat (1793), which he gave a more vivid title, Marat at His Last Breath. Of all the famous modernist artists, some of whom were leftists, only Jacques-Louis David (1748- 1825) had an important active political role. After grand success under the old regime, he played an important role in the French Revolution and survived to be a champion of Napoleon. His early masterpieces from the 1780s feature subjects that might have been painted by Nicolas Poussin. He wasn’t a political activist then. But then, during the revolution, he painted his memorial for Marat, and he was an active revolutionary who almost lost his life. And so it’s unsurprising that Crow and the other most prominent senior leftist art historian, his teacher T. J. Clark, have devoted particular attention to David’s painting of Marat. To understand that picture, you need to look closely at the political life of the French revolutionaries. Clark’s discussion published in Farewell to An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999) provides a very full account of the political background. Crow’s account is very different.

We really are considering in Crow’s new book the political developments of three eras: that of David during the Revolution; that of Crow when he was a young scholar in Paris and Los Angeles in the 1970s; and, of course, the present. It might be said, then, that this is the commentary on David’s painting that Crow wanted to write then, with the resources available in the 1970s counter-culture. That’s why it makes sense that he begins with a personal account of his earlier career. Crow wanted to be an art critic, and now he has, one might say, become one, an art critic devoted to the late eighteenth century. I mean by that to suggest that Murder in the Rue Marat deliberately refuses to obey the usual conventions of art history writing. Crow’s goal is to use some historical materials in an original way, as if he were an art critic.

How, we might ask, would David, a painter whose prior models of memorial paintings were mostly scenes of Christian saints or martyrs, have depicted the death of a much-admired contemporary revolutionary figure, Marat? David needed to secularize his figure in a way that would make its political context immediately comprehensible to a mass audience in 1793. One significant resource for Crow is Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist thinking, and another is Roland Barthes’ then-famous book on a short story by Balzac, S/Z (1975). Lévi- Strauss wanted to show how we needed to set visual artifacts within a system, and Barthes was interested in taking apart the text of Balzac’s short story about the would-be lover of an Italian castrato. And so, although neither scholar was an art historian, they both presented very original ways of thinking nicely adapted to Crow’s purposes. What he offers now is less an interpretation of David’s picture of Marat, as ‘interpretation’ is generally understood in art history, than a text about that painting, an account based upon these structuralist texts. That, at least, is the best way I can find to describe the radical originality of Crow’s book. We then have in Murder in the Rue Marat two different structures at play. In painting, J-L David’s image of the murdered androgynous male, Marat. And in literature, Balzac’s story of the murdered Sarrasine, a male pretending to be a female. And since the painting used to illustrate Balzac’s story showing Sarrasine is by David’s pupil, the Neo-classical painter Anne-Louis Girodet, for a structuralist thinker, these themes are intricately connected. Crow’s aim thus, if I understand his account at all, is to decenter the usual strategies of art history.

What might support this radically original interpretative structure is comparing our situation to David’s I can see how in some ways, our political situation is not unlike that of David during Napoleon’s rise to power, and also after his fall. Like contemporary America, France suffered military setbacks. But what follows from that vague parallel isn’t, as yet, clear to me. I have not read all of Crow’s books, and so perhaps that’s why I don’t comprehend all of the details of this one. But I understand enough to see that Murder in the Rue Marat deserves sustained further scrutiny and, most likely, emulation. Crow briefly mentions that when he was a graduate student, he met Clark, who gave him advice on how to approach this painting. But he doesn’t say much about Clark’s published account. Since Crow and Clark are our two most eminent senior political art historians, this book could provide a welcome opportunity to compare and contrast their very different accounts. Are their accounts compatible, or in conflict? I hope that some younger scholars will discuss this issue, for Crow’s amazing book deserves attention. Crow (and Clark) are amazing writers, almost beyond emulation. They are better art historians than we deserve. No one is more skilled, accomplished or deservedly influential than Crow.

I am a little surprised that Crow, whose career (from my great distance) seems an astonishing success story, felt (at least early on) beleaguered professionally. If he feels that way, what hope is there for the rest of us? He mentions that Yale, where he later chaired the art history department, had earlier rejected his application for admission as a grad student. But after all if Jacques-Louis David could become a radical, why cannot Crow emulate him, at least in his academic life?

Note:

On Crow’s earlier writings see my “The Political Art of Jacques-Louis David and his Modern Day American Successors,” https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0141-6790.2003.02605006_5. Structuralist ideas were in the air in the 1980s: see my “The transfiguration of the commonplace: Caravaggio and his interpreters.” https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.1987.1043536. And “Toward a structuralist analysis of baroque art.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/23207906.

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