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Terror and Terrorism in Painting |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / ESSAYS |
| Author: Francis J. Greene |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 10/1/1994 |
| Size: 4,787 Words, 28,459 Characters |
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The work of Jacques-Louis David was considered by the Romantic painter Delacroix as the beginning of the evolution of nineteenth-century French painting. Whether this be the case or not, David certainly begins the evolution of the theme of terror, which was to mark such a vast amount of painting after 1800.
David's Death of Marat, unveiled on October 16, 1793, serves as a prime example of the theme of terror. It was commissioned by the Convention after the death of Marat, who was one of David's heroes. What is so terrifying about this painting is its immediacy. The assassination has taken place perhaps only minutes before, and we are standing in the very space occupied by the assassin, Charlotte Corday. David did not, in fact, re-create with exactitude the murder scene but rather drew upon his recollections of Marat. Indeed, the artist had visited the day before while Marat soaked in his tub, as he was forced to do for long periods because of a skin condition. However, all the essential details of the assassination are correct as depicted, and the whole story is laid before our eyes. Nothing in the room has been touched, so to speak, since the assassin dropped her weapon and fled. In his hand Marat still holds the note, a ploy by which Corday had gained access to his house.
As for Marat, his head has fallen slightly toward us. In like manner the arm falls gracefully over the side of the tub, the hand still holding the quill with which he had been writing. The ink and other pages rest on a crate that serves as a makeshift desk beside the tub. Blood stains the sheet and turns the bathwater crimson, so profusely has he bled from the wound in his side. The murder weapon, a bloodstained knife, lies beside the tub, having been dropped perhaps only minutes before. Rarely has a painting brought the viewer into such terrifyingly immediate contact with a murder in all its details. The colors of the painting only reinforce the terror, for these colors, particularly the background green, are fittingly austere. There is no trace of the pastels so dear to many eighteenth-century French painters and thus no touch of warmth or comfort.
For all this, however, it can be said that the terror is somehow tolerable, and the viewer does not turn away in disgust, unable to bear the bloody details. How is this so? Despite an apparent immediacy there are layers of mediation between the viewer's gaze and the actual scene, a mediation in the form of iconography that somehow renders the gruesome details and the totality more acceptable, even somewhat reassuring. Marat's tub becomes his coffin; the sheets, his shroud. The crate functions as a tombstone upon which David has inscribed his own homage to Marat.
The comforts of religious iconography, here borrowed and politicized, permeate the painting. Marat...
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...Norton, 1988), 94-97.
2. Alfred Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 247.
3. For a detailed study of possible sources for the wailing mother, see Anthony Blunt's Picasso's Guernica (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 44-56, as well as Oppler's Picasso's Guernica. Both texts offer an excellent overall study of this complex mural.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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