Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jacques-Louis David
French; 18th-century, 19th-century
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
92%
Death of Marat. 1793. Oil on canvas
This painting contains both absolute presence and total obscurity — the wood box and the scumbled wall — and it crams in between them the thick unbridled stuff of history unfurling, the death of an historical man. I may be cribbing from Clark. The box at bottom right is a trompe l'oeil painting, essentially, and it brashly signals the picture's closeness to its own limits: the note atop the box sticks out past the picture plane; the carved artist's name marks a boundary with what's outside the reality of the image, which is to say, reality. The wall behind Marat is the inversion of this: complete darkling nothingness, the frightening interiority of an image. Marat, having perished and entered history, mediates — literally mediates, in the way the shadows running across his chest and down his arms carry his worldly substance backwards into the belly of the picture, combining it there with the stuff of abyss — what's present and what's absent in this image. The front and the back of this painting are too much of what painting is, as such; Marat is the embodiment of everything it isn't, but could be. (TFS, 2026)
Paris, France: Louvre Museum
82%
Portrait of Juliette Blait de Villeneuve. 1824. Oil on canvas
If David's earlier, most famous pictures possessed something like a generalizing outward disposition that pointed the way, however obliquely, to the pictorial tensions that would come to characterize modernism — think the leering swaths of wall and stone in Socrates, Oath, Marat — a late work like this one turns that "facingness" (vide Fried) entirely inward, concentrating its effects on the skin of every object without much care for the surface of the painting itself. The lady's music stand is the arch instance of this, but also her flesh and her stony hair and the soundboard of her harp all contain a similar hermeticism and discreteness. It's clear that David was aiming for something comestible and sleek, but the result is almost animatronic: a real unreality. There would be no returning unconflicted to the comforts of ancién regime decoration; kitsch — including the exquisite kitsch of Ingres — would go on to develop elaborate methods of papering over this fact. But here, at his life's end, David forged ahead blithely into the past. His late works may be the last premodern paintings. (TFS, 2026)
Paris, France: Louvre Museum
77%
Oath of the Horatii. 1784. Oil on canvas
There's really only one picture in David's oeuvre that makes good on its suggestions of full-force frontality, and that's the Marat with its wood box and its night-sky of a gulping background. The Oath, similarly, is all oriented outwards, but it doesn't quite consummate its relationship with the world beyond it. The arches behind the Horatii make of the courtyard a sort of stage, but then the actors are set safely behind its proscenium by that band of flooring between their feet and the painting's bottom edge. The rigidity of the characters; the precise connections between their most infinitesimal movements and the overall arrangement of the scene; David's proclivity for modeling by way of juxtaposing so many sealed-off planes of vivid light and color — all of these qualities amount to an "abstractness" that festers in the painting but stays buried inside it, cloistered somewhere just behind the soldiers' outstretched arms. (Maybe I mean this literally: there's a spear on the back wall — perfectly horizontal — that seems to contain every formal possibility of the figure group in the foreground, but which also almost disappears from view into this abyss of the picture.) David's paintings tended to raise problems which they were not prepared to solve. (TFS, 2026)
Paris, France: Louvre Museum
48%
The Coronation of Napoleon. 1805-07. Oil on canvas
Revolutionary David has a lithic austerity in which, if you peer from the right angle, you might glimpse the first flashes of modernist painting. Bourbon David has a garishness that's pathetic and delightful, as well as a delicacy that's just simply delightful. Napoleonic David has very little. It can't be denied that the arrangement of figures in this painting is acrobatic, or that there's something of interest in its umbrous tone and the large swaths of patterned surface in its middle third, above the heads of the courtiers. But the stilled plasticity of this painter's earlier efforts has given way to a mawkish ease of movement, typified by how little the figure of Napoleon has to fight to receive the light that's flowing through him and out onto his toadies. Nor has this new ease yet metastasized into the extravagance, patently untenable, of David's later work. Instead this painting fills itself up to its edges but no further; it falls back into itself just far enough to sustain its illusions, but not so far as to ever indulge them. Kitsch is not quite at the door, but it's starting to round the corner. (TFS, 2026)