CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Thomas Crow’s Radical Political Art History

Image by Juliet Furst.

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-........

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