Art: David the Difficult

“Hurry, hurry, my dear friend, thumb over your Plutarch and choose a subject familiar to everyone—it counts a great deal.” Jacques-Louis David, the painter prophet of the French Revolution, was advising a favorite pupil. “Now give yourself to what really constitutes history painting,” he went on. “All other sorts . . . will disappear; only this is safe from men’s passions.”

The curly-maned old lion could never have dreamed it, but his kind of painting, which put ideas ahead of emotions, was on the verge of obscurity for a century or more. The romantic French masters who followed him, from Courbet and Delacroix on, were apt to consider David more of a pedant than a painter—and a passionless clod to boot. They were wrong, as a huge David exhibition, the biggest showing of his work ever held, proved last week in Paris.

Two centuries after his birth, David’s place in art history was finally assured. He had lived through an age when history marched with a heavy and decisive tread, and he had stamped it with the mark of his genius and his will. His austere neo-classicism helped set the tone, and even the fashions of the First Republic and later of Napoleon’s Empire.

Naked Heroes. A pupil of his great-uncle Francois Boucher, David was brought up to be a boudoir painter, trained in the sentimental and erotic elegance that the court demanded. But young David was a difficult student; he simply could not learn to paint charmingly. At 27 he took off for Rome, looked at the statues and pictures, and came back a fighting antiquary. Brutus and the Horatii were his idols; he painted them to resemble the antique sculpture he admired, posturing naked and grand in a cool world. To complaints about la nudité de mes héros, David replied simply and smugly that they had always been represented that way in the Golden Age.

Like the Big Three of Mexico’s revolutionary art (Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros), David thought painting should “contribute forcefully to the education of the public.” The French Revolution and its aftermath gave him a chance to paint propaganda pictures for a vast new public, and a brand-new set of heroes and martyrs to portray. David sat in the National Convention, voted for Louis XVI’s death, and eventually went into exile because of it, but not until he had tasted glory with Napoleon. Marat, Robespierre and Napoleon might seem a mixed and dubious cast to admire; to David they were all great. And they admired him too; Napoleon once signed a decree reading: “We have named and name M. David our first painter.”

Scrubbed Paintings. The 144 Davids on exhibition in Paris last week had been gathered from all over France, from Belgium, and Manhattan. To prepare for the show, experts had spent almost a year cleaning the dun varnish from French canvases, restoring to them the clear bright colors David had intended. His pen-drawing of Marie-Antoinette on her way to the guillotine, which David was cool enough and history-minded enough to sketch on the spot, was an unassuming example of his naturally incisive draftsmanship and genius for portraiture.

But David’s Marat Assassinated (see cut) was more typical of his art and his ambition to illustrate history in an inspiring way. To modern eyes, Marat looked rather like a green & yellow waxwork, contrived and obvious, yet it had been painted in a passionate and not at all pedantic rage (Charlotte Corday, who killed Marat in his tub, did not happen to be one of David’s many idols). “The people asked for their murdered man back again,” David had proclaimed when he finished it. “I heard the voice of the people, and obeyed.”