Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution

by Thomas Crow

Overview

How an enigmatic masterpiece of the French Revolution became a talisman of the revolutionary spirit in our own time

Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat depicts the painter’s friend and fellow revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat collapsed in his bath after being fatally stabbed by a female assassin who stands just outside the frame. In this fascinating book, Thomas Crow traces the radical legacy of a painting that has been called the Pietà of the French Revolution, showing how David’s masterpiece captures the saga of that violent era in the single figure of Marat, and how it reveals itself anew today.

Crow begins by describing how the painting’s enduring power came to the fore during the countercultural tumult of the 1960s, discussing how his vocation as a scholar arose out of his own encounter with the work. He then takes readers back to 1793, telling the story of the painting’s creation through the eyes of David, his subject, and Marat’s charismatic assassin, Charlotte Corday. Charting the history of its impact across more than two centuries, Crow shows how this multilayered portrait surfaced in succeeding waves of political dissent as an enduring talisman of popular insurgency.

Beautifully illustrated, Murder in the Rue Marat is an art historian’s disarmingly personal account of a painting whose hidden complexities bear witness to the promise and peril of revolution in Marat’s time and our own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691274430
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	11/04/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	52 MB
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About the Author

Thomas Crow is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. His many books include Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812–1820 and The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge (both Princeton).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In this revelatory book, Marat is set free to slip in and out of sex, gender, medium, and time, reanchored again and again in violent political and cultural reality. From Corday to the counterculture, from Balzac to Barthes, Thomas Crow restages Marat and method with rare and brilliant analysis.”—Mark Ledbury, coeditor of The Versailles Effect

“An unusual and extraordinary blend of autobiography, theory, history, forensics, and Crow’s signature visual analysis, Murder in the Rue Marat is a model of explanatory ambition and compelling from beginning to end. Readers will never see David’s celebrated painting in the same way again.”—Hollis Clayson, author of Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque

“Returning to the object that first stirred his interest in art history, Thomas Crow submits a renowned revolutionary icon—and his own methods—to fresh scrutiny. Brilliantly combining pictorial, political, and philosophical analyses, Crow constructs a vivid narrative, at once personal and scholarly, that reveals new aspects of a painting we thought we knew.”—Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, author of The Painter’s Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard

“A remarkable book. Crow unravels an intricate history of The Death of Marat, skillfully using the present to illuminate the past—and vice versa—in a suspenseful and compelling manner. Through a rich tapestry of historical accounts, Crow weaves a narrative that mirrors the complexities of our own social lives, offering readers an experience as layered and delicious as a revolutionary croissant.”—Serge Guilbaut, author of How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War

“It is not often that art history is unputdownable and trippy, but Murder in the Rue Marat manages both. It has the blood and guts of a whodunit, complicated by a polyphony of responses to the painting from the French Revolution to the music and protest of the 1960s. This is some of the most sustained close looking I’ve read. Thomas Crow shows us how art can be philosophical without ceasing to be visceral, and how it can shape a whole community of viewers, listeners, and writers.”—Andrei Pop, author of A Forest of Symbols