"Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile" The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. February 1-April 24, 2005.

Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute Williamstown, Massachusetts. June 5-September 5, 2005

About the last thing one should wish on anyone is "curator of an exhibition on Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)." But this is the fate that has befallen those curators, led by Philippe Bordes, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Mark Twain famously warned that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds," and so too it goes for David. Jacques-Louis is a fantastic artist who rarely measures up to himself.

There are of course the practical considerations. Mounting a David show in the United States can be vexing. What about his most famous paintings in Europe? The Oath of the Horatii (1784)? Brutus (1789)? The Oath of the Tennis Court (1791)? The Death of Marat (1793)? The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799)? The Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine (1805-1808)? The Distribution of the Eagles (1808--1810)? You Can forget about securing loans of these masterpieces.

Then there is the problem of organizing and presenting an artist who in equal measure produced portraits, images of contemporary events, and history painting (if you were to consider Homer an historian). He was a politician who was at various times aligned with Robspierre, implicated in the Terror, at serious risk of losing his head to the guillotine, Napoleon's Style Guy, and an exile in Brussels. He was a republican who lived smack dab in the middle of the monarchy, the Revolution, the Directory, the Consulate, the Empire, and the Restoration. He was a painter whose mastery of cool composition and the invisible hand spawned a generation of artists including Girodet, Gerard, Gros, Isabey, not to mention the legions of academic painters who followed them, but one whose strange vision somehow dwarfed everyone.

Finally there is the contemporary scholarship surrounding David. No matter what form "critical theory" takes, it always shares the same urge to seduce and the besotted logic of why we never got David up until now. The Marxist art historian T. J. Clark produced the most charismatic of these arguments in his 1999 book Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. In a chapter dedicated to David he writes that, with its new political contingencies, "David's Marat 'turns on the impossibility of transcendence' and shows us politics as the form of a world." Okay. Politics played a role in Paris in 1793. As an artist in Paris you would be hard-pressed to avoid it--especially when you could see Marie-Antoinette on her way to the scaffold from your window. But "of a world"? Didn't catch that one. Then again modernism for Clark

 
   is a process that deeply misrecognizes its own 
   nature for much of the time.... Modernism, 
   as I say, is always part rearguard action against 
   the truths it has stumbled upon. 

For a Marxist, beneath the surface of Marat is always ...