Jacques Louis David at the Metropolitan

An excellent show of the artist's drawings has AHW reconsidering art & politics

Yes, internet friends, the Whitney Biennial is upon us, and I for one am relieved to see it back on an even numbered year. Those 2017 and ‘19 odd Biennials were odd in all the wrong ways, ways that had little to do with the actual contents of the show. They are now footnotes to the protests that engulfed them. I know that my upcoming Biennial review is just as hotly anticipated as this Biennial, so I hate to disappoint you by making you wait for my take on the most contemporary of contemporary art shows. In the meantime, take a trip to the Met. If you like dead artists (five in the Biennial are!) and “political” art (it is a Whitney Biennial after all), you’re going to love Jacques-Louis David. — AHW

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Jacques Louis David, The Oath of the Tennis Court, 1791

“Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman”
Metropolitan Museum of Art
February 17 - May 15 2022

Contemporaries like to call themselves radical as they tinker with whatever debris float to the surface of our muddy waters. To be radical is to get to the root of things and transform them, not to do something new or weird or unpopular, as our century seems to believe. Exhibitions promising “radical ideas” of “alternative futures” do no such thing: they merely affirm the limits of the present. For once, the moniker “Radical Draftsman” is accurate to its subject: David, I think, did in fact get to the root of things, or at least quite near.

Jacques-Louis David was the artist of the French Revolution. He is famed as a painter and is deftly presented here as a draftsman. He was also a Jacobin, a member of the National Convention and a choreographer of revolutionary pageantry, not least of which was the transformation of the Palais du Louvre into the Musée du Louvre, which he also made his home. 

The majority of drawings in the show are preparatory studies for his famed canvases, only one of which, the Met’s own Socrates, is included here. The highlight of the show, however, is a preparatory drawing for a painting that never came to be: The Oath of the Tennis Court. The work is held, somewhat ironically, in the collection of Versailles, and this rare opportunity to see it stateside is not to be missed. 

The year is 1789. It’s been 74 years since the death of the Sun King Louis XIV. Après moi le déluge, said his successor Louis XV, and now, in the reign of Louis XVI, the flood arrives. Just over a decade prior, some precocious American colonials had wrenched open history and declared independence from the British crown. The French crown had committed a great deal of money to their successful enterprise and now finds itself quite broke. In crisis, Louis XVI calls the Estates General, a meeting that had not been called since 1614. The First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the aristocracy) and the Third Estate (the bourgeoisie) were summoned to Versailles, the royal seat a dozen  miles from Paris. The delegates took their seats: the supporters of Louis and the ancien régime on the right and the soon to be revolutionary bourgeoisie on the left. (This is where the left got its name.) 

The Third Estate held the wealth of France, but not the political power. Frustrated that they could not but be outvoted on every point by the First and Second Estates, the Third, and some sympathizers from the First, absconded to a tennis court on the property where they vowed to create a constitution for the nation. It marked the beginning of the French Revolution, which would unfold in glory and chaos, in dreams and desires, across the whole of human history henceforth. 

The composition of David’s document of that moment, executed three years after the fact, is disquieting, uneconomical. Nearly half of the space of the picture is given over to unadorned architecture. The claustrophobic urgency of the crowd is palpable. Hands fly up toward the rafters where curtains dramatically billow in the wind. David’s inclusion, in the lower left corner, of a racket and balls is a reminder of the contingency of the day. At the center is Jean-Sylvain Bailly administering the oath. Beneath him is a rather glum abbé Sieyès, whose pamphlet What is the Third Estate? established the groundwork for the Revolution, but who, at the time of David’s draft, had fallen afoul of the Republic. Two years after the drawing was made, Bailly, no longer the hero, met the guillotine. On the left behind Bailly, Maximilien Robespierre dramatically rises from the crowd, arms spread like a bird taking flight. The editorial gloss suits the political situation of 1791 in which Robespierre, a personal friend of the artist, was ascendant.

The urgency of the draft, not yet fully realized in monumental paint, is a blessing of history. Oil paint, dried and varnished, captures its subject forever. But this sketch, like the moment it depicts, remains an incomplete project. The completed Coronation of Napoleon is a document of history but The Oath of the Tennis Court was and remains a promissory note. 

Jacques Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787

I’ve written before that radical art and radical politics do not hew together precisely, but if ever they did, it was, briefly, in the figure of David. The curation of the show underscores the point: the first of three galleries contains his work prior to the Revolution; the second The Death of Socrates (a 1787 prefiguration of the values that would burst through two years later), Tennis Court and other documents of the revolutionary period; the third contains work from his imprisonment in 1794 through his work for Napoleon and end of his life. It is easy to make the argument that he was at his best in the second gallery, from 1787 to 1794, when his art and his politics were most perfectly aligned. The final gallery is a sinking sadness in the wake of the triumphs of the second.

Nonetheless, it’s the portraits David drew of his fellow prisoners, followers of Robespière unseated by the Thermidorian reaction, that are most appealing to the modern eye, full of emotion brimming over steady resolve. Studying their faces cannot but embarrass the contemporary viewer. Portrayed in medallion rounds, David captured them facing the guillotine in the format of classical antiquity, whose torch they claimed for themselves.These men dared to change the fabric of reality. They succeeded, if not precisely as they would have liked. What my pathetic generation calls “politics” is nothing worthy of the name. We no longer wish to transform the world and barely even succeed in managing it. 

It’s difficult to say which of the three Davids (three and a half, perhaps, counting the prison portraits as not yet fully departed from his revolutionary period) is the superior painter when the bond between his painting and his politics is so inseparable. It must be confessed that to the modern eye Socrates and The Oath of the Horatii, represented here in preparatory drawings, are not particularly attractive: too rigid, they occupy what is now called the “uncanny valley” of imagery too close to human verité but too far at the same time. It’s worth keeping in mind that David’s classicism was counterposed to the previously dominant aristocratic rococo style: conservative as it may appear to us today, it was indeed a subversive and militant art.

Jacques Louis David, The Head of the Dead Jean Paul Marat, 1793x

A preparatory sketch for the well known painting of The Death of Marat is included in the second gallery: a pained death mask of the murdered journalist and friend of the artist. David seems to have allowed himself more feeling and verité in the study than he allows in the finished painting (although no one can argue that the painting Marat is not vastly more emotive than Socrates). The martyr’s lifeless head lilts slightly to the side. His face appears almost boyish. His eyes are not fully closed and the slightest of smiles crosses his cold lips. One could almost imagine Marat has just come upon a new and somewhat pleasant thought. But in the next glance he is quite lifeless, and the study oscillates eternally between the two. Here the grim mortality of flesh makes its most successful stand against unflinching classicism until the final, tortured drawings of the artists’ last years in exile in Brussels. 

Marat was not presented as autonomous art in the sense that we know it today. It was a set piece in one of David’s elaborately staged festivals, stirring the outrage of the Jacobins against the Girondins. In even further vulgarity, the heart of the picture’s subject had been removed and placed in a secular reliquary before the spectacle took place. The Revolution, for all its extraordinary rationalism, was not without magical, sometimes garish, pageantry. We 21st century people, expecting the cocooned display of paintings as art and somewhat repulsed by the first presentation’s vulgarity, would do well to note that rigidity in ourselves even as we may find David’s rigid classicism alienating. 

This all begs a question, one I feel a certain responsibility to answer having spent the past six years staking my claim against political art: why does political art succeed for David? Why does it succeed, perhaps even more, for Delacroix and Géricault, who did not have the privilege of their predecessor to draft a moment of triumph untinged by the tragedy of failure? 

The taste and demand for absolutely autonomous art can be grasped only with the recognition of modernism as the pathos of political modernity, whose symptoms worsen as liberté egalité fraternité festers unrealized. The better art of our present hermetically seals itself off from the world for its own survival; the worse art attempts to do what politics has failed to for its own right to exist. Art historian Arnold Hauser argued that the recoil from romanticism and insistence on the absolute uselessness of l’art pour l’art stemmed from ruling class anxiety over losing the ability to exploit art for their own ends. It seems to me more complex than this, but one ought consider why “political” “art” is today so in vogue from this standpoint. 

I cannot say with any confidence that I adore the work of David independent of his politics. In truth I am moved more by the political vitality fossilized in his works than his composition or draftsmanship. I imagine reaching out my hand to touch the paper, succumbing briefly to a magical desire that these may be some form of talismans, that to touch them is to touch the possible. Even art historians tend to confess that the interest invested in David is contingent upon what came before and after. David as historical crux. Within a century of the artist’s 1825 death, art’s pathological drive to attain its own concept — that is, modernism —  had blown it to smithereens. Everything can be art but it is unclear whether anything is. Après lui le déluge. 

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I have elected not to footnote this post, since it is not academic writing, but interested parties will find the material referenced here in the usual places: the third volume of Hauser’s Social History of Art, Clark’s Farewell to an Idea, and Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution. I also owe the usual debt to Adorno and recommend Chris Cutrone’s article on the 20th century critiques of revolutionary art. And if I have gotten any of my facts wrong or you’d like a more specific citation, I welcome you to chime in in the comments.