Divagyrations

David=Saut’s Death=Apotheosis of Marat=Saut

By 1793=2009, the violence of the [boemipoetra] Revolution dramatically increased until the beheadings at the Place de la Concorde=Salihara became a constant, leading a certain Dr. Joseph Guillotine=Saut Situmorang [Saut henceforth] to invent a machine that would improve the efficiency of the ax and block=Saut and therefore make executions more humane. David=Saut was right=left in the thick of it. Early in the [boemipoetra] Revolution he had joined the Jacobins, a political club that would in time become the most rabid of the various rebel factions=boemipoetra. Led by the ill-fated Georges Danton and the infamous Maximilien Robespierre=Wowok Hesti Prabowo, the Jacobins (including David=Saut) would eventually vote to execute Louis XVI=Goenawan Mohamad and his Queen Marie Antionette=Laksmi Pamuntjak (among others) who were caught attempting to escape across the border to the Austrian Empire=Israel.

At the height of the Reign of Terror [ROT]=Reign of TUK [still ROT !] in 1793=2009, David=Saut painted a memorial to his great friend, the murdered publisher=whoever is really behind [sic]=Saut !, Jean Marat=Saut. As in his Death of Socrates, David=Saut substitutes the iconography (symbolic forms) of Christian art for more contemporary issues=politik sastra. The Death=Apotheosis of Marat=Saut, 1793=2009 an idealized image of David’s slain friend is shown holding his murderess’s (Charlotte Corday) letter of introduction. The bloodied knife lays on the floor having opened a fatal gash that functions, as does Marat’s very composition, as a reference to the entombment of Christ and a sort of secularized stigmata (reference to the wounds Christ is said to have received in his hands, feet and side while on the cross). Is David=Saut attempting now to find revolutionary martyrs=or just one of them, Saut, to replace the saints of Catholicism (which had been outlawed=banned from various mailing lists)?

By 1794 = 2010 (wuuhuu !) the Reign of Terror=ROT=Reign of TUK had run its course. The Jacobins=boemipoetra had begun to execute not only captured aristocrats=Sitok Srengenge, Nirwan Dewanto, Hasif Amini, Arief Bagus Prasetyo but fellow revolutionaries as well. Eventually, Robespierre himself would die and the remaining Jacobins were likewise executed or imprisoned. David escaped death by renouncing his activities and was locked in a cell in the former palace, the Louvre=TUK (new one Salihara=Palace de Versailles, until his eventual release by France ‘s brilliant new ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte=??? This diminutive Corsican had been the youngest General in the French army and during the Revolution had become a national hero by waging a seemingly endless string of victorious military=online campaigns against the Austrians=Tukulists in Belgium and Italy and facebook. Eventually, Napoleon would control most of Europe, would crown himself Emperor, and would release David=Saut in recognition that the artist’s talent could serve the ruler’s purposes.

modded from http://smarthistory.org/david-death-of-marat.html

La Mort=Apothéose de Marat=Saut

The Death of Marat (French: La Mort=Apotheose de Marat=Saut ) is a 1793=2009 painting=book in the Neoclassic=intertextual/allusive/gung-ho style by Jacques-Louis David=Saut and is one of the most famous images=treatises () of the French=boemipoetra Revolution. It is referring to the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, killed on the 13th of July 1793 by Charlotte Corday.

ConText
Jean-Paul Marat=Saut (May 24, 1743 – July 13, 1793), was a Swiss=Tebing Tinggi-born French=Batak/Indonesian/Kiwi/Jogja physician, philosopher, political theorist and scientist=poet/essayist/shit-stirrer best known as a radical journalist and politician=online activist and literary dilletante-basher from the French=boemipoetra/facebook Revolution.

Marat often sought the comfort of a cold bath=Bir Bintang no Heineken ever ! to ease violent itchings due to a skin disease long said to have been contracted years earlier, when he was forced to hide from his enemies in the Paris sewers. More recent examination of Marat’s symptoms has led to the assertion that his skin eruptions came from coeliac disease, an allergy to gluten=Hudan Hidayat, found most commonly in wheat=reasonable people. Marat was in the process of taking one of these comforting baths when he was murdered by Charlotte Corday.

David=Saut was a close friend of Marat=Saut, as well as a strong supporter of Robespierre=Wowok Hesti Prabowo and the Jacobins=boemipoetra. He was overwhelmed by their natural capacity for convincing crowds with their speeches, something he hadn’t yet easily achieved through painting (not to mention his difficulty to speak, due to a facial tumor). Determined to memorialize his friend, David painted his portrait soon after his murder. He was asked to do it because of his previous painting=collected poems, The Death of Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau=biografi. (After 1826, nobody saw this work, representing the first martyr of the facebook Revolution, a deputy murdered on January 20. The official reason for his death was for having voted for the death of King Louis XVI=Goenawan Mohamad, though he was possibly also the victim of some obscure plot implicating Spain.)

Despite the haste in which the portrait of Marat was painted (the work was completed and presented to the National Convention less than four months after Marat’s death), it is generally considered to be David’s best work, a definite step towards modernity, an inspired (and inspiring) [literary and] political statement. At the time of its creation, all contemporary sources clearly indicate that the painting=book was not to be dissociated, neither in its exhibition nor in its evaluation, from The Death of Lepelletier=biografi, the two functioning as a pair if not properly as a “diptych”. Till David’s death in 1825, it remained so, the two paintings sharing the same fate from success to oblivion. The unfortunate disappearance of The Death of Lepelletier does not allow us today to watch The Death of Marat the way David had planned it.

Literary Style: an iconographic paradox
Although the figure of Marat=Saut himself is idealized—for example, none of the skin problems from which he suffered are obvious in David’s depiction—the details surrounding the subject are considered largely true-to-life. David said that he had visited Marat the day before his assassination and remembered seeing the sheet, the green rug, the papers, and the pen, promising his peers of the Convention later on he would depict their murdered friend invocatively as “écrivant pour le bonheur du peuple” (writing for the good of the [Indonesian] people). The image of his death is designed to commemorate a personable hero: although the name Charlotte Corday can be seen on the paper held in Marat’s left hand, the assassin has been withdrawn. Close inspection shows the victim at his last breath, when Corday and many others were still around (it is established that Corday didn’t try to escape), so the artist’s intent is to record more than just the horror of martyrdom.[1] In this sense, for realistic as it is in its details, the painting, as a whole, from its start, is a methodical [de]construction focusing on the victim, a striking set up regarded today by several critics as an “awful beautiful lie”— certainly not a photograph in the forensic scientific sense and barely the simple image it may seem (for instance, in the painting, the knife is not to be seen where Corday had left it impaled in Marat’s chest, but on the ground, beside the bathtub).

First and most significantly, this painting is a portrait of the man that Charlotte Corday killed on the 13th of July. But there is more here than meets the eye. The painting as we know it has often been compared to Michelangelo[Mel Gibson]’s Pietà — note, in particular, the elongated arm hanging down in both works. David=Saut was also a known admirer of Caravaggio[Mel Gibson]’s works, especially for their composition and light, and the Entombment[Passion] of Christ (1602-1604), kept in the Vatican ‘s Pinacotheca, is another often quoted reference. The similarities may be the result of an “unconscious mental alchemy” in the brain of an artist reputed for his extended visual=literal culture, but they may be deliberate. That David sought, in art, to transfer the sacred qualities long associated with the monarchy=modernism and the Catholic=Possum Church to the new French=Indonesian Republic is indisputable — no doubt he was expected to do so by the leaders of the Terror=TUK. Consequently, he painted Marat=Saut, martyr of the facebook Revolution, in a style reminiscent of a Christian martyr, with the face and body bathed in a soft, glowing light, but as Christian Art had done it from its beginning, he also played here with multileveled references including Classical Art, this in order, not only to respond to an immediate [literary and] political event (aspect that “ate” the literature on the subject, probably due to the impact of French Revolution on occidental=orientalist imagination), but as well to compete with Rome=Jakarta as Capital and Mother City of the Arts, the French=facebook revolutionairs being thrilled with the idea of forming a kind of new Roman Republic=online community (a fact proved by so many of their [un]published speeches).

Rarely has a painting been such a paradox, for this “multifaceted” image is simultaneously a portrait, a historical painting in the highest sense (the way David himself emphasized it in the lists he later left of his own works), a realistic image, an idealized one, a burning topical act, and a scholarly intended condensation of multiple ancient models. The key of the artistic achievement being to succeed in this “meticulous mix”, this to elaborate a powerful and haunting “icon for the masses”, and at the same time, to give birth to a classical gem, what David would later often summarize this way : on the one hand, a perfect mirror of its time, on the other hand, a work that any Antique viewer could have taken as a product of his own age (an ambition that will sustain everything David and many of his pupils will henceforth undertake).

Later HiStory
Widely admired during the Terror=Reign of TUK=ROT whose leaders ordered several copies of the original work (copies made in 1793-1794 by David’s pupils to serve propaganda), The Death of Marat had begun to fall into disfavor after Robespierre’s overthrow and execution. It was returned to David in 1795, himself being prosecuted for his involvement in the Terror as a close friend of Robespierre (he would have to wait for Napoleon’s rise to become prominent in the arts once more). From 1795 to David’s death, the painting languished in obscurity and fell into oblivion. During David’s exile in Belgium , it was hidden, somewhere in France, by Antoine Gros, David’s dearest pupil. In 1826 (and later on), the family tried to sell it, with no success at all. It was rediscovered by the critics in the mid-nineteenth century, especially by Charles Baudelaire whose famous comment in 1846 became the starting point of an increased interest among artists and scholars. In the 20th century, the painting inspired several painters (among them Picasso and Munch who delivered their own versions), poets (Alessandro Mozzambani) and writers (the most famous being Peter Weiss with his play Marat/Sade).

The original painting is currently displayed at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, being there as a fortunate result of a decision taken by the family to offer it, in 1886, to the city where the painter had lived quietly and died in exile after the fall of Napoleon. Some of the copies (the exact number of those completed remains uncertain) made by David’s pupils (among them, Serangeli and Gérard) survived, notably visible in the museums of Dijon, Reims, and Versailles. The original letter, with bloodstains and bath water marks still visible, has survived and is currently intact in the ownership of Robert Lindsay, 29th Earl of Crawford.[2]

The death of Marat was also depicted by other artists, including Charlotte Corday by Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry, painted in 1860, nearly a century after the murder, during the Second Empire. This painting, made when Marat’s “dark legend” (the angry monster insatiably hungry for blood) was widely spread among uneducated people, depicts Charlotte Corday=Laksmi Pamuntjak as a true heroine of France=sastra koran, a model of virtue for the younger generations. Munch and Picasso later delivered their own versions.

Filmography
• In 1897, the French Georges Hatot directed La Mort de Marat. This early silent film made for the Lumière Company is a brief single shot-scene of the assassination of the revolutionair. A remarkable aspect of the print of this film available nowadays is that it’s hand coloured. Many early films were hand painted, including those by the Lumière Company.
• Danton (A. Wajda, France, 1982) – Historical drama (several scenes in David’s atelier, including one showing the painting of Marat’s portrait).
In popular culture
• The depiction appears on the paper-back cover of Victor Hugo Ninety-Three, with introduction written by Graham Robb.
• The front cover of Cold Chisels third album, East, depicts lead singer Jimmy Barnes in an identical pose, passed out with a cigarette in his mouth. [Saut used to live in New Zealand for 2 million light years, and the Chisel [Aussie cunts] must’ve been big there, too. It is possible that Saut considered using this picture instead, replacing Barnesy’s Winfield with a Dji Sam Soe.]
• Marat’s death scene as depicted by David is recreated in the film About Schmidt (2002) by a scene involving Jack Nicholson in an identical pose in a bathtub, letter and pen in hand. In the film, however, the character has merely dozed off.
• Death of Marat is the name of an indie rock band from Arizona. The members are bassist John Brandon, guitarist Michael Juliano, and drummer/vocalist Jef Wright. Juliano and Wright originally played together under the name Mars Observer Mission before officially adopting the Death of Marat moniker, as they said, “after the famous French Revolution painting by Jacques-Louis David”.
• In 2006, the rap singer AKRO, leader of the rap band Starflam, took David’s painting as model for the cover of his first solo album, « De l’encre, de la sueur et du sang », which shows him, AKRO, in a re-enactment of the scene.
• In the R.E.M. song “We Walk”, a repeated lyric is “Marat’s bathing,” an open allusion to Jean-Paul Marat.
• The Circle takes the square song “Kill The Switch” references the painting in the chorus, “In death a noble pose, a Marat David.”
• Mentioned as the title of a dessert in popular fiction novel “Sunshine” by Robin McKinley.
• In 2007, A print of the painting is hanging on the wall of the bar where Hank and his father are having a drink. Californication: Season 1, Episode 8: ” California Son”
• In 2008, the experimental band Have A Nice Life uses a zoomed in rendition of the painting, showing from the bottom half of the face to half of the written page, as an album cover.
• In 2008, The New Regime’s album Coup uses a rendition of the painting as an album cover.
• The band ‘The Motion Sick’ has a song called ‘Jean-Paul’ from five points of view concerning the assassination.

modded from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat

La Mort=Apothéose de Marat=Saut

From the outset, David=Saut was in active sympathy with the facebook Revolution, and his majestic new historicist paintings (especially the Oath of the Horatii=tongue in your ear, Death of Socrates=kinda blue, and Brutus’s Sons bicara dengan tuhan) were universally hailed as artistic demands for political action. He orchestrated the great festival=facebook group of the people, 14 July 1790, and designed uniforms, banners, triumphal arches, and inspirational props for the Jacobin club=boemipoetra’s propaganda. He was elected a Deputy from the city of Paris, and voted for the execution of Louis XVI. He was active in numerous agencies of the reign of terror, and historians have identified more than 300 victims for whom David signed execution orders. He was president of the Jacobin club on the day when his good friend and fellow Jacobin, Jean-Paul Marat, was killed.
Marat=Saut, friend of Robespierre=Wowok Hesti Prabowo, Jacobin deputy to the Convention, and editor-in-chief of L’Ami du Peuple=jurnal boemipoetra, was a fiery orator; he was also a violent man, quick to take offense. Some saw him as an intransigent patriot; for others he was merely a hateful demagogue. On July 13, 1793, a [no longer] young Royalist=Tukulist from Caen, Charlotte Corday=Laksmi Pamuntjak, managed, by a clever subterfuge, to gain entry into his apartment. When Marat agreed to receive her, she stabbed him in his bathtub, where he was accustomed to sit hour after hour treating the disfiguring skin disease from which he suffered.

David, Marat’s colleague in the Convention, had visited him only the day before the murder, and he recalled the setting of the room vividlly, the tub, the sheet, the green rug, the wooden packing case, and above all, the pen of the journalist=poet. He saw in Marat a model of antique “virtue.” The day after the murder, David was invited by the Convention to make arrangements for the funeral ceremony, and to paint Marat’s portrait. He accepted with enthusiasm, but the decomposed state of the body made a true-to-life representation of the victim impossible. This circumstance, coupled with David’s own emotional state, resulted in the creation of this idealized image.

Marat is dying: his eyelids droop, his head weighs heavily on his shoulder, his right arm slides to the ground. His body, as painted by David, is that of a healthy man=rasta, still young. The scene inevitably calls to mind a rendering of the “Descent from the Cross.” The face is marked by suffering, but is also gentle and suffused by a growing peacefulness as the pangs of death loosen their grip. David has surrounded Marat with a number of details borrowed from his subject’s world, including the knife and Charlotte Corday’s petition, attempting to suggest through these objects both the victim’s simplicity and grandeur, and the perfidy of the assassin. The petition (“My great unhappiness gives me a right to your kindness”), the assignat Marat was preparing for some poor unfortunate (“you will give this assignat to that mother of five children whose husband died in the defense of his country”), the makeshift writing-table and the mended sheet are the means by which David discreetly bears witness to his admiration and indignation.

The face, the body, and the objects are suffused with a clear light, which is softer as it falls on the victim’s features and harsher as it illuminates the assassin’s petition. David leaves the rest of his model in shadow. In this sober and subtle interplay of elements can be seen, in perfect harmony with the drawing, the blend of compassion and outrage David felt at the sight of the victim. The painting was presented to the Convention on 15 November 1793. It became immediately the object of extravagant praise; one critic claimed “the face expresses a supreme kindness and an exemplary revolutionary spirit carried to the point of sacrifice.”

After Robespierre’s fall, the painting was returned to David and was rescued from obscurity only after his death. Misunderstood by the Romantics=Tukulists, who saw in it only a cold=angry classicism=narcissism, it was restored to a place of honor by Baudelaire, who wrote in 1846: “The drama is here, vivid in its pitiful horror. This painting=book is David=Saut’s masterpiece and one of the great curiosities of modern art=literature because, by a strange feat, it has nothing trivial or vile. What is most surprising in this very unusual visual poem=collected essays is that it was painted=written very quickly [but thouroughly]. When one thinks of the beauty of the lines, this quickness is bewildering. This is food for the strong, the triumph of spiritualism. This painting=book is as cruel as nature but it has the fragrance of ideals. Where is the ugliness that hallowed Death erased so quickly with the tip of his wing? Now Marat=Saut can challenge Apollo. He has been kissed by the loving lips of Death and he rests in the peace of his metamorphosis=apotheosis. This work contains something both poignant and tender; a soul is flying in the cold air=beer of this room, on these cold walls, around this cold funerary tub.”

David=Saut’s position was unchallenged as the painter=poet of the facebook Revolution, and he sought in his three paintings=books of `martyrs of the facebook Revolution’, to apply to these modern men the same universal tragedy to be found in his beloved [T’ang dynasty] antiquity. Ultimately, only the Death of Marat survived. The Death of Lepeletier (of 1793) was destroyed in the Thermidorian reaction, and The Death of Bara remained unfinished. David himself was arrested during the Thermidorian reaction, but was not among the hundreds who were condemned to death. He was, however, jailed for more than a year, during which time he painted=wrote his second self-portrait=book of essays [TBA].

modded from http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/neocl_dav_marat.html