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How to Read Paintings: The Death of Marat by Edvard Munch
A depiction filled with energy and emotional torment
This painting, titled The Death of Marat, is a writhing mess of blood and flesh, offering a nightmarish scene of murder and mayhem.
Like many of Munch’s artworks, the content makes for an unnerving concoction of serenity and violence.
Quietness reigns now that the frenzied struggle is over. The crepuscular hush that falls across the canvas feels moonlit. The atmosphere is like memory: unreal, hard to pin down, darkly nostalgic.
The Death of Marat is based on a real-life historical event, but it also echoes a dark episode in Munch’s own private life, one that would decisively shape his art and mental health.
A Bloody Murder
The Death of Marat was made in 1907, on the cusp of Munch’s later artistic period. (By way of a benchmark, he painted his most famous work The Scream in 1893.)
It was a deeply uncertain time for Munch. He had fallen into a long bout of depression, exacerbated by alcohol abuse, which eventually led to a mental breakdown and hospitalisation in the following year.
The title of the painting refers to Jean-Paul Marat, a journalist and political radical during the French Revolution. Winning admirers and enemies, Marat soon became a target of political assassination. On the night of the 13th July 1793, a sympathiser of the Girondins named Charlotte Corday entered his chambers and stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen blade. She was quickly arrested and guillotined four days later.
Munch’s painting purports to show the moments after the bloody crime. Yet the women’s nakedness ought to tell us that this is no factual rendering. She stands solemnly upright in the centre of the image, almost serene in a kind of hypnotic trance.
For Munch, the subject matter acted merely as a framework to hang his own representation of a dangerous female seductress who uses her sexuality as a weapon.
The resulting image might be read either as an unveiling of the anxieties and madness that lie beneath society’s ordered surface — or else as a homage to the artist’s frightened and…
