The show didn't have the objective of focusing on any particular artist, or artistic movement, but on the perception of crime and punishment by the artist, and the different mediums every epoch used to document or perceive these acts. For example, around the 1870's, most artist through the main development of journalism and the spread of mass media, had to document their views in journals. They would draw or paint little crime scenes, either mockingly or shockingly, and that would be printed in high numbers. I mostly saw this exposition as an encyclopedic account of crime and punishment throughout history, going from the Bible, the French Revolution up to Bertillon's bases for photographic judicial identification.
The exposition starts by showing the first and most popular crime of history: the murder of Abel by his brother Caïn. Follow images of the abouts of the French Revolution and their use of the guillotine. Documents and facts are plenty, they even have a real guillotine exposed, just in case you had no idea of the apparent violence and size of the machine. I must admit it was my first live encounter with one and it's not like in the movies, especially this one who actually had a few hits of her own. Then come the murder of Marat and Fualdes, the romanticist view on art with all the witches by Goya in his Caprices and ladies MacBeth by numerous artists. The exposition then presents excerpts of journalist artists in Le Petit Journal of 1866, images of judges and lawyers from the judicial world, a view of the pain of death by Victor Hugo and Warhol. Finally, the exposition finishes with the scientific approach that the system took in order to document and investigate crime. This affected the artists imaginations particularly by the searches of Lambroso, Georget and Bertillon.
Putting aside the fact that there were a lot of people and that the documentation was sort of unnerving, Crime et Chatiment still clarified compelling aspects of the time, )articularly the subjective view of events by the artists. Indeed, just as political parties or even everyday people, artists would take sides and present the event in that way, or this way, putting an emphasis on different aspects. The most appalling example, I must say, was the murder of French revolutionary Marat by Charlotte Corday in 1793. The most famous painting of this event belongs to Jacques-Louis David, turning the man into a revolutionary martyr. Yet, opinions on the murder and the murderer diverged. Cunning criminal for the revolutionary and a hopeful Jeanne d'Arc for the royalists. Some diversity also existed in the matter of the event; is Corday even important, is her presence relevant. Following are two works presenting the event. The first by Jacques-Louis David, and the second by Paul Baudry. These two works exemplify the pictorial diversity that existed regarding this event. Startring by the title, they both show what the important matter in the painting is. David's one is called "The Death of Marat" whereas Baudry's is simply called "Charlotte Corday". David, a sympathizer for the revolutionanry cause, choose not to show Corday. Nor is she mentionned in the title or even placed on the picture. By totally excluding her, he shows how irrlevant she is to the event, just as stray arrow is to the death of a king. Because of this, David tries to make people forget about Corday and her royalist cause. If she is nowhere to be seen or read, she will eventually be forgotten and Marat glorified as a martyr for the nation. In David's image, Marat's wound is present, and so is the murder weapon. Yet, his face is of someone not in pain, but in extausion. He keeps a smile on the corners of his lips. Generally, this image is not violent at all. It even has something solemn to it. The light on the right creates shadows that beautify his body and render his face younger and healthier. When delivered to the convention in November of the same year, a present critic said: "(...) the face expresses a supreme kindness and an exemplary revolutionary spirit carried to the point of sacrifice". Even Baudelaire wrote in 1846 :"(...) by a strange feat, it has nothing trivial or vile". David succeed to really create an admirable and respectable figure for his contemporaries and for further generations.
On the other hand, Baudry's painting puts Marat and his death to the left of the image, almost as a secondary plan, where they leave the man alone to his suffering. He concentrates in depicting the complexity of Corday's figure. She stands miliseconds afetr the act, her left hand still in the position of clutching the knife. Baudry depicts her as a grave character, snuggling in the corner but still keeping a determined face, as though just realizing the graveness of her act yet accepting it proudly, knowing it is for the defense of France and the return to peace. This is shown by the map of Frane in the back of Corday. Her vacant eyes, lifted up to the sky, seem to glaze and answer to someone from high above, thus the comparison to Jeanne d'Arc. Moreover, where David's painting idealised Marat's death, Baudry really gives us a crime scene. The violence involved in the act is quite apparent. The turned over chair, the fallen paper and the stumbled wooden plank show how Marat and Corday must have fought. Plus, the weapon is still tucked in the body. The grimacing face, the clinging hand and the half-opend mouth testify of Marat very soon to come death.
This diversification of opinions really interested me in the visit of this exposition because no matter what, painters remain human and will have point of views on things. As Max Ernst said: Just as the poet who writes down what he hears in his head, the painter must clarify and try to paint what he sees in his head". In "Crime et Chatiment" we also see Dehas opposing Lambroso's criminal anthropology by the creation of his "Little 14 years old dancer".
Finally, I must say that even if this exposition had apalling parts and an enormous amount of goodwill and work in order to research, compile and categorize the huge amount of information they had, it is precisly this vast amount of written and pictorial documentation that might have created an overload on the spactator and thus not integrating and wholy appreciating the exposition in its right valor. Sadly, I wished there had been less works in order to let the viewers truly concentrate on the core works and not diverging and deconcentrating by all the satellite ones.
amazing
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