Am I wrong in saying you go to an exhibition not because it has a pretty title, but because it has pretty pictures? You're there for the art, not the signage. So what does it matter if a show's name amounts to the grossest case of mistitling since Midnight Express turned out not to be about trains? The pictures are no worse, the curating is as precise, and the catalogue as expensive.
This is exercising me because the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) has staked a lot on a title and lost. Its latest easel-busting show is called Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760-1830. The problem is that it lacks citizens. Does it matter? In this case, yes, since the title reflects the exhibition's thesis: that the royalty and aristocracy who consumed so many gallons of paint in early Enlightenment portraiture were replaced by the lower classes - you and me, buddy.
The truth is, however, that the exhibition's title is an oxymoron. Portraiture by its very nature at this time excluded average citizens, the sans-culottes in the streets, and the musket-wielders on the battlefields. Who really had the time or the money to appear in portraits? Not the workers, for sure. The only citizens who feature in this show are the upper bourgeoisie, and that is not enough to justify the title's revolutionary implications. The title argues that portraitists started capturing new, lower ranks of life, but the art contradicts this.
The pivot on which the show is meant to turn from king to commoner is "David's Death of Marat" (1793) (right). Jean-Paul Marat, a radical, violent, anti-royalist Jacobin, is shown as a Christ-like martyr to the Revolution after his assassination by royalist Charlotte Corday. (His pose evokes Christ coming off the cross.) The shocking use of dark space, fully covering half the canvas, sets off the corpse, as does the almost heavenly light shining on it.
The portrait achieved rapid replication and was distributed among the Parisian crowds, the equivalent of Anna Nicole Smith's corpse shots appearing on the web, although Marat inspired revolution, not revulsion.
Marat was hardly the average citizen, the man on la rue who would benefit from liberté, égalité, fraternité. His career had been as eminent scientist and doctor to the aristocracy, making him more like a powerful faction-leader than a brother to the masses, as the portrait tries to show.
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