A Few of My Favorite Things: Mahjong and Marat

The Death of Marat by the iconic French Academy painter, Jacques-Louis David, is shown in every survey Art History course. Therefore, I was quite familiar with its compositional elements. What wasn’t familiar was its prevalence within Mahjong, the current exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting it, let alone to see it twice. In Wang Xingwei’s History of Revolution, there is a copy of Marat in the right hand panel, though one thing is different: it is reduced by 50%. The transformed black-and-white image is squeezed down to half of its original size while the painting on the left panel, Chairman Mao goes to Jin-Yuan is magnified and stretched by 200%. The presentation of images, seemingly propagandistic, is really a satire on the media and what people believe to be true. The Death of Marat was originally a highly political piece, as Marat was a political activist and journalist, murdered (in his bathtub) because he supported the death of King Louis XVI. Xingwei shrinks down this painting as to reduce its impact while expanding the painting of Mao to twice its original size. To see these paintings at their original size, the viewer must shift their viewpoint to the right hand corner of the whole thing and look at it sideways. This demonstrates the power of the artist to control how the viewer sees an image and how it is presented to them. If the viewer doesn’t know the correct way to view an image, these ideas can be blown way out of proportion, literally. The image of Marat lying dead in his bathroom is shown again in Wang Guangyi’s Death of Marat (1986). This painting is a complete abstraction of the original Marat. There are now two reflecting dead Marats without faces, fingers or even colors, they are just shades of black and gray. If the title were not there, it would be hard to realize what the painting was actually depicting. The curvature of Marat’s arm falling from the tub to rest on the floor and the other hand gripping a letter are the only semblances of the original. This abstraction removes the political charge of Marat through showing Guangyi’s imitation of Xingwei’s imitation of David’s work. In some sense, this is avant-garde in that it requires previous knowledge of the Death of Marat. The real meaning of this painting isn’t fully accessible to the viewer unless he or she has knowledge of the original image. It could easily be mistaken for an abstract landscape or merely pure forms. Although no prior knowledge is required to appreciate either of these pieces, recognition of their visual quotations does help one to understand them. It also helps chat it up in your art history class…. Lisa Cambier