The Death of Marat

Five years before he painted this, in 1902, Munch's long affair with Tulla Larsen ended in a violent scene at his summer house, during which a revolver went off and a bullet injured his left hand. He never let it go. Here he takes the French Revolution's most famous murder, the radical Marat stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday, and makes it about himself. He is Marat, laid out dead across the bed, blood on the sheets. Larsen becomes Corday, standing stiff and naked at the foot of it, facing us. The historical crime is only a mask. He painted the subject more than once, working through the same wound in broad, raw bands of colour.