The Death of Marat

On 13 July 1793 Charlotte Corday stabbed the revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Marat in his bath in Paris, and within months Jacques-Louis David had painted him dying alone, with the killer left out of the picture. More than a century later Edvard Munch took the same murder and turned it around. Here Marat is a man sprawled across a bed, one arm stretched out, with red spots on the sheet, and the woman stands naked near the centre of the canvas, facing us. Munch cast himself and a former lover in the two roles. He signed this version at the upper right, Edv. Munch 1907 Berlin, around the time he was working in that city for the theatre director Max Reinhardt. The room around the figures is built from long horizontal and vertical stripes of paint, a manner he pushed furthest in 1907.