«Bad acquaintances». On the literary sources and parallels of Jacques Louis David’s work

Abstract

The role of Jacques Louis David in the history of world art cannot be assessed without an iconological analysis of the literary context of his work. The author of the article highlights the “psychoanalytic” leitmotif of the literary production of the era of the Great French Revolution, which allows one to abstract from strictly ideological classifications and place the neoclassicism of the French master in the space of other stylistic and ideological trends. One of the founders of modernism, David is often identified with the propaganda program of the revolutionary era. At the same time, the radical implications of the artist’s neoclassicism go far beyond rationalistic theories. The philosophical and literary parallels of the “thrill- ers” of the French master are inexhaustible. In this article, the work of Jacques-Louis David is compared, in particular, with Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Louvet de Couvray’s Les amours du chevalier de Faublas, two works that deconstruct the opposition of rocaille and classicist strategies. The countercultural component of David’s art allows us to connect it with the primitivist tendencies in the literature of his time. The concept of primitivism introduced by Robert Rosenblum in the field of fine art allows us to expand the range of literary sources and parallels of the French artist’s work. Charles Nodier and James Macpherson, Herbert Croft and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Marquis de Sade and Edmund Burke are considered in the context of David’s revolutionary classicism and related issues. The author of the article seeks to build a new interpretation of David’s art, clarifying the well-known opposition of Thomas Crow — radical classicism / rococo. Close analogies to the art of Jacques-Louis David are fantastic art and the “Gothic novel” — trends that allow one to liberate the unconscious and conceptualize the problematic of “basic instincts”. David’s “thrillers” raise questions about the relationship between mass art and politics, following the theoretical field opened by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant.