The political art of Jacques-Louis David and his modern-day American successors

Until relatively recently, Jacques-Louis David was a famous, relatively well-understood painter. Thanks to Thomas Crow, and a number of recent historians, his art now has come to seem much more complex. According to these writers, David's pre-Revolutionary paintings make subtle comments on French politics of the Revolutionary period. I demonstrate that this way of thinking cannot be understood without acknowledging the intense desire of recent American critics that there be art which is aesthetically significant and politically critical. Crow's account of David, so I argue, projects back into the 1780s important concerns of American art writers in the 1980s.