Jacques-Louis David at the Metropolitan Museum — a French revolution in art

Jacques-Louis David’s rollercoaster life carried him from troughs of obscurity to teetering heights of power. Nurtured on conventional academic style, he reached for a radical aesthetic, shedding rococo frills for raw muscle. When the French Revolution exploded, he was ready. The austerity of his technique dovetailed neatly with the severity of Jacobin principles, creating a serendipitous feedback loop between stylistic virtue and political purity. Beauty, as he defined it, served the moral good, as the state defined it.

The Metropolitan Museum’s magnificent Jacques-Louis David: Radical Draftsman traces the full arc of his career, from his formative student days in Rome, through his early neoclassical manifestos, to the propaganda of his revolutionary years, a stint in jail, glory under Napoleon and, finally, exile in Brussels. The unprecedented gathering of works on paper includes loans from two dozen institutions and private collections. Such a concentrated display of skill would be enough to give the exhibition its lustre, but the show also makes blindingly clear how, even as his fortunes tossed and his politics yawed, David clung to the solid beam of his art.

He was a slow starter. Having twice unsuccessfully applied for the Prix de Rome, he threatened a hunger strike, was denied a third time anyway and finally succeeded on his fourth try. That sojourn in Rome defined for him what it meant to be French: a revival of ancient discipline. He filled his days with drawings of the Forum, the Pantheon, nudes and figures costumed as Greco-Roman archetypes, arming himself with an arsenal of memories.

The Met’s installation reveals the profound and life-long impact of those sketchbooks. From the beginning, we see the emergence of David’s abiding themes, such as patriotic sacrifice and unbreachable divides between male and female worlds. In a sketch for his early painting “Belisarius Begging for Alms” (which triumphed at the Salon of 1781), a blind, impoverished old general reaches out and opens his palm to accept the charity of a passing stranger. That outstretched arm entered the body language of David’s tableaux, though its meaning shifted over time. A similar gesture recurs, with more terrible force, in that world-changing masterpiece, “The Oath of the Horatii” (1784).

The Met tracks the multiyear process of distilling that painting through a series of studies. A virtuosic chalk drawing enshrines the central composition: the cluster of brothers, virile bodies tensed for battle, dominates one half of the frame, while the women liquefy into a swoon on the other. On the male side, stiff arms and steel swords form a tensile structure, electrifying the scene through sinew and contour. A later oil sketch envelops the scene in a rococo blur of hazy oranges and reds, which David eventually rejected.

It’s too bad that the final product remains at home in the Louvre, so viewers can’t see how ruthlessly he stripped away all softness and superfluities. The colours have turned cold and grey, the light is unforgiving and the men’s steely limbs radiate moral clarity. Even architecture has had to sacrifice something to the warriors’ high purpose. The oil sketch’s Doric columns have now been pruned of their bases, so that pure, unornamented cylinders spring straight from the floor. The storming of the Bastille was still years away, but already “all the required ingredients for revolutionary rhetoric were spectacularly announced in this painting: patriotism, fraternity and martyrdom”, writes Simon Schama in Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution.

Just about any ideology can adopt those lofty principles, and David elevated them, along with integrity and sacrifice, well before he had an agenda to proselytise. More than a dozen studies preceded “The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons”, which depicts the implacable founder of the Roman Republic, Lucius Junius Brutus, soon after ordering the execution of his two rebellious sons.

At first, the artist experimented with the energy of frenzied crowds. Gradually, he deleted distractions, cutting down the cast of characters, simplifying lines, compressing depth of field. Instead, he illuminated three sets of extremities as if with separate spotlights: a corpse’s bare legs, elevated on a stretcher; the mother’s arm, extended in longing and accusation; and Brutus’s knot of twisted toes, which express the immensity of a father’s grief and the ordeals of power. His face remains in shadow.

The story of that work highlights art’s adaptability. Louis XVI commissioned it, David developed it through the last years of the old regime and it appeared in the 1789 Salon just six weeks after the Bastille fell on July 14, repurposed to promote an utterly different political era. David’s allegiance to antiquity made him seem suddenly current, historical allegories freshly relevant, and his paintings struck the architects of the Revolution as both prophecy and justification.

When Napoleon assumed control of the nation, David once again popped up, Zelig-like, as the leader’s designated glorifier

The exhibition culminates in a large pen-and-ink drawing of “The Oath of the Tennis Court”, a political manoeuvre that set the stage for violence in the streets. On June 20, members of the newly formed National Assembly defied the king by gathering on a tennis court near Versailles, where they vowed to stay until they’d completed a new constitution. David knew just how to solemnify a contentious meeting: with his signature choreography of straight arms raised at an angle. Thanks to the tremendously popular “Oath of the Horatii”, everyone recognised that gesture as an emblem of zeal, unity and loyalty. In 1794, David and his friend Robespierre organised a parade; participants re-enacted the salute, adding ersatz ancient dignity to the marshalled crowds.

When Napoleon assumed control of the nation and of the Revolution’s rhetoric, David once again popped up, Zelig-like, as the leader’s designated glorifier. Then, too, he responded to a new political reality with old tropes that proved sturdy enough to survive even Napoleon’s metamorphoses. The collective raised arm reappears in an oil sketch for “The Distribution of the Eagles” (1809-10), forming the central triangle. Here, that collective oath-taking and the raising of the eagle standard mark France’s transition from republic to empire — the betrayal, in other words, of everything David had claimed he would defend with his life. (David’s semaphore outlasted the Napoleonic era, too, eventually morphing into the fascist “Roman salute”, still popular with today’s neo-Nazis.)

One event did overcome his insistence on manly stoicism and theatrical poses: his own arrest in 1794. During two periods of relatively brief and luxurious confinement in the Palais de Luxembourg, he drew his fellow Jacobin prisoners, observing them with a quality that was new to him: empathy. An ink-and-gouache portrait of the naval commander Jeanbon Saint-André shows the fearless warrior in profile on a round medallion, like a hero of antiquity. But he looks stressed-out now, shoulders hunched, hair unkempt beneath a plain black hat, arms folded protectively, his stare less defiant than apprehensive. Artist and subject both survived that round of humiliation and went on to complete their illustrious careers, but at least in this portrait (and others like it) we see what happens when nimbleness fails and certainties have crumbled away.

To May 15, metmuseum.org