"In this revelatory book, Marat is set free to slip in and out of sex, gender, medium, and time, reanchored again and again in violent political and cultural reality. From Corday to the counterculture, from Balzac to Barthes, Thomas Crow restages Marat and method with rare and brilliant analysis." --Mark Ledbury, coeditor of The Versailles Effect "An unusual and extraordinary blend of autobiography, theory, history, forensics, and Crow's signature visual analysis, Murder in the Rue Marat is a model of explanatory ambition and compelling from beginning to end. Readers will never see David's celebrated painting in the same way again." --Hollis Clayson, author of Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque "Returning to the object that first stirred his interest in art history, Thomas Crow submits a renowned revolutionary icon--and his own methods--to fresh scrutiny. Brilliantly combining pictorial, political, and philosophical analyses, Crow constructs a vivid narrative, at once personal and scholarly, that reveals new aspects of a painting we thought we knew." --Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, author of The Painter's Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard "A remarkable book. Crow unravels an intricate history of The Death of Marat , skillfully using the present to illuminate the past--and vice versa--in a suspenseful and compelling manner.

Through a rich tapestry of historical accounts, Crow weaves a narrative that mirrors the complexities of our own social lives, offering readers an experience as layered and delicious as a revolutionary croissant." --Serge Guilbaut, author of How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War "It is not often that art history is unputdownable and trippy, but Murder in the Rue Marat manages both. It has the blood and guts of a whodunit, complicated by a polyphony of responses to the painting from the French Revolution to the music and protest of the 1960s. This is some of the most sustained close looking I've read. Thomas Crow shows us how art can be philosophical without ceasing to be visceral, and how it can shape a whole community of viewers, listeners, and writers." --Andrei Pop, author of A Forest of Symbols.