Thomas Crow’s Radical Political Art History

Image by Juliet Furst.

Some years ago, I was obsessed with Thomas Crow’s impressive first book, Painters in Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1987). I even read the PhD thesis which is its source. Because I was interested in the birth of the Louvre as a public art museum during the French Revolution, I wanted to to understand this period just before that Revolution. Painters in Public Life, a classic, made Crow’s reputation. Now his newest book is Murder in the Rue Marat. A Case...