Jeff Wall’s version of La Mort de Sardanapale by Eugène Delacroix (The Destroyed Room): Response writing

Jeff Wall’s The Destroyed Room precisely recreates the ravaged atmosphere of La Mort de Sardanapale, presenting the practice of iconoclasm in his artworks. Nonetheless, Jeff Walls has achieved an evolution in the message evoked by the artwork, yet maintaining the original plot. While at first we wonder whether we are being shown the past scene of a robbery or rape, we soon realize that it deals with the idea of the domestication of murderous passion in a era of bourgeois and neurotic private life.

On a comparative look at these two artworks, Wall’s photograph presents the site of a passed violent scene without showing us the presence of any bodies, which, contrarily to the painting of Delacroix, removes the development of the event. In fact, the title of Wall’s piece provides us with such an identification, as the word “Destroyed” implies the past. Hence, unlike Delacroix’s art piece, Wall places a greater importance in the representation of the motionless after the destruction and not on seizing the moment. It acts as proof of what has occurred, the scene only illustrating an aftermath.

However, there are several elements in Wall’s photograph which hint at the relationship between it and the painting. Firstly of all, Wall iterates the general composition of La Mort de Sardanapale. That is to say, the original positions are respected. The broken chair at the right of the photograph mimics the shape of the slave stabbing one of the women in the foreground, the vast wound of the mattress like the bed in the painting, both directing our look towards the upper left corner of the frame. The light is also coming from the same direction, hitting, in the place of the monarch, an ironic statuette of a female dancing figure. This light hence pushes us to identify an association between Sardanapale and the statuette, bringing forth a main question on whether the allegory of the monarch into a feminine figure would have avoided the slaughter. Nonetheless, the overall rhythm established by each artwork is similar, although we move from the dynamic occurrence of the action to the static.

If we analyze the content of each art work more closely, we can see that In La Mort de Sardanapale, there is no sign of blood visible, despite the violence of the scene depicted: only the red bed sheets and different tissues associated to the arms of the male murderers suggest the bloody massacre. In a similar manner, Jeff Wall places the scene in a room with red walls and uses the appearance and position of items to create a bloody atmosphere. Here, the mattress is topple, the walls torn and the clothes ripped on the floor, once more allowing us to foresee some red tissues. The nudity of the tyrant’s female mistresses is suggested, in Wall’s image, by the exposure of female undergarments and the spread of jewelry all over the floor: something which could refer to the violation of their intimacy. There is however a small statue of a female dancer, which is miraculously intact, situated on top of the dresser with completely opened drawers (on the left of the photograph). This could represent the maintenance of the erotic imagery characteristic of Delacroix’s painting. Even more importantly, the differently dispersed shadows of the statuette, as well as its untouched appearance gives it a central character which permits her comparison with the king of Ninive featured in the painting, who is almost enthroned, higher up, in the scene and impassive to the violence.

However, it must be further noted that despite the chaos and destruction of the room, the door situated on the left side of the room is not broken. This reminds the viewer that this version of La Mort de Sardanapale is set in a studio: its is an artificial construction. Yet, albeit it can be argued that Jeff Wall wishes to expose the artifice of his reconstruction, he proposes not only the remembrance of Delacroix’s painting (while destroying it altogether) but its re-inclusion in the present, in the now, by making a visual of the everyday.

The reason why Jeff Wall probably chose to create a more modern version of such an influential artwork is perhaps because he desired to give photography a privileged position within the world of fine arts, regularly using such paintings to get inspired and attribute to his compositions an iconographic dimension. Even more so, I believe that Wall has chosen Delacroix’s La Mort de Sardanapale as the conceptual base for his photograph due to its legendary appearance and essence. This way he can incorporate the epic and symbolic quality of the painting and the banality of the 20th century urban life. This however makes his photographs not accessible to everyone. That is to say, the complex nature of the painting means that Wall’s replica cannot have meaning for viewers unfamiliar of the source image. This can have a potential benefit, which is the breaking of historical connections and continuity, but it brings forth a main question of who is the intended audience of Wall’s The Destroyed Room: The common people or the art critics and academics? While for some, The Destroyed Room might simply be a strange, arty take on domestic clutter, less naïve art-historians will be able to understand it as a rework of historical painting as a modern staged drama. Notwithstanding, directly referring to Jeff Wall’s interviews of 1985 and 1993, the artist clarifies his interest in Eugène Delacroix’s painting by emphasizing its historical and psychological importance to him: ” it shows the eroticized ideal of military glory which characterized the Napoleonic period being turned […] back toward domestic life at the end of that epoch” and “I was particularly interested in violence at that time […] and I got intrigued by that monumental painting [which] wove together themes of war and military glory, on the one hand, and the conflicts of private life, on the other.”

Finally, I do not believe that Wall’s main aim was to change the meaning of the original painting by Eugène Delacroix. Instead, I perceive his incorporation of such a historical work as a means of giving his artwork a richer, more suggestive and more aggressive aura, as well as placing his ideas and feelings in the “historical prism of another work.”