Accession Number
2006/1.153

Title
Death of Chatterton

Artist(s)
Vik Muniz

Artist Nationality
American (North American)

Object Creation Date
2000

Medium & Support
dye destruction print on paper

Dimensions
51 1/2 in x 67 9/16 in x 2 in (130.81 cm x 171.61 cm x 5.08 cm);51 1/2 in x 67 9/16 in x 2 in (130.81 cm x 171.61 cm x 5.08 cm)

Credit Line
Museum purchase made possible by the W. Hawkins Ferry Fund

Label copy
March 28, 2009
A copy of a copy is always an original thing.
—Vik Muniz
Muniz is known for using unconventional materials—dust, soil, thread, sugar, and, in this case, chocolate syrup—to recreate famous images from the history of art, which he then preserves in photographic form. He calls the resulting works—drawings translated into photographs that recall paintings—“photographic delusions.” These visual tricks invite the viewer to resolve them into their component layers and simultaneously challenge the notion that things are what they seem.
The subject, composition, and title of this work are borrowed from a painting by Henry Wallis of 1856 that depicts the dead body of Thomas Chatterton, an English poet who committed suicide by arsenic in 1770 at the age of seventeen; Chatterton served as an icon of unacknowledged genius to nineteenth-century romantics. Muniz chose Bosco chocolate syrup (the same brand used by Hitchcock to represent blood in his black and white films) to recreate Death of Chatterton because it forced him to work quickly before the chocolate dried out or melted under the hot studio lights. Though the original drawing is ephemeral, the photograph of it—produced, ironically, in an instant—is lasting.

Subject matter
Muniz based this image on Henry Wallis' painting of the same name, painted in 1856. Wallis' painting depicts the dead body of Thomas Chatterton, an English poet who committed suicide at the age of 17 in 1770. Long regarded as an icon for the Romantics, Muniz revisits the subject of Chatterton's death in his "Pictures of Chocolate" series, in which he reproduced the original work by drawing in chocolate syrup on white plexi-glass, photographing it for the finished piece.

Physical Description
A photograph of a drawing made with chocolate syrup on a piece of white plexi-glass.

Primary Object Classification
Photograph

Collection Area
Photography

Rights
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please visit http://umma.umich.edu/request-image for more information and to fill out the online Image Rights and Reproductions Request Form.

Keywords
Romantic (modern European styles)
boys
chocolate
deaths
historical regions
photography (process)
suicides