Crime
Swindles, thefts, murders and punishments, from Baroque painting to crime-scene photography.
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Crime gives art suspense and moral weight: the swindle, the theft, the murder and the punishment that follows. Caravaggio's The Cardsharps (c. 1594) shows a naive young man cheated by a pair of accomplices, and William Hogarth's print series Industry and Idleness (1747) follows a lazy apprentice from petty theft to the gallows.
Photography brought the scene of the crime itself. Weegee chased police radio calls to New York shootings in the 1930s and 1940s and published Naked City (1945), and Letizia Battaglia documented Mafia killings in Palermo for decades. Andy Warhol's mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964), made of enlarged mugshots for the New York World's Fair, was painted over after officials objected. Corinne May Botz photographed Frances Glessner Lee's Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, miniature crime scenes built to train detectives, and Abigail Goldman makes tiny dioramas of grisly acts.
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