Jacques Monory, together with the artists of the Figuration Narrative movement, participated in the 1964 exhibition “Mythologies quotidiennes” (Daily Mythologies) at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. The event may be regarded as a reaction against abstraction, Pop Art and the Nouveau Réalisme movement. Criticizing society and often taking political positions, without neglecting the poetic dimensions, the Nouvelle Figuration movement favoured easel painting.

Murder no. 18/1 is one of a series of twenty-two murder scenes begun in 1968, evoking the roman noir and film noir of life as seen by Monory. From 1962, he had turned his art towards an objective description of everyday life based on the coldness of photographic shots. He worked from photographic images that he either took himself or cut from magazines, which he then enlarged with a projector according to the size of the canvas.

The most original feature of his work is his almost exclusive choice of monochrome tones of blue, thus creating a distance to the subject. The real or figurative breaks of his paintings, their composition as well as their juxtaposition of images turn them into scenes of suspended temporality.

Later on, Monory said about his works: “This adventure with the Meurtres (Murders) was impeccable from a psychoanalytical point of view, because I was wounded not with a gun, but emotionally. So I was ill. And so, how do I heal? By becoming aware of it. If you look at the series as a whole, you see that at the beginning I am the one getting shot, but at the end, it's not me anymore, it's the others. A sign of good health: it’s somebody else getting killed.” (Jacques Monory – Interview with Pascale Le Thorel, Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2009).