I’d
prepared myself to be disappointed by the Delacroix exhibition at New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art, curated by Asher Miller, in collaboration with
Sébastien Allard and Côme Fabre. On its website, the Met describes it as “the
first comprehensive retrospective devoted to this amazing artist ever held in
North America.” There are good reasons it’s taken so long: No museum will ever
be able to encompass a truly comprehensive survey of Delacroix’s work, and
still less any museum other than the Louvre—the Met’s partner in this venture,
where the show first took place last spring and summer.
What are
the paintings that come to mind when you think of Delacroix? Probably two: The
Death of Sardanapalus (1827) and Liberty Leading the People (1830). Both are
works of Delacroix’s extraordinarily energetic first maturity (he was born just
outside Paris in 1798)—unforgettable images that are nonetheless rather
atypical of his oeuvre, yet which seem to predict later phases of French art.
Delacroix invested his immense enthusiasm for the popular uprising known as the
July Revolution of 1830 in the painting that commemorated it, which he executed
in the immediate aftermath. Liberty Leading the People imagines a triumphant
unanimity among different classes who would soon enough rediscover their
irresolvable conflicts. Delacroix, disillusioned, would later steer clear of
political commitments, cultivating instead a sort of Epicurean pessimism
(Allard and Fabre, in their meticulous essay for the exhibition catalog, speak
of a “reactionary skepticism”). And yet, with its carefully observed rabble and
heroically flag-waving, bare-breasted Marianne, Liberty Leading the People
looks forward to the revolutionary realism of Gustave Courbet, specifically to
his notion of a “real allegory” mixing the concrete and the symbolic.
Likewise,
Sardanapalus—which, like Liberty, is absent from the Met, though it’s
represented there by a preparatory oil sketch dated 1826–27, as well as by a
scaled-down replica that the artist made for himself in 1845–46, having finally
succeeded in selling the original—should not mislead us into imagining all of
Delacroix’s work as conjuring a Symbolist or decadent dream world. Based on a
play by Byron, Sardanapalus illustrates a legendary episode in which the last
Assyrian king had all his goods destroyed and all his servants and concubines
murdered rather than let them fall into the hands of invaders. In the painting,
the monarch, reclining on his bed, observes the massacre from the background;
beauty and horror are mingled for the corrupt delectation of a potentate
discovering that his power is ultimately futile—an allegory of what we would
now call toxic masculinity. Horrified critics at the Salon of 1828, who
condemned the work as totally immoral, must have realized that the painter
somehow identified with the debauched protagonist, for whose eye this
apocalyptic spectacle has been arranged. This is the Delacroix whose
sensibility would nourish the fever dreams of Symbolist artists like Gustave
Moreau and Odilon Redon.
Paintings
like Sardanapalus and Liberty—and other important early works in the Louvre’s
collection, like Delacroix’s first success, The Barque of Dante (1822), or The
Massacre at Chios (1824)—have not traveled to New York. As if in recompense, we
do get Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834), the painting that probably
had the greatest impact on artists of the 20th century—both Matisse and Picasso
were obsessed with it, and it had intoxicated Cézanne before them. But if this,
like the other two paintings I’ve mentioned, and indeed most of Delacroix’s
other best-known work, dates from well before his 40th birthday, there’s a
reason: Those were the years when the painter was giving his all to the
production of works that would make an impact at the annual Salon, the only way
for a French painter at the time to attract a public and find support and
patronage, mainly from inside the government. Once he had achieved this, around
the mid-1830s, Delacroix focused his most concerted efforts not on paintings
for exhibitions, but on what we might now call site-specific works: murals,
mostly for government buildings, but also for churches.
And yet
Delacroix’s murals are his least familiar works—despite the fact that most are
in the heart of Paris. Yes, a few hardy art lovers make their way to the Church
of St. Sulpice, the home of his best-known murals, and even those who have
never been there may have seen a reproduction of his extraordinary scene of
Jacob Wrestling With the Angel (1854–61). But hardly anyone knows his
decorations for the Palais Bourbon, where the French National Assembly meets,
unless they’ve been there on official business. An art historian who’s studied
them reports “poor and at times appalling lighting…while the dead weight of
bureaucratic pomp encourages the sensation that the viewer is an interloper in
sanctuaries of power and privilege.”
Across
five centuries, grand cycles of murals—at once narrative and
decorative—probably represent the pinnacles of artistic ambition in European
painting: Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy; Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel
in Rome; Tintoretto’s work for the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice. Such works
never move—or do so only once, permanently, as when Rubens’s Marie de’ Medici
cycle was transferred from the Luxembourg Palace to the Louvre. Delacroix was
the last exemplar of this tradition (at least until the rise of the Mexican
mural movement in the 1920s): the last of the painters whose work can never
really be encompassed by a museum exhibition, because so many of his important
paintings can’t be transported. That’s why I expected to be disappointed at the
Met.
Delacroix
was also arguably the last great literary painter—working, as Baudelaire would
recall after the painter’s death, in “a kind of furious rivalry with the
written word.” Besides mining the Bible and classical myth, he took his themes
from Goethe, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Sir Walter Scott, and—as I’ve already
mentioned—Byron, among others. For some observers at the time, such as the
critic Jules Castagnary, all of this meant that Delacroix was, simply, “the
last great painter.”
None of
his successors, of the artists who took inspiration from him—not Courbet, or
Manet, or Degas, or Cézanne, or any of the Impressionists or
Post-Impressionists or Fauves or Cubists—steeped their art in narrative, in
illustration, as Delacroix did. The only exceptions were some of the
Symbolists, who thereby put themselves in a position marginal to their own
time. As for the rest, their poetry of everyday life did not allow for anything
but a focus on the now. What the better artists of the later 19th century took
from Delacroix, they found in his technique, in his extraordinary manner of
weaving colors together without mixing them—a method he called flochetage—and
in the parallel weaving together of desire and disillusion that he conjured as
much out of those colors as out of the stories that ostensibly inspired his
paintings.
La mort de Sardanapale
As it
turns out, I was far from disappointed by what I saw at the Met. Even in the
absence of many major paintings, the exhibition made it clear why the last
great literary painter continued to hold such fascination for generations of
artists who would forgo overt narrative in their own work. And contrary to the
nineteenth-century critic who warned that “M. Delacroix’s small paintings are
absolutely unintelligible, unless they are viewed with the large ones in mind,”
it turns out that an exhibition like this one, which necessarily puts an accent
on the smaller works (including many prints and drawings as well as paintings),
reveals the fertility of Delacroix’s invention and the depth of his
exploration. Allard and Fabre note that for his last presentation at the Salon,
in 1859 (four years before his death), Delacroix showed modestly sized works,
“concentrated worlds, covering in appearance a small surface but delving deep
into time and the spaces the artist has passed through over nearly forty
years.”
It is
the first decade of Delacroix’s career, from his initial success with The
Barque of Dante in 1822 through his journey to North Africa in 1832, that still
accounts for the painter’s image as the pioneer of Romanticism in French
painting, the rebel who broke away from the neoclassical academic formal
strictures and didacticism that had been promulgated by Jacques-Louis David,
the preeminent painter of the revolutionary era. In doing so, he accepted the
baton passed to him by his friend Théodore Géricault, seven years his elder,
whose Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) was Delacroix’s wake-up call, but who died
tragically young in 1824. Like all great artistic movements, this Romanticism
looked back in order to look forward, reviving the dynamism and turbulence of
the Baroque era in order to express the bubbling discontent of the generation
that came of age under the unpopular Bourbon Restoration.
Delacroix
could not entirely give himself over to the realism proclaimed by The Raft of
the Medusa—this would await the next generation, that of Courbet—but he
entirely rejected the neoclassical idealization of heroic male protagonists. At
the Met, one of his finest works of the 1820s is the life-size portrait
(1826–27) of a young fellow painter, Louis-Auguste Schwiter, as a sort of
English dandy in a landscape setting. (It’s no wonder this painting ended up in
London’s National Gallery.) The quasi-Mannerist elongation of Schwiter’s figure
conjures a sense of elegance, yet the stiffness of his stance suggests a
congenial awkwardness, a kind of chafing against the constraints of his chosen
self-image; and the darkly flickering brushstrokes of the flowers and foliage
of the large potted plant to his left seem to imply that there are more fluid
ways for a cultivated being to flourish.
Elsewhere,
realism is mitigated by allegory. The symbolic female figure at the center of
Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826) is surrounded by raw details of the
massacre following the Ottoman siege of the city, notably the dead hand
emerging from under the stones in the foreground. But her own expression is
strangely calm as she gestures toward the destruction around her, apparently
asking the viewer simply to bear witness, yet by her very uprightness
proclaiming that Greece remains unbowed. This idealized woman of the people
brings Delacroix closer than we think to the neoclassical aesthetic against
which he was supposed to have rebelled. She reminds us, too, that Delacroix was
heir to several generations of painters and dramatists who had—as the art
historian Edgar Wind once observed—“rediscovered for themselves the law of
Racine that distance of country is as conducive to grandeur as distance of
time, and that it allows what the classical rules of the grand style had
forbidden: the representation of contemporary events without disguise.”
The
Greek struggle for independence offered a sense of drama not easily located in
the mundanity of French daily life. In North Africa, even the uneventful doings
of ordinary people would exert their fascination on Delacroix. The proposal
that he accompany a diplomatic mission to Morocco, returning by way of Algeria
and Spain, came at an ideal time: the moment when, as Allard and Fabre write,
Delacroix “faced the question of how to continue, how to find new inspiration.
In under ten years, he had explored and revitalized nearly every genre: history
painting, modern subjects, animal painting, portraiture, still life, literary
subjects, the nude.” Now what? How would he negotiate the onset of what we’d
now call his midcareer?
The
journey gave Delacroix a chance to take a perspective on what he’d done so far.
For the period of his journey, from January to July 1832, his studio would be
his sketchbooks—there would be no question of working on canvas—and he imbibed
impressions that would stay with him for life. Delacroix had realized, as Women
of Algiers in Their Apartment shows, that geographical and cultural distance
would allow him to find grandeur not only in action and suffering, but also in
the banal inactivity of daily existence. Only 30 years later would Édouard
Manet demonstrate how to manage this same feat for the daily life of the
metropolis.
The
mission to Morocco followed France’s then-recent invasion of Algeria; diplomacy
and colonialism worked hand in hand. For some, it may raise a suspicion that
none of this is directly represented in Delacroix’s art. But the fact is that
he was no orientalist. As Allard and Fabre point out, even his use of the
everyday word “apartment”—rather than “harem”—in the title of Women of Algiers
in Their Apartment shows how little he was tempted by cheap exoticism, the conqueror’s
supercilious wonderment at the incomprehensible ways of the subjugated.
Delacroix accords his four female subjects (one a black servant) full dignity,
even as the material solidity of the scene “dissolves” into what Cézanne
extolled as a “symphony of colors.” And yet, how different is Delacroix’s
conception of color from that of Cézanne or the Impressionists, whose palette
is so much brighter than his! In Women of Algiers, as in so many of Delacroix’s
paintings, there is a warm, inviting darkness to the weave of hues, which seem
always to move in and out of the shadows. Here, no obscurity is ever absolute,
but rather serves as the matrix from which colors arise and return to rest.
It
perhaps should not be surprising that Delacroix, in assimilating all that was
so new to him in North Africa, would fall back on familiar terms in an effort
to understand it. He saw the Maghreb as classical terrain, imploring a
correspondent at home to “imagine, my friend, what it is like to see figures
like consuls—Catos, Brutuses—lying in the sun, walking in the streets, mending
old shoes.” Perhaps it is for this reason that, on his return to France, and
for more than a decade to follow, his work shows surprisingly more and more
influence from the neoclassical tradition in French painting that he was
supposed to have overthrown—not that he would ever abjure his painterly weave
of colors in favor of the classicists’ hard, sculptural volumes, but his
compositions often became more planar and symmetrical. Thus the disposition of
the figures in a late reminiscence of his African journey, the 1848 Arab
Players, is as frieze-like as a David or a Poussin. But the immediate change
could be seen in his embrace of biblical and classical subjects, which in the
1830s and ’40s become more numerous than the literary subjects that had
previously entranced him. Consider Saint Sebastian Tended by the Holy Women
(1836) or Medea about to Kill her Children (1838), in its way a sort of female
counterpart to Sardanapalus: The monumental figures in these paintings possess
a concentration of form that is new in Delacroix’s work.
Even so,
this effort to encompass classical solidity in his pictorial vocabulary would never
be Delacroix’s major concern. For him, energy would always trump form. The
underlying impetus of his development is beautifully illustrated by the
juxtaposition at the Met of two treatments of the same scene from a poem by
Byron. The first version of Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, now at the Art
Institute of Chicago, dates from 1826, the period when Delacroix was pegged as
the Romantic rebel; the second, in the Petit Palais in Paris, from 1835, when
he was experimenting with aspects of classicism. In the earlier version,
although the two protagonists and their horses are splendidly conjured, each
one has been conceived separately; likewise for the landscape in which they’ve
been placed, along with some secondary figures. In the later version, the two
men and their animals have been united into a single dynamic entity—the combat
itself, rather than the opponents who have become inextricable within it, and
whose centripetal force commands the entire rectangle in an indifference to
everything else that is illustrated by the corpse trampled under the two
horses’ feet. Here we see how the painter had taught himself to overcome one of
his great problems—that of creating a sense of unity in his paintings. In his
earlier works, he clearly invented each figure separately and then the setting,
trying to impose a unity after the fact. Later, he accustomed himself to
working from a single intuition of all the large masses as a complex whole,
then filled in the details. The ideal was Rembrandt, in whose works, Delacroix
felt, “the background and figures are one. The interest is everywhere, nothing
is separate.”
In his
quest for unity, this last great narrative painter was gradually remaking
himself as a painter of the pensive moment, for whom even the whirlwind of
combat could become a sort of self-contained object of contemplation. And yet,
something more like the kind of narrative impetus that was Delacroix’s starting
presupposition—but rejected by modernism—has been making its way back into some
of the most interesting painting of recent years, by artists as different as
Karen Kilimnik, Kerry James Marshall, and Chris Ofili. Does the literary side
of Delacroix’s art therefore have renewed relevance now, after a century and a
half of irrelevance? If so, it would confirm one of the most striking
observations in the artist’s journals: that “the new is very old; you might
even say it is the oldest thing of all.”
The Last
Great Literary Painter: The legacy of
Eugène Delacroix. By Barry Schwabsky.
The Nation, January 7 , 2019.
Delacroix.
September 17 2018 – January 6, 209. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Eugène
Delacroix, it seems, is having his moment. A retrospective of his paintings
that began at the Louvre has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
the critical consensus seems to be that a star is reborn. Everyone, of course,
has heard of Delacroix, but for the past century or so no one has really cared
very much about him. There was nothing especially wrong with him; it was just
that there was little in his oeuvre that inspired great excitement. But for
some reason the art-loving public has resolved to turn to him now in a state of
receptivity, approaching fervour, that it could not have mustered a decade ago.
For some
critics, however, by which I mean me, this sudden and enthusiastic reassessment
is baffling. I have long been aware of Delacroix’s eminence in the pantheon of
French artists, but none of his works seemed quite equal to that esteem. This
is not to deny that Delacroix was a good painter, but it is vigorously to
question whether he was a great painter. And yet so many artists whom I admire
more than Delacroix—van Gogh, Cézanne, and Picasso—spoke of him in terms of
highest praise. How can it be that the querulous, demanding, infinitely
discerning Degas eagerly collected 250 of Delacroix’s paintings and drawings,
when Delacroix at his best could not rival Degas on a bad day?
The
answer, as best I can determine, involves an art-historical calculation that
was more important to his contemporaries than it should be to us. Delacroix,
born into affluence and social prominence in 1798, was instrumental in
introducing an entirely new spirit and formal language into visual art. He is
the first modernist in painting, in exactly the sense in which his
contemporaries Victor Hugo and Hector Berlioz were the first modernists in literature
and music respectively. That is to say that although none of them was a true
modernist—that movement would emerge long after they had established themselves
in their careers—each fought for and achieved a new zone of impassioned freedom
in his given art, a freedom that stood in explosive opposition to what preceded
it and was the genesis of so much that followed.
In the
case of Delacroix, he liberated painting from the compositional rigidity of
neoclassicism while endowing his work with a fugue—a flame and fury in the
textures of the paint itself—that stood in such obvious contrast to the smooth,
serenely flat canvases of his more academic contemporaries. Perhaps most of
all, Delacroix pried open the very notion of what a painting could depict and
be about. Entire registers of experience—geographical, in Arabia; temporal, in
the Middle Ages; experiential, in the life of everyday men and women—that had
seemed off-limits to serious artists were henceforth to replace the
aristocratic fawning and neo-Platonic indirection of earlier art. Delacroix was
not alone in this quest: He acknowledged his debt to the young Englishman
Richard Parkes Bonington, whose brilliance would be far better known today had
he not died at the age of 25 in 1828. Yet it was Delacroix who, for more than
40 crucial years, until his death in 1863, was the standard bearer of The New.
But
these achievements of Delacroix, properly assessed, were more important in the
context of art history than of art itself. If Hugo and Berlioz won similar
battles in their disciplines, they also produced works that masterfully
implemented those revolutionary innovations. With Delacroix, by contrast, one
is apt to feel that many followers used his new language and engaged his new
themes more compellingly than he did.
Nearly
150 works are included in the Met exhibition, ranging from small drawings to
large paintings, as well as numerous prints and book illustrations. From all
periods of Delacroix’s career, these pieces touch on the main themes of his
work: The viewer will never have seen quite so many turbaned infidels raising
their sabres in Byronic rage against persecuted Christians or quite so many
kings and councillors parading about in the stockings and petticoats of the
French Renaissance court.
Through
no fault of the Met, however, the present exhibition leaves out some of the
artist’s best works, which were deemed too important to leave the Louvre; among
these are The Massacre at Chios, The Death of Sardanapalus, and Liberty Leading
the People. The first of these three canvases, from 1824, depicts the
contemporary uprising of the Greeks against their Ottoman overlords, who pass
on horseback among the prostrate survivors of their aggressions. In the
greenish-grey palette and tunnel-like progress to a distant vanishing point,
Delacroix seems to have learned a great deal from Velázquez. This is almost a
proto-realist work in its studious fidelity to observable reality.
Two
years later, however, his depiction of the death of the Assyrian king
Sardanapalus is conceived as a slightly woozy perspective that flattens and
unfurls its dozen figures, naked or not, across the canvas in a highly
artificial, almost abstract way. With its startling blast of crimson, this work
is infused with the truth of art, if not gravity: The figures float freely
through space in a way that perfectly corresponds to the opulent dissoluteness
of their lives, and that is the entire point of the painting. Delacroix’s most
famous work, surely, is Liberty Leading the People, painted a year after the
1830 Paris uprising against Charles X, which it commemorates. The incarnation
of Liberty—a bare-breasted young woman—waves the tricolour aloft as she climbs
over the dead and the moribund, leading into battle members of the bourgeoisie
and the working class. At her side a young boy somewhat alarmingly brandishes a
pistol in either hand.
If these
three works were unable to travel, at least one of Delacroix’s finest paintings
is indeed in the present show: Self-Portrait with Green Vest (ca. 1837). The moustachioed
painter, his flowing hair carefully parted to either side, rises up against an
unspecified brown wall and assesses the viewer with no obvious approbation.
But
Delacroix is rarely that good. From the late 1820s onward, a literary
sensibility overtakes his painting, to regrettable effect. It is no accident
that some of his most representative works are illustrations of Dante,
Shakespeare, and Tasso. But the besetting problem with this literary
inclination is that it is more concerned with what is depicted than with how it
is depicted.
Although
Delacroix has always been famous for his thickly applied paint textures, it is
astonishing how rarely the viscous pigment springs to life. Its application to
the surface of the canvas is full of bravado, but the result, more often than
not, is inert clumps of matter waiting for that Promethean fire by which, one
generation later, the Impressionists would awaken them. In looking at his two
depictions of baskets of flowers and fruits from 1849, weakly composed and chromatically
dull, it is impossible not to think what Monet or Renoir, what Cézanne or
Fantin-Latour, could have done—what they did do—with all those dahlias, asters,
and peonies.
Even one
of the most famous paintings in the Met exhibition, Women of Algiers in Their
Apartment (1834), is marred by its inept execution, despite its status as a
forerunner of Courbet and Realism. The three seated women occupy an interior
space whose perspective is incoherent, while the turbaned woman on the right
twists her body backward in a way that is anatomically baffling and, as so
often in Delacroix, results from his insurmountable weaknesses as a draftsman.
It is difficult to see this painting without longing for the Apollonian
perfection of Ingres, a very different and incalculably greater artist.
The
First Modernist. Delacroix’s undeserved reputation for greatness. By James Gardner. The Weekly Standard. October 7, 2018
Eugène
Delacroix (1798-1863) — is he not the most fascinating of all painters, past or
present? Extraordinarily well connected, exquisitely socially poised, he was an
intimate friend of Hector Berlioz, Fréderic Chopin, and George Sand, while the
greatest contemporary poet, Charles Baudelaire, passionately championed him.
Thanks
in part, it seems, to the support from his unacknowledged biological father,
Talleyrand (Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord), the French Minister of
Foreign Affairs, and Talleyrand’s successors, his work, though often highly
controversial, almost never failed to attract official support. When very
young, he was one of the models for the figures in “The Raft of the Medusa”
(1818-19), the early masterpiece of Théodore Géricault, who was a friend. A
couple of years later, Delacroix’s own “The Barque of Dante“ (1822), which was
a sensation at the Salon, was purchased by the state.
In 1825,
Delacroix visited England, which engendered his lifelong enthusiasm for Byron
and Shakespeare. And then in 1832, he traveled to Spain and North Africa, as
part of a diplomatic mission to Morocco, a trip that inspired some of his best
visual art. His Journal is perhaps the
fullest and most vivid literary document produced by any painter; the older
English-language edition has a remarkable lengthy introduction by Robert
Motherwell. And his published letters reveal how intensely he valued
friendship. His “Self-Portrait in a Green Vest” (1837) reveals a strikingly
handsome, entirely self-confident man. No other painter from anywhere was as
privileged and renowned from early on – and hardly anyone had so consistently
successful a career.
In his
essay “The life and work of Eugène Delacroix” (1863) Baudelaire asks: “What
role did he come into this world to play, and what duty to perform?” To answer
that question we need to identify the way that Delacroix’s career straddles a
decisive transitional moment in French history. A political transition: Born
nine years after the start of the French Revolution, he lived to see the 1851
coup in which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon, was crowned as
emperor. Then just seven years after his death came the Commune of 1870 and the
birth of the Third Republic, which finally abolished the French monarchy.
In art’s
history, too, this was a time of transition. The career of Delacroix’s most
important immediate predecessor, Jacques-Louis David’s (1748-1825), was
launched during the Old Regime. And the two greatest French painters coming
immediately after Delacroix, Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and Édouard Manet
(1832-1883), who surely are modernists, both had some contact with him.
Courbet’s early work puzzled Delacroix; and the young Manet copied one of
Delacroix’s paintings. But Delacroix came from a different visual culture.
Indeed, his famous “Liberty Leading the People” (1830) gives a very misleading
picture of his politics — unlike Courbet, he was a reactionary. And unlike
either Courbet or Manet, although he himself was not religious, he painted many
Christian subjects.
Like
Delacroix, Baudelaire too was a transitional figure. His greatest essay “The Painter
of Modern Life” (1863) argues that the artist needs to find contemporary
subjects; here he anticipates Manet (and the Impressionists). Delacroix,
however, had no interest in the contemporary political subjects of Courbet or
the Parisian themes of Impressionist painting. Apart from his scenes of North
Africa, he never showed modern life. The great “Women of Algiers in Their
Apartment” (1634) and “The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage” (1856) do
depict the contemporary Islamic world. His “Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi”
(1826) was inspired more by his love for Byron’s role in the struggle for Greek
Independence rather than a position of his own.
And yet,
he is not a traditional literary or history painter — for what old master would
conceive of anything like his various images after Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or his
“The Death of Sardanapalus” (1845-46), represented in the exhibition Delacroix
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by his small copy after the famous enormous
work in the Louvre? Indeed, apart perhaps from Caravaggio, what old master
could have conceived of compositions like his Saint Sebastian Tended by the
Holy Women (1836), in which two woman furtively remove arrows from the saint’s
sprawled dead body, or Christ on the Cross (1835), in which the voluptuous Mary
Magdalene, clad in red and prone passionately on the ground below, stares
upward at Christ?
A number
of Delacroix’s best-known paintings were apparently too large to be borrowed —
and of course those in Parisian churches or public buildings, including the
Louvre ceiling, Apollo Slays the Python (1860), a sketch of which is in this
exhibition, cannot be moved. But here, with more than 150 paintings, drawings,
prints, and manuscripts, with the exhibition complimented by more than 100
additional works on paper from the Karen B. Cohen collection (Devotion to
Drawing: The Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix), there’s certainly
sufficient visual material to gain an adequate view of his achievement, and
locate his place in the history of art.
A mere
listing of some of these subjects is exhilarating. His early portrait “Baron
Schwiter (Louis Auguste Schwiter (1805-1889)” (1826-7) gives a note-perfect
image of a Romantic dandy. “Collision of Arab Horsemen” (1833-34) is a stunning
Western depiction of passionate Islamic culture, Orientalism triumphant. The
great “Ovid among the Scythians” (1859), with the poet reclining amidst the
barbarians at the Black Sea, is an extraordinarily original vision of what
exile means. “Lion Hunt (fragment)” (1855) shows how much Delacroix learnt from
Peter Paul Rubens.
And how
extraordinary are the results when he turns his hand to still life painting. In
the amazing “Basket of Flowers” (1848-49), which is set in a landscape, look at
how these flowers tumble towards you. As for the drawings, they reveal how hard
Delacroix worked — and how closely he studied the most varied sources. We see
early academic nudes; a caricature of Rossini with his three best-known
operatic characters; studies after Cruikshank, Gericault, Gillray, and Rubens;
studies of works by Raphael and Veronese; scenes illustrating Goethe’s Faust;
Norman churches and landscapes; tigers from the Paris zoo; studies of classical
sculpture; and, of course, many luscious North African scenes.
What
I’ve long dreamt of, but rarely found at major exhibitions like this are
catalogues that offer an accessible commentary. What, alas, I usually find are
heavy, posh, beautifully illustrated academic publications, souvenirs that I
suspect aren’t much read by anyone but reviewers and professors. The catalogue
for Delacroix, presenting both the paintings on exhibition and many of his
other works, is an unfocused, bookish summary of the literature; the lighter,
cheaper Devotion to Drawing catalogue is mercifully brief. But apart from
Michèle Hannoosh, who contributes a luminous short essay about the Journal
(which she has edited), none of these scholars write with Baudelairian
enthusiasm. I grant that when Baudelaire writes about Delacroix, who was his
favorite painter, he praises him in terms that maybe are a little too enthusiastic:
Delacroix
is the most suggestive of all painters ; he is the painter whose works, even
when chosen from among his secondary and inferior productions, set one thinking
the most and summon to the memory the greatest number of poetic thoughts and sentiments
which, although once known, one had believed to be for ever buried in the dark
night of the past.
He
describes their conversations in terms that misleadingly suggest they were
intimate friends. But when he quotes Delacroix advising another artist — “If
you have not sufficient skill to make a sketch of a man throwing himself out of
a window, in the time that it takes him to fall from the fourth floor to the
ground, you will never be capable of producing great machines” — he conveys a
startlingly accurate perspective on Delacroix’s essential greatness.
If you
want a suggestive perspective on these two great exhibitions, buy his Journal
or reread Baudelaire’s incandescent memorial essay. That commentary will not
satisfy modern scholars, but he does, I think, ask the right questions. The
last great artist who was not a modernist, Delacroix synthesized very complex
visual and verbal traditions in stunning works that, by summarizing the old
master European worldview, open the way to modernism. Political and artistic
transitions are tricky to deal with — but his handling of this transition was
exemplary.
Author’s
note: I quote Baudelaire from The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
(London, 1964), the translation by Jonathan Mayne; my own fuller account of
these themes is High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism
(University Park and London, 1996).
Devotion
to Drawing: The Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix continues at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan)
through November 12; Delacroix continues there through January 6, 2019.
The
Importance of Being Delacroix. By David Carrier. Hyperallergic , September 29,
2018
