The last great artist who
was not a modernist, Delacroix synthesized very complex visual and verbal
traditions in stunning works that open the way to modernism.
David Carrier
Eugène Delacroix,
“Self-Portrait with Green Vest” (ca. 1837), oil on canvas, 25 9/16 x 21 7/16
inches, Musée du Louvre, Paris, © RMN – Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Michel
Urtado (all images courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
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.
Eugène Delacroix,
“Collision of Arab Horsemen” (1833/34), oil on canvas, 31 11/16 × 39 9/16
inches, private collection
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.
https://hyperallergic.com/461270/devotion-to-drawing-the-karen-b-cohen-collection-of-eugene-delacroix-metropolitan-museum-of-art/
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario