Delacroix
By: As
Tags: New York City, Paris, Review, Art, Delacroix

Delacroix

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

Eugène Delacroix. Medea About to Kill Her Children (Medee furieuse), 1838. Oil on canvas. 8 ft. 6 3/8 in. x 64 15/16 in. (206 x 165 cm.) Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Stéphane Maréchalle. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

For the first time in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eugène Delacroix receives an extraordinary retrospective that has been made possible through coordination with The Louvre in Paris, France. Delacroix is a profoundly phenomenal exhibition that features over 150 paintings, drawings, prints and manuscripts. Although his paintings appear in museums around the world, Delacroix’s works are heavily concentrated in the painting galleries of The Louvre, and remain largely unseen to those who are unable to travel there. Thus writing about Delacroix is a delicate matter.

While this exhibition may initially appear both Romantic and old school, the paintings and drawings on view reveal the stylistic evolution of an artist who grew up during the French Revolution and the wake of the one in America, that separated church from state and established an independent, secular society. Delacroix’s representations of military battles as well as tigers, horses, flowers and the Orient, evoke the historic writings of Stendhal and Gustave Flaubert.

Only later, after France had established itself as the first successful democracy in Europe, were Delacroix’s paintings considered to be a bridge to the early Modern era, when new art forms were sought for a secular society. Throughout Delacroix wavy lines and vibrant, colorful brush strokes seem to vaguely reference back to El Greco’s Mannerist style.

But these paintings, wherein Delacroix heightens the sense of scale and depth through the layering of quick dancing lines, are packed with earth-bound movement. Gravity is the anchor of these experiences that are widely received and felt, an effect of the artist’s meticulous rendering of visual illusion.

Therefore while flora, fauna, animals and landscapes are portrayed lyrically, to suggest real-time movement, the subject matter comes alive so that Delacroix becomes a feast for the eyes that retrain one’s vision synonymously with a better knowledge of history. Although the artist spent his youth observing nations fight against church dominance, in order to move away from Europe’s God-given, divine-right past, none of Delacroix’s paintings portray a specific, singular hero.

Figures are posed and portrayed in absence of anything greater except for either beautiful, wild naturalism or a violent other. However despite one’s search for a single, mighty figure, the heroic is not absent. Instead the artist locates this anonymous individual in the viewer, through lines of movement that emerge from the viewer’s perspective, from where these intense compositions reverberate. By way of this transference that takes place between the artist’s canvas and the viewer, Delacroix confers the notion of the heroic as a status that is accessible through learned knowledge.

To think of Romanticism when seeing Delacroix is to err. The theme itself becomes a point of critique throughout a series of prints that focus on Goethe’s Faust tragedy. At least two of the prints that were made around 1827 portray the figure of Richard Wagner with the fictional character of Faust. Delacroix made this a decade before Wagner had moved to Paris in 1839 with aspirations of professional success, where he had settled in an apartment that was located within short reach of Eugène Delacroix’s studio.

For the Delacroix exhibition, The Louvre did not lend the two monumental paintings titled July 28, 1830: Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Massacre at Chios. (1824) But it didn’t have to. The gravity of action seen in The Death of Sardanapalus (1845–46) echoes the artist’s composition seen in Chios and strongly juxtaposes the subject of Liberty Leading the People.

Overall, the collection of works on view at the Met are not only large in number but also sweeping in form and style. One might perceive these paintings as almost too sophisticated for New York City, where challenges are daily fare. But this grand introduction of Delacroix to America is better late than never, adding a new dimension to an artistic heritage that has long been known for its flat, two-dimensional character: favoring the genres of folk, outsider and abstract art without negotiating the notion of either the monumental, or the heroic, as a significant marker within the scope of American art.