Eugene Delacroix, “Christ on the Sea of Galilee,” 1854. Image courtesy of the BMA.
Roughly every 18 months, the Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) has a ticketed exhibition. In 2012, they put on a genuine blockbuster of a show that was more or less able to sell itself: an impressively comprehensive selection of works by one of the most popular and commercially successful artists in history, Norman Rockwell.
The BMA has set a more daunting challenge up for itself with this year’s ticketed exhibition, traveling from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and opening on Feb. 22, entitled Delacroix and the Matter of Finish. The eponymous French painter Eugène Delacroix was hugely influential as an early standard bearer of Romanticism in the arts, but he’s still comparatively obscure compared to such later devotees as Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, even though they owed much of their success to him.
To try and offset Delacroix’s lack of immediate name recognition, the museum has engaged in a savvy marketing campaign, asking, in capital letters on a poppy pink background, “Who is Delacroix?” The answers are complex and fascinating, painting a portrait of a man defined by his insatiable obsessions as much as by his great learning, a man who was capable of producing art that could both engage the intellect and stir the soul.
So who is Delacroix, anyway?
In one secluded corner of an outdoor courtyard at the Vatican Museums sits a statue called the Apollo Belvedere, depicting the Greek god of truth, reason, harmony and the sun. Apollo’s face is placid and poised, his body relaxing in the moment after he’s loosed the arrow that will slay the mighty serpent Python. There’s no swagger or fear in the Apollo’s eyes. There is only cold perfection.
Born to a prominent family in 1798, Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix came of age amid a Parisian Salon milieu – where critics and creators convened to discuss art – that saw the Apollo Belvedere as the singular achievement of the ancient world. Obsessed with the artwork and stories of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Neoclassicists of the early 19th century prized meticulously planned drawings, refined colors and a high finish on the surface of their paintings that approximated that classical perfection. Even in the rare occasions when the Neoclassicists used contemporary subject matter, as in Jacques-Louis David’s famous Napoleon Crossing the Alps, it was depicted with all the heightened idealism of a Greek god.
Thanks to his family’s prominence and connections, the young Delacroix was able to pursue a career in painting, apprenticing with the Neoclassicist Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. Despite the turns his career would take, Delacroix kept many of the lessons of Neoclassicism – and its emphasis on technical mastery – close to his heart, even as he evolved into something quite different.
On the opposite side of the same Vatican courtyard that features the Apollo Belvedere, you’ll find the statue of Laocoön and His Sons. Far from the triumphant calm of Apollo, the Laocoön features the eponymous Trojan seer and his sons being strangled to death by sea serpents. Laocoön, with his contorted body and despairing face, is a timeless example of human agony in an unfeeling universe, and Laocoön’s helplessness to do anything to save his innocent sons is deeply moving. If the Apollo Belvedere provided an icon for Neoclassicists to rally around, the Laocoön provided the same for the burgeoning Romantics.
“Laocoon and His Sons.”
The contemporary art critic Théophile Silvestre memorably described Delacroix as “a painter of great genius, who had the sun in his head and storms in his heart.” As the young Neoclassicist matured and developed his own style, those storms grew steadily more furious, and he veered away from the serenity of Apollo – whose frenzied victory over Python he would later depict in 1854 – and toward the pain and humanity of Laocoön.
In the Paris Salon of 1824, Delacroix debuted The Massacre at Chios, which depicted sickly Greek rebels about to be slaughtered by Ottoman Turks. Because of its subject matter and grim depiction, the painting scandalized the Salon crowd, who dismissed it with varying levels of vitriol (one Neoclassicist, Antoine-Jean Gros, called it “the massacre of painting”). “Thus it is that geniuses are greeted at their dawn,” wrote Théophile Gautier, another of Delacroix’s defenders.
The 1824 Salon made Delacroix an object of intense scorn from many in the critical community, and established Delacroix’s long, unfriendly rivalry with the proudly old-fashioned Neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. But thanks to his family’s connections – and his own ardent obsessions – Delacroix continued down a trail toward spearheading Romanticism, creating such works of profound impact as The Death of Sardanapalus (1828) and Liberty Leading the People (1830).
Even more than his salacious and exotic choices of subject matter, what polarized the French artistic community was Delacroix’s pioneering style. “He grew into a lavish use of color – brilliant, unmixed colors – with the idea that the beholder, when looking at these, is going to mix the colors,” said Dr. Robert Schindler, the BMA’s new curator of European art. “And that is an idea that the Impressionists pick up on; you don’t paint every single detail, it’s more about the impression that the canvas leaves on the eye. … When you look at works by Delacroix, it’s all about the visible brushstroke. You see the spontaneity. Just by looking at the painting, you can see how he applied the paint to the surface. It’s very exciting.”
Delacroix himself wrote in his journal that, “In the arts, all truths are produced by methods which show the hand of the artist.” As a result, one of the most striking things about Delacroix’s work is the extraordinary sense of motion and vitality in them, which are just as immediate as his famous use of color. The great American art critic Clement Greenberg agreed when assessing Delacroix’s illustrations in an essay: “The best of [Delacroix’s drawings] are the quickest, most abbreviated and least careful ones, in which line and shading, as they capture movement, attain a movement almost independent of the objects depicted.”
By the time he died in 1863, the critical pendulum had swung in Delacroix’s favor. The onetime pariah became the toast of the Parisian art scene in his late career. But Delacroix, who never married, became a near-recluse because of chronic illness and devotion to his craft. To calm his shivering from the chills he felt, Delacroix worked in a heavy overcoat, thick cap and felt slippers, but he still managed to leave behind more than 6,000 drawings and more than 800 paintings in his Left Bank studio when he died.
Delacroix was immune neither to feeling flattered by praise nor feeling frustrated by criticism, but the defining feature of his career was his independent spirit. Despite decades of living in the shadow of lesser painters like Ingres, Delacroix worked with complete conviction to help realize his imagination. By the end, as with everything else, Delacroix’s declining health was secondary to his need to create.
Eugene Delacroix, “Desdemona Cursed by Her Father,” 1852. Image courtesy of the BMA.
Why does it matter?
History has been kind to Eugène Delacroix. The Romantic movement he led would prove to be massively influential, inspiring artists from Claude Monet to Pablo Picasso, the latter of whom painted 15 different versions of Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers as though he were a musician practicing scales. “His remains the finest palette in France, and nobody in our country has possessed at once such calm and pathos, such shimmering color,” said the great Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. “We all paint in him.”
History may be fond of Delacroix, but it remains to be seen whether the residents of modern-day Birmingham will cotton to the moody old Frenchman. Even so, the Romantic has much to recommend him, whether you’re a budding art historian or you’re just being dragged to the museum by your significant other.
The first thing is just how immediate Delacroix’s work is. Despite painting’s reputation for elitism, the Delacroix’s paintings are anything but stuffy and boring. A Neoclassical painting hanging in the Louvre has pretty much done the job for the viewer already; it’s clean, finished, prepared for consumption. Delacroix’s painting, on the other hand, invites the viewer in through the flurry of his brushstrokes and the drama of his scenes, who then finish the unmixed colors in a kind of partnership with Delacroix. For their part, the folks at the BMA have done their level best to encourage close viewing and an intimacy with each work.
Despite the apparent messiness of Delacroix’s painting – one early critic said that he “painted with a drunken broom” – he provides an excellent opportunity to learn more about the actual craft of art. Thanks to his classical training, each Delacroix painting provides a master class in lighting, composition and color. As the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire put it, “Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.”
With that in mind, one rough contemporary analog to Delacroix’s career might well be that of polarizing director Brian De Palma, whose films, including Carrie, Blow Out and Scarface, have been acclaimed for their technical artistry but decried for their lurid subject matter. Both men agonized over a great influence – in Delacroix’s case, it was the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens; in De Palma’s, Alfred Hitchcock – and both men saw eventual appreciation for their careers thanks to late shifts in critical attitudes.
Delacroix was inspired as much by literature as he was by art, and his paintings’ literary sensibilities shine through in the selections on hand at the BMA. Besides Rubens, Delacroix’s biggest influence was probably the Romantic poet Lord Byron, and Delacroix’s choices of literary subject matter reflect his pet themes. Desdemona Cursed by Her Father depicts Othello’s new bride being cast out of Venice because of her forbidden love, showing how emotions can upset a fragile order. Continuing the Shakespearean trend, there are also 16 lithographs in the exhibition depicting scenes from Hamlet, the greatest drama of the head and the heart in conflict ever written.
Those literary sensibilities work in tandem with the visual feast each painting provides, because they incorporate multiple senses. The ingenious New Jersey artist Willie Cole touched on this facet of Delacroix’s power while commenting on a painting of a Moroccan street scene, saying, “I sense the movement in the painting. I can sense the movement of the light, I can see the dots, the dashes. The fact that it’s a visual presentation, and it touches all your senses – you can hear music, you can smell the street – that makes it a great work of art.”
Eugene Delacroix, “Collision of Moorish Horsemen,” 1844. Image courtesy of the BMA.
The best example of that brilliance in this exhibition is another North African scene, Collision of Moorish Horsemen, from 1843-44. The two Moors in the center of the painting are supposed to be in the middle of a training drill for rifle marksmanship, but their frightened horses have begun fighting one another. The kinetic impact of the horses, the commingling shrieks of panicked men and beasts, the smell of smoke and sweat polluting the training ground – all of these elements combine for a thrilling, engrossing piece.
This gets at the heart of what makes Delacroix great, at what makes him resonant and relevant even to a modern audience. Delacroix was profoundly sophisticated and cultured, but his fascinations lay in matters of the heart, of the human spirit’s potential for compassion and violence – sometimes simultaneously. An interest in Delacroix’s work, then, is nothing less than an interest in humanity. His passion was for humankind, and his lambent, lucid imagination was preoccupied with human cruelty and human tenderness, human ugliness and human beauty.
Defining Delacroix
Who is Delacroix? That’s a question that each person who goes to see Delacroix and the Matter of Finish will have to answer for himself or herself. But the power of Delacroix is such that you’ll want to compose your own answer for reasons more important than just standing out at cocktail parties. Delacroix worked in strokes of burning desire as much as he did in oils, and he demands definition.
The BMA’s Schindler had a nuanced answer when the question was put to him. “That’s the problem: there isn’t just one answer,” Schindler said. “He’s bold, he’s passionate, he’s defined, he’s romantic – there are a number of answers to that question. To me, Delacroix is really one of those artists who are just passionately creative, who just has this drive in him to create, and create, and create.
“He faced a lot of opposition when he showed works at the Salon, and he was disappointed,” Schindler continued. “He wasn’t accepted as a member of the academy, even though he applied something like eight times, and that was hugely frustrating for him. But in his work, he was very convinced. And I think that’s just someone who’s doing what he’s committed, what he’s destined, to do.”
Delacroix and the Matter of Finish will be on display from Feb. 22 through May 18. Tickets are $15. For more information, call (205) 254-2565 or visit artsbma.org.