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Now, at the Met, comes the first large-scale North American retrospective of his epoch-altering work.
Howdidit alter his epoch?
Delacroixs style is so uncontained, convulsive, and atmospheric its hard to pigeonhole as simply Romanticism.
What do you see when you look at a Delacroix?
Fuzziness, smears, fibrillating paint, irradiated color that destabilize space and emulsify objects.
The technique fuses the Italian, Flemish, and Spanish painterly dash of Titian, Rubens, and Velazquez.
Cezanne exclaimed, you’ve got the option to find us all in this Delacroix.
Legendary gallerist Peter Nagy recently wrote, We owe all of 20th century painting to Delacroix.
And 21st century too.
Delacroix painted from and for art history; the new generations were making history paintings of modern life.
Born in France in 1798, Delacroix is a true son of the revolution.
His father was foreign minister in the revolutionary government; his older brother a general in the Napoleonic Army.
Everything was on the rise for the young artist when his life took a drastic turn.
He was orphaned at 16 and soon lived in near poverty.
His art education was being apprenticed to the neoclassicist Pierre-Narcisse Guerin who was also training Gericault.
For him this kind of work was lifeless, a waste of labor, the display of mere dexterity.
Cold exactitude, he wrote, is not art.
Instead, Delacroix wrote of the pleasure in vagueness.
We may say that he touched Vagueness Sublime.
Over 150 prints, drawings, watercolors, paintings, and manuscripts fill 12 galleries at the Met.
Because much of the work is small we dont get the wide-open retinal fireworks of his big pictures.
Which is a small shame; Delacroix himself wrote small paintings…bore me.
(Of course they were good for the market.)
This can really wear you down.
Van Gogh described it as color seeking life.
Unfortunately, only flashes of this sublimity illuminate this show.
The galleries are painted an adumbral-shade of aubergine which instantly puts his work back in the crypt.
There are only about a dozen large paintings here.
This lack of large works isnt the fault of the Met.
Dante recoils in horror and the infernal city of Dis blazes in the tinged distance.
Salon crowds instantly grasped the feelings the painting portrayed.
The country was then subjugated by the allies and saw the unthinkable restoration of a Bourbon King.
Censorship was back; there were no widespread voting rights at all.
The crowds, that is.
Delacroix knew what he wanted and why.
This wasScenes from the Massacres at Chios.
(He did!)
The famous Neo-Classicist Antoine-Jean Gros deemed the work a massacre of painting.
This means Delacroix provided no real story or narrative, just disconnected figures, shapes, forms, paint.
Crowds complained of being denied the possibility of penetrating beyond the foreground.
This is a perfect observation of this works relentlessly modern frontality.
Its still a mystery how this titanic nowhere-ness holds together at all.
It worked, and secured his place in history and peoples hearts.
It would be among the last times Delacroix painted something inspired by current events.
(Its like he did this to free himself forever of ever having to do it again.)
France bought the painting and it was slated it to one day hang in the Louvre.
Liberty was not seen again in public until around the time of the next revolution of 1848.
By then it was already a legend.
Today the figure of Liberty has been used in more illustrations and political cartoons than can ever be counted.
Delacroix was all of 33 years old and the most famous painter in the world.
He remained that for the rest of his life.
At his funeral, however, was only a small contingent of dedicated artists.
Now you have the tools to visit the Met, look at whats here and know about whats not.
This loan from the Louvre has mesmerized, inspired, and flummoxed artists ever since.
Delacroix called it akin to beautiful verses.
Its real and unreal, seen, imagined, reassembled, made up with African and Caucasian models.
In 1832, Delacroix was brought by the government on a diplomatic mission to Northern Africa.
From here on out, we see more voluptuous color and scenes of otherness.
Womencame about on the return voyage, when Delacroix finally gained entry inside a Muslim household.
(He had been allowed inside Jewish households before then, but never Muslim.)
The memory of that moment is what he tried to paint inWomen of Algiers in Their Apartment.
The women arent naked, nude, lascivious, seeking approval, being bought and sold, or performing.
Many have projected that this is a slave, although this is not at all clear.
Cosmopolitan goods are seen all around and on the central woman who wears a hanging watch.
So these arent primitives.
That is the metaphysical infinitude of the work whether you find it annoying and too much, or not.
