Delacroix [antikvár]

BOí'í' fi ' i ' I T Introduction Eugene Delacroix was one of those painters like Gauguin whose impact on history was probably greater than their actual artistic achievement. 'We are all in Delacroix,' said Paul Cézanne, who produced an apotheosis of the master sailing up to the heavens, like some Baroque saint of modern painting. This feeling of respect was not confined to the Impressionist generation, to Renoir, Degas, Monet and Pissarro, but extended also to their successors Van Gogh, Seurat and Gauguin, although they were often highly critical of the intervening taste for realism. Delacroix could make a double appeal to posterity, at first as an original and experimental colourist with a semi-scientific interest in natural effects (Dr Lee Johnson has concentrated on this aspect of his talents in a recent monograph) and later, to Gauguin's generation, as a pioneer of the more musical and Baude-lairean concepts of painting, painting which should derive from 'the mysterious centre of thought'. During his lifetime his friend George Sand rightly insisted on this complexity, observing that 'through his many-sided intelligence' he was able to appreciate 'the varied aspects of beauty'. It is the same complexity which makes it difficult to enrol under any one label this lover of Classical antiquity who could ridicule David, this Romantic who stressed unity and preferred Mozart to Berlioz and Chopin. Some writers such as René Huyghe have attempted to escape the dilemma by putting him in a third category — that of the dandy. Delacroix was probably the last great painter who, unlike Courbet and Manet, felt no continued obligation either to be of his own time or to depict it. When he speaks of modernity he seems to be alluding not to the external scene but to a mood of nervosity and melancholy; thus he declared Mozart to be modern — 'that is to say he is not afraid to touch on the melancholy side of things'. Perhaps the nearest he came towards recognising a specifically modern task was to write : 'We live in a time of despondency. Courage is needed to make a god of a beauty which is unquiet'. But nevertheless without Delacroix, contemporary Romanticism, with all its ferocity and gloom, its passion for medievalism and for English and Oriental themes, would not have found a worthy interpretation in paint. Even the sensible Taine noticed this; 'Bear in mind that he said something new and the one thing which we needed.' But Delacroix neglected one Romantic theme dear to contemporary Englishmen and Germans — the emotional bond between the poet or painter and the world of 'nature' outside him. He rarely painted landscapes without figures, although when he did, these are amongst his most moving works. Delacroix was born in 1798, early enough, like the older Stendhal, for him to glimpse the heroic tumult of the Empire. He could never acclimatize himself to the more tame and bourgeois age of Louis-Philippe and to the money grubbers described by Stendhal and by Flaubert in LEducalion Sentimentale (1846-69), who would have sold themselves and France at the drop of a hat. He belonged to the world of Beethoven and Kant's Idealism when it was still possible to speculate about the nature of art in a wide and metaphysical way. (He seems to have read some of Kant's aesthetics which were as much in harmony with his own ideas as Comte's materialism was suited to the circle of Courbet.) His idea of history, like that of Michelet, was a matter of stormy crowds and dramatic incident rather than the semi-scientific enquiry into race or climate which interested Taine. Delacroix was born well before the disillusion and cynicism engendered by the failure of the 1848 rising. His high seriousness would not have permitted him to call his pictures his 'articles' as Degas did. Degas and Manet's generation were far more wary of the big certitudes, less inclined to believe in a lofty struggle between the forces of humanity and darkness which is the implicit subject matter of Delacroix's murals. (It might have been difficult successfully to undertake a large mural