Philippe Dagen On show in France
The 200th anniversary of the birth of the French painter Eugne Delacroix (1798-1863) is being celebrated by a series of exhibitions in France, each devoted to a different aspect of his work.
The bicentenary exhibitions set a challenge: since Delacroix is being served up in pieces, why not try to learn something from the scatter effect? The result suggests that he is not the artist we thought we knew. He is no less powerful, but powerful in a different way; no less impressive, but impressive in an unexpected way.
Delacroix’s historical masterpieces may suffer from not being included in the bicentenary tribute, which shows his output as a draughtsman and engraver to best effect because it reveals his finest work in those areas.
The Grand Palais exhibition is based on the argument that, while Delacroix’s so- called Romantic period is well known, his later works have tended to go unremarked because they were produced at a time when Courbet and Manet were breaking revolutionary new ground.
That argument seems to be borne out, though it does not make for an attractive, let alone exciting, exhibition. Delacroix did not produce a stream of masterpieces during the last 15 years of his life. Celebrated and much sought after, he gave in to the pleas of art dealers, who were aware that collectors preferred medium-sized paintings depicting typically Delacroix subjects such as tigers, horses and battling Arabs.
Delacroix accordingly obliged. He executed highly picturesque variations on his pet themes, drew on his memories and on notebooks that he had brought back from his trip to Morocco, and borrowed subjects from world literature. Byron, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Dante, Scott and Ovid were good sources. Most of them had already inspired him 20 years earlier, and he returned to them as though revisiting his past.
He chose the most intense passages in their works, those that would justify compositions full of movement, interacting colours, lyricism and pathos. He then ran the risk of repeating himself in an area where that risk is greatest: when it becomes necessary to repeat the representation of extreme feelings or situations. He had to be careful not to lapse into mere rhetoric or turn out nothing but a facile “Delacroix product”.
While some of these works are admirable, others do not entirely satisfy our modern demand for invention and renewal. Sometimes the variant is only a slightly modified replica, and style becomes all- important. The hanging of the show is perilously honest, in that it accentuates such similarities by juxtaposing several versions of a single motif. Just occasionally one gets the feeling of being in the presence of a manufacturing process rather than true creativity.
Sometimes an odd feature will prevent this mechanical approach from impoverishing the representation. The six versions of Christ sur le Lac de Gnsareth are not identical. Postures, the use of colour and quirky details vary from painting to painting, as though Delacroix were deliberately trying to avoid boredom or routine.
One begins to suspect that, although they were commissioned works, Delacroix was less interested in satisfying the dealer than in freely taking to its logical conclusion a possibly fortuitous idea, dissonance or discovery that may have emerged while he was working on them.