Exhibitions
Grand
Aone walks round the exhibition of Delacroix's late work, Les Demieres Armies currently at the Grand Palais, time and again one sees images of wild libidinal energy — savage, snarling beasts, rearing, plunging horses, mountainous seas — bare- ly restrained by the forces of humanity; and, on occasion, not restrained at all.
Delacroix, Baudelaire famously wrote in the valedictory assessment he published after the artist's death in 1863, was 'pas- sionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible'. (Also putting a similar point in a more picturesque fashion, he claimed that the painter was 'a volcanic crater artistical- ly concealed beneath bouquets of flowers'.) This sense of a split, a tension between extreme opposites, runs right through Delacroix's life and work — and, as is shown by this exhibition, it intensified, rather than slackened in the final decade and a half of his career. On the one hand, after the death of Gericault — for one of the figures in whose 'Raft of the Medusa' Delacroix is supposed to have posed — he was widely regarded as the leader of the Romantic school in France. On the other, as the artist coldly put it to an unfortunate soul who accused him of Romanticism, 'Sir, I am a pure classic.'
There is a strong case for both points of view. There is the intense Romanticism of subject matter and manner: the opulent richness of colour, the slashing brush- strokes, the exoticism, the themes from Byron, Shakespeare and Walter Scott. But there is also the undoubted fact that Delacroix was the last of the Old Masters, the final giant in a tradition stretching back to the Renaissance, and beyond, to Classi- cal Antiquity. He was the only artist of the 19th century — unless one counts Goya who could carry off grand narrative paint- ings in the fashion of Rubens, Raphael and Leonardo (even if occasionally these grands machines' creaked a little).
In contrast, his great opposite and rival, Ingres, saw himself as a Classicist, a disciple of Raphael, but got into trouble whenever he tried to work in the grand manner. Ingres's real forte was the mesmerisingly, weirdly precise depiction of what he saw around him, the over-furnished sitting- rooms of 19th-century Paris, and their over- dressed inhabitants, for example. Delacroix, though he turned out the occasional por- trait, or scene of everyday life, focused habitually on the long ago and far away — Morocco, the Bible, the Middle Ages.
This gave rise to a further paradox. In the mid century, Delacroix looked like the most progressive artist in the Salon which was one reason why Baudelaire hero-worshipped him so (he took a fresh pen, he claimed, to write the name Delacroix'). But it was much more to `Tiger and Serpent; 1862, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington Ingres that Degas and Manet looked. The influence of Delacroix skipped a genera- tion, to emerge again in Van Gogh — a tremendous fan as can be seen from his let- ters and versions of Delacroix's works — and Gauguin, another exoticist, who remarked approvingly that Delacroix had the temperament of the wild beasts'. So what are we to make of him today? The artificiality and literary quality of his imaginative compositions, I suspect, make him a difficult artist for the contemporary sensibility to assimilate (for that matter, many people have the same kind of prob- lem with Raphael and Rubens). Those grands machines and the petits ones too, of which this exhibition is largely composed, don't just creak a little; if you choose to look at them that way, they are downright preposterous.
Who could take 'The Abduction of Rebecca' of 1858, for example, entirely seriously, with its central figure marching Purposefully along in full chain-mail, with a desperately fluttering maiden clasped over one shoulder? The very idea of painting an incident from Ivanhoe is a little absurd. But is an absurdity which attends many things — such as Rubens and grand opera which are simultaneously magnificent. If one can get over it, one can see that Delacroix attained, again and again, a mag- nificent synthesis of form, colour and emo- tion.
In the 'Tiger Hunt' at the end of the first section, horse, snarling cat and huntsman blend into a single form, a vortex of opposed forces. The surprisingly languid Indian lady and the tiger that is devouring her in another picture constitute a sort of Yin/Yang diagram — Yin and Yang with a violent edge. This was Delacroix's subject above all the struggle between instinc- tive, amoral energy and the forces that try to hold it down. As time went on, he came to concentrate — as ageing artists often do — on a few compulsive themes. Lion and tiger hunts were to him what waterlllies were to Monet. There was trans- parent identification of artist and wild beast (many observers noted that he even looked like one of his own tigers). At feed- ing time in the Jardin des Plantes, he reported himself penetre de bonheur'. But he also, no doubt, identified with the forces of restraint — the hunters struggling des- perately to contain the savage fury of the beast. Another obsessive theme — with no fewer than six versions on show — was Christ on the Sea of Galilee', the heroic, solitary figure calmly sleeping amid a fren- zy of panicking disciples and tempestuous waves. Here is the force of Baudelaire's remark — the whole effort of his life was to express passion, but in the most disci- Plined manner possible. When passion wasn't engaged, the inter- est of the paintings slumps. The large still- 'des are florid, hothouse concoctions but fundamentally dull, the `Baigneuses' from 1854 even more so. Arcadian bliss simply wasn't his thing. Nor, with the exception of the Sea of Galilee pictures, do the biblical subjects quite come off. Some of the little landscapes, on the other hand, particularly of the sea at Dieppe, are as beautiful as any by Whistler or Courbet.
The exhibition, which is thematically arranged, brings out these strengths and weaknesses well. It was a good idea also to include quantities of pastels, and drawings (the latter often wonderful, swirling indices of psychic force). But in other ways the exhibition is not an ideal way of commemo- rating the bicentenary of the artist's birth. For one thing, many of these small works — mostly those from American collections — have been badly over-cleaned. There is consequently a painful contrast between, say, the 'Abduction of Rebecca' from the Louvre, which still retains every nuance, and surrounding paintings from which all the air and subtlety have been sucked.
Also, by concentrating on small works the main exception is the splendid fragment of the 'Lion Hunt' from Bordeaux, partially burnt in 1870 — it brings home how, like Rubens, Tiepolo or Jackson Pollock, Delacroix was only really himself on a huge scale, activating whole walls, whole rooms. For that reason this exhibition should ide- ally be complemented by a visit to the Lou- vre and Saint Sulpice to see Delacroix at full symphonic power. Why not throw in his studio in Rue Furstemburg and make a Delacroixian weekend of it?
Previous page
