Art: He Had a Sun in His Head

When the centennial of Delacroix’s birth rolled around in 1898, France made nothing of the occasion for, as impressionism grew in favor, paintings of the great romantic offended public taste. Now, on the centennial of his death, it seems as if the art world cannot hear or see enough of Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix. A spate of articles has appeared in the art magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, and at least three new books on him are coming out.* Earlier this year Toronto put on a Delacroix retrospective, and 3 last week six memorial exhibitions were running in Paris.

The biggest was in the main galleries of the Louvre, where 165 of his oils, including many borrowed from distant museums, are on show. They goto prove what a close friend of Delacroix said about him shortly after his death:

“He had a sun in his head and storms in his heart. He played upon the whole keyboard of human passions.”

Wild and exotic music came from that keyboard: scenes of massacre and battle and hell. There were (see color) the funereal chords of his Hamlets, the lyric melancholy of some of his portraits, the emotional rhythms of his still lifes. History has cast Delacroix in the role of the great romanticist pitted against Ingres, France’s great classicist. Yet for all his passion, he was a man of intellect who never surrendered to unbridled emotion. “Reason must control all our infirmities,” he said.

“Exigent Mistress.” Eugène Delacroix burst upon Paris at the age of 24 when he exhibited in the Salon his tortured scene of hell, Dante and Virgil. The painting was viciously attacked by some of the critics, but the government of France bought it all the same—a purchase so out of character for bureaucratic establishments as to inspire a generally accepted conjecture that Delacroix was the illegitimate son of Talleyrand, the French foreign minister.

In his famous Journal, Delacroix records a number of love affairs, but the only one that lasted was with his “exigent mistress,” painting. Wherever he looked—into an overcast sky, at a news item about a Turkish massacre, into the fragile face of his friend Chopin, or even into his own mirror—he saw things that addressed themselves “to the most intimate part of the soul.” He was an expert draftsman who told his students, “If you are not clever enough to do a sketch of a man throwing himself out of a window during the time it takes him to fall from the fourth floor to the ground, you will never be able to do the big stuff.” Yet he was above all the master of color who raised it, as the late Walter Pach said, “from an accessory to a completely expressive role”—from prop, that is, to performer.

“Catos & Brutuses.” Compared with other artists, his travels were offbeat. He made no pilgrimage to Greece or Rome; instead he went to England, where he fell under the spell of the landscapists, notably Constable, who taught him how to give color increased intensity by breaking it up into fragments so that it would seem to vibrate. He found the glories of Greece and Rome not in the marble masterpieces of museums but in the antique civilization of Morocco, where man seemed to him to be so many “Catos and Brutuses.” Whereas in other artists a love of antiquity resulted in a cool neoclassicism, it became in Delacroix a lush and dazzling orientalism. Similarly—though Delacroix’s French conscience hated to admit it—he found nothing to move him in the measured verses of Racine but a whole world of inspiration in the hot-blooded visions of Shakespeare.

The fact that Delacroix drew on literary sources has confounded modern critics, for today storytelling is, as Critic Roy McMullen has pointed out, “the hobgoblin of modernism: since 1863 painters have been ashamed of reading.” The question then arises as to whether Delacroix was essentially a Renaissance artist with whom the Renaissance tradition came to an end, or whether his chief importance lies in his being a precursor of modernism. The answer, says Art Historian Françoise Cachin, is that he was both, for he greatly influenced the generation that made the break between painting and literature final.

“Most Beautiful Palette.” The impressionists and Cezanne, says Critic Cachin, insisted that Delacroix had “the most beautiful palette in French painting.” Rodin admired him “as the painter of movement,” and Renoir considered Delacroix “the essential link” between him and Rubens and Titian. Seurat said of his theory of color that “it represents the most rigorous application of scientific principles interpreted through a personality.” Matisse and Van Gogh had Delacroix reproductions on their walls, and Kandinsky was in debt to Delacroix when he began formulating his theory on the correlation of color and the states of the human soul.

Thus 100 years after his death, Delacroix is getting the best of both reputations. Like today’s action painters, he felt that a painting had a life of its own and that the artist “must always take into account improvisation.” But if a work of art was an object with independent life, it was also a window into the heart. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “The smile of a dying man! The look in the mother’s eyes! The embraces of despair! Precious realm of painting! That silent power that speaks at first only to the eyes and then seizes and captivates every faculty of the soul!”

* Including a vivid Pictorial Biography by Yvonne Deslandres (Viking).