Art: Great Journal

Last week students and lovers of art could turn to one of the richest accounts ever written of an artist in Europe, the monumental Journal of Eugene Delacroix, translated for the first time into English by able, devoted Art Critic Walter Pach.*

Delacroix, whom Renoir called the greatest artist of the French school, died in 1863 after having fought for a lifetime against the flawless but colorless classicism upheld by his great contemporary, Ingres. His three most important mural jobs, in the Chamber of Deputies, the Church of St. Sulpice and the ceiling of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, are among the few French masterpieces in this medium. With the steady growth of his influence, other paintings by him have been advanced until they now occupy a third of “the line,” or tier of honor, in the gallery of the Louvre given to 19th Century French artists. To superficial moderns these big canvases, full of exotic or heroic action, may seem uncongenial, but they and the 1,500-page Journal have been deeply esteemed and studied by almost every serious French artist from Monte to Matisse. Readers of the Journal, distilled to 700 pages by Translator Pach, will have no difficulty in understanding why.

Born in 1798, Delacroix had an adventurous infancy. He was dropped from a ship’s side by one careless nurse, nearly burnt up by another, and when he reached the age of reason came close to hanging himself in imitation of an engraving. From his German mother Delacroix may have inherited the responsiveness to Flemish art which showed itself in a life-long admiration for Rubens. His first masterpiece, Dante and Vergil, which was exhibited when he was 24, was described by his master as “Rubens chastened.” Beginning his journal in that year, Delacroix scribbled down a daily medley of ambitions, resolves, despairs, descriptions of his casual or palpitant love affairs which would sound like the model diary of a Young Romantic Genius were it not for an extraordinary vein of hardheaded observation.

From this early section the Journal jumps to 1832, when Delacroix accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco. His notes on the most vivid adventure of his life are clipped, wholly objective, brilliantly businesslike, set down only to help him remember details of what he saw. Some of them are like a modern Imagist poem or a sketch for a cinema continuity: “The entrance to the castle: The Guardsmen in the court, the faÇade, the lane between two walls. At the end, under a sort of vault, men seated, making a brown silhouette against a bit of sky.”

By 1847 Delacroix was an established painter, a friend of Chopin, Baudelaire, George Sand, already engaged in the speculations and experiments with color and form which have made many critics consider him the father of all modern painting. Copious, passionate, acute, the entries are studded with keen sidelights on Paris society, on music, the theatre, politics and science as well as art.

*Covici-Friede ($7.50).