Delacroix

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

For the first time in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eugène Delacroix receives an extraordinary retrospective that has been made possible through coordination with The Louvre in Paris, France. Delacroix is a profoundly phenomenal exhibition that features over 150 paintings, drawings, prints and manuscripts. Although his paintings appear in museums around the world, Delacroix’s works are heavily concentrated in the painting galleries of The Louvre, and remain largely unseen to those who are unable to travel there. Thus writing about Delacroix is a delicate matter.

While this exhibition may initially appear both Romantic and old school, the paintings and drawings on view reveal the stylistic evolution of an artist who grew up during the French Revolution and the wake of the one in America, that separated church from state and established an independent, secular society. Delacroix’s representations of military battles as well as tigers, horses, flowers and the Orient, evoke the historic writings of Stendhal and Gustave Flaubert.

Only later, after France had established itself as the first successful democracy in Europe, were Delacroix’s paintings considered to be a bridge to the early Modern era, when new art forms were sought for a secular society. Throughout Delacroix wavy lines and vibrant, colorful brush strokes seem to vaguely reference back to El Greco’s Mannerist style.

But these paintings, wherein Delacroix heightens the sense of scale and depth through the layering of quick dancing lines, are packed with earth-bound movement. Gravity is the anchor of these experiences that are widely received and felt, an effect of the artist’s meticulous rendering of visual illusion.

Therefore while flora, fauna, animals and landscapes are portrayed lyrically, to suggest real-time movement, the subject matter comes alive so that Delacroix becomes a feast for the eyes that retrain one’s vision synonymously with a better knowledge of history. Although the artist spent his youth observing nations fight against church dominance, in order to move away from Europe’s God-given, divine-right past, none of Delacroix’s paintings portray a specific, singular hero.

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