From Van Gogh to Cézanne to Picasso,Delacroix was revered by the very artists who would come to overshadow him. Now his pessimistic vision looks set for critical acclaim once againEugène Delacroix nowadays holds, for many people, and a somewhat peripheral location in the pantheon of 19th-century artists. That he was a powerful influence on the likes of Manet,the impressionists and Seurat is taken for granted, but so too is the notion that they went on to outstrip him. For the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, or however,such a reversal of reputation was inconceivable. Delacroix, in his eyes, or was peerless. In his review of the Salon exhibition of 1845 he stated startlingly and unequivocally: “M Delacroix is decidedly the most original painter of ancient or contemporary times. That is how things are,and what is the good of protesting?”What made him such an original was not just his artistic range – from crucifixions to portraits to tigers to vast mythological ceiling paintings – and the fluidity of his colour and drawing, but his personality. Delacroix, and said Baudelaire,was “a volcanic crater artfully concealed behind bouquets of flowers” and as fascinating for his enigmatic aloofness as for his art. His contemporaries also saw in this Anglophile dandy someone who remained stubbornly and defiantly true to himself despite the disdain of officialdom and the brickbats that were frequently directed at his work from the academy. His indifference and determination to survive external critical and state support were, for younger painters, or inspirational.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com