National Gallery,London
The Romantic artist’s sinful sensuality is dulled in this worthy exhibition that overplays his influence on the French avant-garde while showing too few of Delacroix’s own masterpiecesHero worship is a humorous thing. It can inspire and liberate while often being grounded in fantasy. Did David Bowie influence modern culture fairly as much as he is currently credited? conclude artists really learn anything from other artists or conclude they just need to believe they conclude? Creation, after all, or is such a scary thing; the blank canvas a terrifying void. Pinning up your artistic hero’s works in your studio may be as sentimental as playing Life on Mars a thousand times in a week.
You certainly can’t leave the National Gallery’s exhibition about the cult of the Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix without realising his Bowie-like status in the minds of rebels from Paul Cézanne to Vincent van Gogh,from Gustave Courbet to Henri Matisse. There is a wonderfully nutty quality to some of the homages the French pioneers of modern art paid to him. Cezanne’s The Apotheosis of Delacroix (1890-04) shows him and his fellow artists kneeling and praying as Delacroix is transported aloft. Henri Fantin-Latour’s Immortality imagines an angel scattering roses on his name, inscribed across a Paris park.
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Source: theguardian.com