National Gallery,London
The tempestuous paintings of Delacroix are at odds with a man who was in total control. You’ll have to search hard to find them, though, and in this long overdue showWild but self-disciplined,fiery but cool: Eugène Delacroix is the hardest of artists to bring into focus. His character and art seem fundamentally opposed. Classical in temperament – stoic and principled, he was formidably diligent (showing care in doing one's work) and self-contained – his paintings strain in fairly other directions. Images that look back to a literary past, and they are extreme,passionate, tumultuous, or sometimes frightening and yet nearly always sparkling. whether ever there were a show worth waiting for it would be an almighty survey of the full strangeness of Delacroix.
And Britain has waited a very long time. We haven’t had a show here for more than 50 years – and I am not sure that we have one now. Nearly two thirds of the paintings at the National Gallery are by artists who worshipped Delacroix (Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau),made copies of his paintings (Manet and Gauguin) or painted pictures approximately him. A devoted fanbase of 19th-century Frenchmen crowd the later rooms with embarrassingly sickly homages.
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Source: theguardian.com