Word: delacroix
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...than it ever had before, or would again. So did its cultural surface, especially in painting, which moved, as it were, from the pink thighs of Boucher's Miss O'Murphy to the martial sinews of David's Horatii and thence to the tumescent flesh of Delacroix's slave girls almost within the lifetime of one man. Yet these tremendous years of the Revolution, the Directorate and the Empire have long been the art historian's Bermuda Triangle. They are crudely charted with the routine marks "classical" and "romantic," shoaled with contradiction, ready to sink...
...neoclassicists Jean-François-Pierre Peyron and Jean Germain Drouais. The subject matter runs from the grandest of historical paintings to an eccentric still life with stuffed birds; the figures, from a swooning and epicene Death of Hyacinth by Jean Broc to the passionate and despairing cragginess of Delacroix's Christ in the Garden of Olives, 1827 (see color page...
Meanwhile, the seeds of "romanticism" were being laid within the authoritarian gloire of the Empire. Where did the impulse toward exotic subjects, far travel and weird archaeologies, which would propel Delacroix to Algiers, begin? The show's thesis is that it was fixed in the French imagination by Napoleon's campaigns, especially by the invasion of Egypt. The lure of the crag and the mystery of the Pyramids were Napoleonic properties; and when Hubert Robert, in 1798, took a maypole dance in Arcady and transformed it into a ring of nymphs dancing around an eroded and indecently suggestive...
...painted disaster ep ics in the 18th and 19th centuries had been laid, even down to the kind of horses. Rubens' standard horse, a prancing, thick-barrelled animal with nervous fet locks, cascading tail, wild, rolling eyes and distended nostrils, was repeated by Géricault and Delacroix until it became the very symbol of the romantics' sense of organic energy. In portraiture, Rubens' sense of the grand manner and his way of putting figures convincingly within nature would deeply affect both Gainsborough and Reynolds, the leading English art theorist of his time. Reynolds greatly admired Rubens...
...society of the elect united by love (which is equally the root of the paradise myth) continued through Watteau's colleagues and imitators, Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Pater - in The Dance (circa 1730) - Nicolas Lancret and the rest. Nor was it altogether lost with the French Revolution. Delacroix, whose painfully stiff early imitations of Rubens (like Henri IV Conferring the Regency on Marie de' Medici) are much to the fore in this show, was able in maturity to go back to his great prototype and produce such majestically sensual works as Turkish Women Bathing (1854), an outdoor seraglio...