Word: delacroix
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...allegory and moral precept was quite new in the 1860s, when Degas was coming to maturity as a painter. The highest art was still history painting, in which France had reigned supreme; but since 1855 practically the whole generation of history painters on whom this elevation depended -- above all, Delacroix and Ingres -- had died, and no one seemed fit to replace them. French critics and artists alike, and conservative ones in particular, felt a tremor of crisis, & as others would a century later as the masters of modernism died off. After them, what could sustain the momentum of culture...
...exponent had been the man Degas most revered, Ingres. Yet their exquisite clarity of profile could not have been achieved without Ingres's example. In them, the great synthesis between two approaches that 30 years before had been considered the opposed poles of French art -- Ingres's classical line, Delacroix's romantic color -- is achieved. There is no clearer instance of the way in which true innovators like Degas do not destroy the past (as the mythology of avant-gardism insisted): they amplify...
...Brettell show by exhaustive research, is mostly moonshine. The brute of fiction was not only a superbly intelligent painter but also a writer who left, as Brettell points out, the "largest and most important body of texts, illustrated and otherwise, produced by any great artist in France since . . . Delacroix . . . That he has always been treated as a businessman-turned-artist rather than an artist- turned-writer shows the extent to which his literary achievement has been undervalued...
...growing consensus even among practitioners that contemporary abstract art bores the hell out of people. Stella attributes this yawning chasm between potential and performance to the flat, two-dimensional quality of the abstraction of the 1970s and '80s, heir to the tradition of highly colored "decorative" paintings exemplified by Delacroix and Malevich...
...rural sentimentalists like Jules Breton, culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion). On the right are academic idealism and romanticism, Ingres and his heirs, Delacroix and his, smooth recipes of Grecian flesh and turbulent Byronic visions of nature. Beyond Courbet on the left, you have Manet; beyond Thomas Couture on the right, there is Degas. To stand in the sculpture-avenue between them, savoring the confrontation, framed in their respective portals, of Manet's Dejeuner...