Word: delacroix
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...egotistical collection," says Saint Laurent. "I thought like a painter or a writer. I put in it all I had in me, all my favorite painters-Vermeer, Delacroix, Ingres, La Tour, Rembrandt. It's the collection of a painter. Then there is the theatrical side-I love the opera and the music hall, and there was some of that. Then I put in my favorite heroines, like Madame Bovary and Catherine of Russia...
...show by that master: blind beggars, stumpy as turnips, caterwauling for alms in the street; an old woman mumbling to her cat; a man in a clownish cap behind a railing, staring from the page with a dreadful mixture of rhetoric and solipsism, entitled simply Lecura - madness. To see Delacroix's watercolor sketch of a tiger, lying on some imaginary ridge in Algeria with the ripples of its striped back imitating the profile of mountains in the background, is to be reminded how that animal - an embodiment of natural force to the Romantics - was for Delacroix akin...
...ideas of Rousseau transmuted him into a red-skinned Cato or Brutus garbed in instinctive rectitude. And as he began to perish along the white frontier, the theme of racial destruction in a wild, vast landscape evoked lamentations from romantic artists who had never been there-especially from Delacroix, whose Les Natchez, 1824-35, is an American cousin to his Massacre at Chios...
...subject matter is probably as much the cause. Matisse and Picasso got away with graceful, terse summarizations of the female nude. And Van Gogh is said to be the individual talent interacting with the artistic tradition when he hacked out the bad imitations of Delacroix and Rembrandt. But because Lichtenstein glorifies and celebrates the succinct essence of hamburgers, comic strips and warehouses, because he reworks Monet's Haystacks and Picasso's Bull with the slick techniques of modern graphics, he is lowered to insultable altitudes--down from the ivory tower of unintelligibility which protects most artists, thanks to the vanity...
...same token, the classic-romantic pigeonholes have conspired to make us think of neoclassical art as sensually diluted. A sharp contour supposedly driveth out lust. Of course it does not, and the sensuality of a Delacroix nude seems quite uncomplicated beside the grandiose perversity of Ingres's Jupiter and Thetis. That monument of ivory and fulgid blue, with the nymph's body twining in supplication up the huge patriarchal block of a torso, achieves a sexual pitch within its insistent abstraction that not even Matisse could rival...