Word: delacroix
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...goldsmith. He went to museums and libraries to study stuffed animals and see pictures of them in their natural habitats, visited zoos to watch them in motion, measured their anatomies after they had died. So vividly did Barye give life to his tiny bronzes that his contemporary, the painter Delacroix, once said of him: "I wish I could put a twist in a tiger's tail like that man." Rodin, 44 years younger, claimed Barye as his teacher and artistic father...
Powers of Bitchery. As Elizabeth Bowen's new novel (her first since 1955) opens, the little girls have become sad-eyed, sixtyish English gentlewomen. Dicey is now Dinah Delacroix, a handsome if slightly dotty widow who lives on her Somerset estate in equivocal intimacy with a cross-eyed, 19-year-old Maltese manservant. Remembering the buried treasure chest, she rounds up her long-lost friends and informs them that it is time to dig up the box and rediscover their old happiness...
...fact that Delacroix drew on literary sources has confounded modern critics, for today storytelling is, as Critic Roy McMullen has pointed out, "the hobgoblin of modernism: since 1863 painters have been ashamed of reading." The question then arises as to whether Delacroix was essentially a Renaissance artist with whom the Renaissance tradition came to an end, or whether his chief importance lies in his being a precursor of modernism. The answer, says Art Historian Françoise Cachin, is that he was both, for he greatly influenced the generation that made the break between painting and literature final...
...Most Beautiful Palette." The impressionists and Cezanne, says Critic Cachin, insisted that Delacroix had "the most beautiful palette in French painting." Rodin admired him "as the painter of movement," and Renoir considered Delacroix "the essential link" between him and Rubens and Titian. Seurat said of his theory of color that "it represents the most rigorous application of scientific principles interpreted through a personality." Matisse and Van Gogh had Delacroix reproductions on their walls, and Kandinsky was in debt to Delacroix when he began formulating his theory on the correlation of color and the states of the human soul...
Thus 100 years after his death, Delacroix is getting the best of both reputations. Like today's action painters, he felt that a painting had a life of its own and that the artist "must always take into account improvisation." But if a work of art was an object with independent life, it was also a window into the heart. "Oh!" he exclaimed. "The smile of a dying man! The look in the mother's eyes! The embraces of despair! Precious realm of painting! That silent power that speaks at first only to the eyes and then seizes...