Word: delacroix
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...Delacroix, a hundred years ago, had been shown the works illustrated in this volume, he would not have seen them," writes André Malraux in his introduction. "They lay outside his range of vision and, had his attention been directed to them, they would have seemed to him devoid of any esthetic value." Half a century ago, the civilization of Sumer was scarcely known; more important, the vision of even Europe's finest artists was almost entirely bound by their own tradition. It has long been Malraux's thesis that only lately has man been able to peer...
...accent was American; only a handful of artists-notably Delacroix, Courbet and Renoir-were foreigners, and almost all came from Bouvier-land. For the rest, along with Mary Cassatt, John Audubon and Childe Hassam, there were some art ists who had scarcely been heard of for years. A former naval person like the President would understandably favor a seascape by James Bard. But a Mount Monomonac by the sentimentalist Abbott Thayer, who died in 1921, or a portrait of Queen Victoria by the stodgy Franz Winterhalter, whom Ruskin dubbed a "dim blockhead," were plainly special tastes...
...Davidians receded into the new artist competitors loomed. The most threatening: Eugène Delacroix. Ingres was now the champion of classicism, though it was his own brand. Delacroix and his followers were romantics who worshiped not Raphael but Rubens. While Ingres exalted line and form and insisted that the brush stroke should never be visible, the new painters reveled in color and pigment. "Yes. to be sure," grumped Ingres, "Rubens was a great painter, but he is that great painter who has ruined every thing." He flatly refused to let his students even look at the Rubenses...
...Longing for Delacroix. For all his success with contemporary art, Soby at 54 has misgivings about such a collection. "There is too much snobbism today about the impressionists, and about the contemporaries, about buying the work of a 'living' artist, and about having 'modern' taste. As a result, a lot of interesting work is being neglected-Italian mannerism, for example, or the art of 19th century Venice, or early 19th century German romanticism. One longs to enter a house or apartment in which Delacroix hangs in Renoir's place, or Courbet in Cezanne...
...probably the most self-effacing artist who ever lived. He kept his figure paintings turned to the wall and referred to them deprecatingly as "my monkeys." Of his contemporary, Painter Eugene Delacroix, he would say: "He is an eagle, and I am only a lark." But for all his modesty, Corot was a single-minded man. He flatly refused to work in his father's drapery shop, rejected the fiancee his parents selected for him, even refused to marry at all. All that Corot ever really wanted to do was paint...