Word: delacroix
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FRANCE'S famed Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) once told an art student: "If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth story to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works." Delacroix's aim, as his friend French Poet Charles Baudelaire put it more precisely, was "to execute quickly enough and with sufficient sureness so as not to allow any element in the intensity of an act or idea to be lost." To this end Delacroix worked continually...
Paradoxically, while he sketched rapidly, Delacroix spent eight months in preliminary studies for a single painting, The Massacre at Scio. In many ways, he approached painting itself as a great performer approaches music; he believed that only endless practice prepares the artist for the grand performance when he must soar above pedestrian problems of technique. He was in continual revolt against the neoclassic manner that Ingres had inherited from Napoleon's court painter. David. To find a counterbalance, Delacroix went back to Rubens' tumultuous, baroque style. A cold, diffident man in private life, he drew his inspiration from...
Though in his day Delacroix won even Goethe's praise for his Faust drawings, much of his theatrical subject matter-triumphant crusaders, fierce sultans and pashas, sultry harem girls-today seems mawkish. Probably only his scenes drawn on the barricades during the 1830 revolution still hold men's imagination. But if Delacroix's content is dated, his art is not. He attacked his craft with an iron will, raising color to a central, expressive role and making discoveries in form and line that still delight...
Settling & Overflowing. But in old age Picasso is developing a new and airier touch. As charming as anything in the Louvre's show were 14 recent variations on The Women of Algiers, a famous harem picture by Delacroix. The variations, painted in a brief, 64-day period last winter, flung open the shutters of Delacroix's exotic little dream world. Some of the "variations" verged on parodies, both of Delacroix and of Matisse. (Said Picasso to a friend after Matisse died: "I will try to continue his work.") More intriguing to curiosity seekers was another recent work. Picasso...
...France of the same period, great painters turned easily to problems of illustration. Eugène Delacroix, a Romantic from his flowing locks to his patent leather pumps, found a congenial subject in Hamlet. Honoré Daumier brought his genius for social satire to a masterpiece in the same genre: Don Quixote. And Edouard Manet made a lithograph after Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven that would have delighted would-be-Parisian Poe's anxious heart...