Word: delacroix
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What did he find there? Basically confirmation, in the real world, of the shape of his own temperament. The leader of the Romantic movement in French painting, Delacroix was both fervid and exceptionally contained. He adored energy -- the fury of stallions rearing and biting one another in a stable, ignoring the efforts of their Arab grooms; the flash in a fighter's eye; the tensed muscles of a lion. He drank color: sonorous reds and browns, flashes of green, veils of cold blue -- a palette he had learned from Rubens. But at the same time he knew, as his idols...
...which is lacking among ourselves in the gravest circumstances." Years later he confided in a letter to a friend that "it was among these people that I really discovered for myself the beauty of antiquity." And not only of antiquity, either. De Mornay was amused to see that when Delacroix was finally admitted to a harem, he became so overexcited that he had to be calmed down with sorbets...
...Delacroix, this antiquity involved color, as for Ingres -- his opposite -- it did not. David and Ingres had given France a colorless antiquity, an abstracted classicism of white marble. What Delacroix got from the arts of Morocco -- woven and dyed fabrics, leather, tiles and pots -- was a sense of extraordinarily vibrant and free color, "barbaric" in French eyes but wholly natural (or so he now realized...
...them, it pointed to abstraction. But in Delacroix's case it was supported by an intimate sense of detail. Nowhere does Delacroix's curiosity about what he saw reveal itself more fully than in the Moroccan drawings. He was determined to get everything right, to bring back exact memory in an age before photography: the weave of a coarse djellaba conveyed in thin licks of wash; the violent white light on a wall; a chaotic still life of saddles, blankets and flintlocks piled in the corner of a guardhouse behind a pair of sleeping soldiers, whose robes give them...
After Morocco, Delacroix lost whatever interest he might once have felt in the mandatory artist's trip to Italy. "Rome is no longer in Rome," he would say. "The Romans and Greeks are here at my door, and I know them face-on; the marbles are truth itself, but you have to know how to read them, and we poor moderns have only seen hieroglyphs in them." Morocco saved him from the abstraction that had weakened French responses to the classic. A painting like his Military Exercises of the Moroccans (1832) shows Delacroix using real life -- the ceremonial charge...