The exhibit of paintings by Delacroix and other late 19th century artists on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art argues this thesis: Delacroix's influence is integral to the work of later painters such as Renoir, Redon, Degas, and Cezanne. This claim derives from John Canaday's famous book, Mainstreams of Modern Art, an art history narrative that commences with David and ends with Picasso and Kandinsky. For Canaday, art's mainstream flowed through Paris and Delacroix (with Gericault) was a transitional painter, a bridge between David's impassioned classicism and the early Impressionists. This argument is based on Delacroix's highly visible and ebullient brush stroke -- the artists slathers paint onto his canvases in thick, vivid swaths and leaves the surface of his paintings, apparently, unfinished, that is, serrated with ridges of bright pigment. Delacroix's subject matter is as vehement as his attack on the canvas -- he begins his career illustrating violent episodes in the poetry of Byron (rapes and massacres) and ends his career with a final painting made in 1863 depicting a nasty little skirmish in the mountains of north Africa. Although many French painters in the mid-19th century claimed Delacroix's influence as decisive, in fact, it is not easy to perceive and the show is seems unpersuasive to me -- Redon's works, at least as presented in this show, don't look anything like Delacroix. Similarly, early paintings by Cezanne and Degas display traces of Delacroix's violent and Romantic subject matter but are far more cerebral, more sophisticated in their design, than the rather primitive and exuberant works by the earlier painter. To the extent that later painters copied Delacroix's subject matter -- particularly his paintings showing north Africa, a coincidence of subject doesn't really show influence: various painters essayed views of Tangiers, for instance, but this doesn't necessarily show anything other than the fact that a walled Moroccan city by the sea is a picturesque thing to paint and that canvases on that subject were probably readily saleable. The curious thing about the show, accordingly, is that many Impressionist or proto-Impressionist painters claimed allegiance to Delacroix, but this seems merely lip-service -- in fact, their own homages to the painter are very different in form, style, texture, and feeling than the work of the man they claimed as master.
The wall labels in the MIA show talk about "emulation". The younger artists emulated Delacroix's work and, I think, that word is useful in considering the relationship between the paintings in the show. By all canons of criticism except one, Delacroix is not a good painter -- indeed, the artist's works have always been a "hard sell" to me. Delacroix's draftsmanship is very clumsy and his grasp of the human body seems amateurish. The artist's famously agitated tigers either look like Chinese gargoyles or stuffed cats with bulging cartoonish eyes. His landscapes are shadowy daubs and Delacroix never seems to have mastered perspective. In his final painting made in 1863 of the Berber tribes fighting, a canvas that I greatly admire, the artist is completely unable to figure out how to make his figures recede in space. The exotic warriors are essentially decals pasted onto a poorly designed and irrational landscape. In the default of rigorous pictorial design, draftsmanship, and anatomical accuracy, Delacroix offers vivid, explosive colors and something like "authenticity." It is, in fact, easy to trace a line from Delacroix's vivid and expressive, if poorly represented, scenes of violence to Jackson Pollock's canvases -- Delacroix institutes, I think, the cult of authenticity. The man can't paint but he wears his multi-colored heart, leaking pigment, all over his sleeve. Accordingly, Delacroix seems to have been a youthful enthusiasm for the other artists featured in the show. Like some rock-and-roll or country-western music, Delacroix's seemingly artless paintings suggest that anyone who has enough heart and desire can make an interesting canvas -- if you can play three chords, you can be a rock star; if you can smear paint on a stretched canvas with exuberant gestures, you can be an artist. Accordingly, I sense that Delacroix for highly sophisticated artists like Cezanne and Degas was a youthful enthusiasm -- he's the kind of artist that suggests to the viewer this proposition: I could do this myself. But youthful enthusiasms are readily and quickly outgrown. Once Cezanne and Degas learned to paint in their own styles, all traces of Delacroix's influence vanish entirely. Thus, Delacroix seems to have been a painter who encouraged younger artists to be bold and to paint experimentally. The apprentice works of Cezanne and Degas, as might be expected, aren't very good and don't even show much trace of the brilliance of these artist's later careers -- thus, to the extent that Delacroix influenced Cezanne and Degas, he seems to have influenced them to paint badly. Only after outgrowing Delacroix's influence, did this artists come into their own. (In fairness to Delacroix, I should note that a film accompanying the show makes this important point -- to his young admirers, Delacroix was most importantly a painter of murals, for instance in the Church of St. Sulpice. Murals, particularly the dome and ceiling panels in a place like St. Sulpice were made to be seen from a distance and not closely studied. Delacroix vivid colors and broad, expansive, and melodramatic posturing are effective when seen from a vantage 100 feet away.)
Degas painted several completely uncharacteristic "history" paintings under the influence of Delacroix. One of these paintings, showing youths competing in Sparta, is large, ambitious, and shows poor draftsmanship -- already, Degas' palette, later heavily influenced by pastels and water-colors, is vastly more sophisticated than Delacroix' flamboyant blood-reds and shadowy, russet landscapes. One of Degas' wonderful paintings of young dancers is included in the show -- it is a mature work by Degas and looks nothing at all like Delacroix; Degas' compositional sense is photographic, snapshot-like whereas Delacroix poses everyone in the most theatrical way possible -- it is as if we are staring at a group of provincial actors appearing in a bad play. Similarly, the show juxtaposes some of Delacroix's scenes of violent action with a weird, large canvas by Cezanne called "Abduction." In Cezanne's painting, a bizarre muscle-bound figure seems to be carrying away a pale maiden -- it's a prototype for monster movies in which a swooning actress is abducted by a staggering and hideous monster. Cezanne's drawing of the abductor is so grotesquely bad as to be risible -- the figure is all lumpy with big misplaced muscles like tumors. The picture may be influenced by Delacroix, but it's a catastrophe. On another wall, a Delacroix painting of bathers is shown next to a small, crystalline and elegant Cezanne canvas of the same subject. Delacroix's water is completely unpersuasive, a sort of silky carpet into which his nudes, females with heavy hips and small breasts, are sinking -- the picture is pretty, but unsuccessful. It simply doesn't look wet at all. Cezanne's picture, a turquoise geometry of vertical vector-like trees and stalking nude giantesses is equally unrealistic but the picture is completely successful on its own semi-abstract terms and totally incongruent to Delacroix's painting.
The show contains a late copy of Delacroix's most famous and sadistic painting "The Death of Sardanapulus" -- it was a pleasure for me to stand near the dozent attempting to explain to a group of fifth graders what was going on in that painting. "What is the man doing to that girl?" one of the boys quite reasonably asked. The painting is extraordinary in any format, an allegory of the sadistic solipsism of the imagination, and the perfect marriage of Delacroix's painterly zealotry with the violent subject matter presented. The force of the image is so great that it doesn't matter that Delacroix can't get the perspective right and just sticks the pale writhing victims of the tyrant onto the canvas like stamps in a stamp book. A "Lamentation" shows one of the Mary's peeping under Christ's shroud to inspect his genitals -- a bizarre image that is, perhaps, a mistake in the way Delacroix painted the gesture. Delacroix's images of Tangiers show a white, castellated city occupying a crevasse in a mountain escarpment something like an Alaskan or Norwegian glacier hovering over a fjord. The landscape except for the city is just a blur of grey and brown pigment, painted without any interest whatsoever -- indeed, in many of Delacroix's paintings vast parts of the canvas seem to have been completely disregarded by the artist, he just smears them with nondescript colors to better highlight the action in the center or lower part of the painting. The artist's painting of "The Convulsionists of Tangiers", owned by the MIA, dramatically demonstrates Delacroix's weaknesses as a draftsman. At the center of the picture, one figure's head, prominently displayed, can not be plausibly connected with any body shown in the image -- the head seems to float, thrust forward, in empty air. The "Convulsionists" although not one of favorite pictures, seems to me successful on its own terms -- the artist's objective was expressionist: he wants to convey to you the sense of the uncanny and eerie aspects of this north African religious cult and the strangely disembodied head creates in the spectator a distinct sense of unease. Similarly, the final canvas painted by Delacroix, the smoky battle of Berbers in the mountains, although incoherent, is effective as well -- the picture with its vignettes of disconnected action, its prosaic mountain setting, something like the flats for a mid-century opera, and the smoky, impressionist void at the center of the image -- a pale fog in which we can only slightly see agitated figures is entirely successful and persuasive as an expressionistic account of the chaotic battle. The fact that the composition doesn't really make sense doesn't matter.
A collection of many Japanese woodcuts, so-called Shin Hanga ("New Print") graphics, is pretty, highly accomplished, and technically impressive. But the pictures are mostly uninteresting images of 'pretty women' and Kabuki actors. The "pretty women" pictures, in particular, verge on kitsch. Upstairs, there is a small exhibit of aquatints, all of them silky, menacing, and exceptionally beautiful -- in particular, there are some horrific war images by both Goya and Otto Dix. Goya's nightmare image called "Bobolicon" ("Simpleton") in which a misshapen clown-shaped colossus confronts a man who is hiding behind a strangely passive, possibly dead, and shrouded woman is the sort of picture that once seen can not be forgotten.
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