Eugene Delacroix is one of the deities of 19th century painting, and his career is usually presented as one half of an art-historical dogfight. His color-laden, proto-modern paintings pitted him against the crisply antique, neo-classicism of Ingres, who was a little bit older than him. Anyone who took Art History 101 knows that Delacroix was the founder of Romanticism. But the label is confusing. He does not tap into the kind of emotion we associate with inwardness or introspection. Rather, his imagination favored the panoramic and war-torn, and his way with color made him a hero to Cezanne, Picasso and other modernists.
Born in 1898, a decade after the French Revolution, Delacroix might be called an action painter. Although he exhibited at the Paris Salon and adhered to proper subjects – i.e., religion, literature and history – his imagery is dense with upheaval. He painted wars and lion hunts, scenes in which horses rear up on the hind legs and swords slice through space. He traveled to North Africa and thrilled to its otherness, its not-France-ness, returning home to Paris to depict figures in exotic gold garments and those pointy slippers known as “babouches.”
The Delacroix show that opens at the Metropolitan Museum on September 17, has received enormous advance publicity. Shown at the Louvre in a different version earlier this year, it reportedly drew more visitors than any exhibition in the museum’s history. The Met, alas, excludes most of Delacroix’s most celebrated paintings, which have been deemed too fragile to travel across the Atlantic. Among the omissions are his “Barque of Dante,” “Young Orphan Girl in the Cemetery,” and “Liberty Leading the People,” that icon of democracy-in-progress. Delacroix, more than any other artist, visualized the ideals of the French people. The valiantly marching figure who dominates “Liberty” is both a political allegory and a real woman whose buxom, shirt-less chest says something about the French belief in the right to a sensual life.
The absence of these major works dials down the mood of the Met show, which feels less like a crowd-pleaser than a quietly rewarding, scholarly show. Still, there are stunners. Your heart will race when you’re standing before “Women of Algiers in their Apartment.” A large, horizontal painting, it takes you inside a shadowy den, where two women sit side by side on the floor, perhaps smoking hash, and two other women appear in other parts of the room. There is no visible connection between any of the figures, and nothing much seems to be happening here. When you look at it, you’re reminded of Picasso’s later harem scene, “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” another radical painting about a group of women who exist to entertain the male gaze. Good thing Delacroix will never have to answer to the #MeToo movement.