Eugène Delacroix
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (April 26, 1798 – August 13, 1863) was the most important of the French Romantic painters. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of color profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. He was a member of the Club des Hashischins and is best remembered for his 1827 painting The Death of Sardanapalus.
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Baudelaire on Delacroix
- Baudelaire worshipped the [Delacroix] as a dark god: "Delacroix, lake of blood, haunted by evil angels," he called him. Delacroix didn't agree with everything Baudelaire wrote about him. He was baffled when the poet, who also translated Edgar Allan Poe's horror stories, compared his favourite painter to his favourite writer. [...] Poe was an alcoholic who married his child cousin and was found dying in the streets of Baltimore. Delacroix was not a bohemian. But his imagination was the source of all modern art's depravity. --Jonathan Jones via http://arts.guardian.co.uk/portrait/story/0,,740389,00.html [May 2006]
An originator of modern art
Baudelaire on Delacroix as the originator of modern art: "The majority of the public have long since, indeed from his very first work, dubbed him leader of the modern school." --Charles Baudelaire.
It is from Delacroix that the line of progressive modernism extends directly to Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet. In the conservative view, Delacroix's Romanticism, Courbet's Realism, and Manet's Naturalism were all manifestations of the cult of ugliness that opposed the Academic ideal of the beautiful. Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet, were each in turn accused by conservatives of carrying on subversive work that was intended to undermine the State. --Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe via http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/artartists/modernism.html [May 2006]
Maurice Barrés on Delacroix
Not without reason was Delacroix the object of a veritable cult on the part of Maurice Barrès. "Du sang, de la volupté, de la mort" might well be the motto of his work." --The Romantic Agony
Famous paintings
