David to Delacroix  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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David to Delacroix (1952) is a book by Walter Friedlaender.

Excerpts[1]

Two main currents appear in French painting after the sixteenth century: the rational and the irrational. The first is apt to be moralizing and didactic; the second is free of such ethical tendencies. The rational trend stems from France's classical epoch, the seventeenth century, and continues, with more or less strength, throughout the eighteenth; the irrational current is less constant, but appears most splendidly in the first half of the eighteenth century. Both, though in a variety of transformations and mixtures, can be recognized in the complicated structure of French painting of the nineteenth century and continue even to our own day.

The battle between the Poussinistes and the Rubenistes which around the end of the seventeenth century produced a whole literature of bitter diatribes (more than the famous querelle des anciens et des modernes of the literary world) is a part of this greater struggle [between rationality and irrationality], really the first open conflict. For though the discussions were apparently concerned with the technical and the visual drawing versus color, calm versus movement, sharply focused action of a few figures versus scattered crowding the real battle was between discipline and morality on the one side and amoral slackening of rules and subjective irrationality on the other. The continuation of this deep cleavage even in the nineteenth century is seen in the bitter rivalry between Ingres and Delacroix. Even for them the real question was not one of mere formal laws. For Ingres, Delacroix, as the representative genius of colorism, was manifestly the Devil; "it smells of brimstone," he once said when he came upon Delacroix in a Salon. Ingres was the self-appointed protector not only of linearism and classical tradition, but of morality and reason as well. Strangely enough, in the most extreme academic credo, line and linear abstraction embodied something moral, lawful, and universal, and every descent into the coloristic and irrational was a heresy and a moral aberration that must be strenuously combatted. Similar though less sharply expressed oppositions are to be found in later French painting.