Западноевропейское искусство от Хогарта до Сальвадора Дали - страница 10

Delacroix's next major work the Massacre at Chios, of 1824, was not easily accepted. The subject was an incident from the Greek wars of liberation against the Turks, which had excited the sympathies of Romantic spirit everywhere. The foreground is scattered with bodies. The neobaroque composition is diffused in Delacroix's centrifugal curves, which part to display the distant slaughter and conflagration. The observer's sympathies are supposed to be with the sufferings of the Greeks, but their rendering is not convincing. The expressions tend to become standardised; the head of the young woman at the lower left almost repeats that of the dead mother at the lower right. This picture was called the «massacre of painting.» The colour shows a richness and vibrancy not visible in French painting since the Rococo. He brought this huge picture to Paris for the Salon of 1824, and before the exhibition opened he took it down and repainted it in tones emulating those, he found in Constable. From here on, Delacroix's interest in colour was great. He investigated colour contrasts on the canvas and in nature and derived a law – «the more contrast the greater the force.»

With the Death of Sardanapalus as a manifesto of Romanticism, the artist drew down upon himself the disapproval of royal administrators. The legendary subject concerns the last of the Assyrian monarchs, besieged in his palace for two years by the Medes. On hearing that the enemy had at last breached his walls, the king had all his concubines, slaves, and horses slaughtered and his treasures destroyed before his eyes, as he lay upon a couch soon to become his funeral pyre. Lacking the pretext of humanitarianism that justified the Massacre at Chios and other pictures inspired by the Greek struggle for independence, the painting becomes a feast of violence, spread out in glowing colours against the smoke of distant battle. The picture is a phantasmagoria in which no real cruelty is exerted. Faces are paralysed with fear but no blood flows. Quivering female flesh is heaped like flowers or fruit, among the glittering jewels and the fabrics of crimson. In his solitary fantasy the artist, identifying himself in imagination with the king and the executioners, discharges all his creative and destructive energy in an explosion of tones.

The Revolution of 1830, which placed on the throne Louis Philippe, the «Citizen King» brought Delacroix relief from poverty. In 1832 he travelled through North Africa with the French delegation. He was the first major painter of modern times to visit the Islamic world. And this was the only real adventure of his life. Although he had no opportunity to paint, and found even drawing dangerous on account of Islamic hostility to representation, he brought back with him hundreds of sketches in pencil or pen. His memory of exotic sights and colours, his vivid imagination provided him with endless material for paintings for the next thirty years.

Delacroix's memories of North Africa were realised in the Women of Algiers, a picture of exquisite intimacy and charm, painted and exhibited in 1834. This picture had an enormous influence on the Impressionists of the late nineteenth century and on many paintings of the early twentieth century, especially Matisse.

Most of the pictures of North African subjects painted during Delacroix's later years were less tranquil. The Tiger Hunt, of 1854, is typical, with forms and poses born of the artist's imagination. In 1847 Delacroix wrote, «When the colours are right, the lines draw themselves," and so they do, in the movements of the raging animals and furious huntsmen, flowing out from the centre and back again with passionate intensity and perfect logic. Almost weightless, liberated from matter, these late fantasies of violence carry the artist into a phase of free colouristic movement pointing directly toward the twentieth century.

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Eugen Delacroix; Mozart; Dante; Romanticism; Venetian; Virgil; massacre; Chios; Medes; Sardanapalus; Assyrian; Matisse; Islamic; Beethoven; Algiers