Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh @ Minneapolis Institute of Art

Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh
Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia)
Through January 10, 2016

Eugène Delacroix (French 1798-1863)

Convulsionists of Tangier, 1837-38

Oil on canvas, 37 5/8 x 50 5/8 inches

Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) presents the first major exhibition in 50 years to explore the legacy and widespread influence of the revolutionary French painter Eugène Delacroix. “Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh” features 75 seminal paintings—including 30 works by Delacroix—to reveal the artist’s indelible impact on French painting and how his radical example led to the rise of modern art. The exhibition also examines Delacroix’s role as mentor and archetype during his lifetime and how his work shaped the styles and predilections of many modern artists, including Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. Organized in partnership with the National Gallery, London, “Delacroix’s Influence” is on view at Mia through January 10, 2016, and draws on works from the Mia’s robust 19th-century holdings, as well as loans from 45 prestigious public and private collections worldwide.

“Eugène Delacroix was the very engine of revolution that helped transform French painting in the 19th century,” said Patrick Noon, the Mia’s Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator and Chair of Paintings, and organizing curator of the exhibition. “Kept at arm’s length by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, he was an artist who was truly ahead of his time, whose work and critical writings resonated deeply with his peers and helped shape the trajectory of art history. This exhibition will examine Delacroix as the bridge—in practice and in theory—between Anglo-French Romanticism and Impressionism.”

“Delacroix’s Influence” demonstrates how Delacroix redefined the possibilities of capturing the unique interplay between light and form, as well as his fascination with optical effects, bold use of color, and passion for the exotic. These innovations subsequently inspired the spontaneity of the Impressionists, the dreamlike allusion of the Symbolists, and the saturated color palette made famous almost a century later by such artists as Renoir and Matisse. Organized according to four thematic sections—Emulation; Orientalism: Imagined/Experienced/Re-Imagined; Narrative Painting at a Crossroads: ‘Truth in Art’; and Delacroix’s Legacy: In Paint and Prose—the exhibition features a broad swath of paintings by Delacroix and his admirers, including works by Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Redon, Renoir, and Signac, among others. Notable works in the exhibition include:

• Delacroix’s Convulsionists of Tangier (1837-38), widely considered one of the artist’s foremost masterworks and a cornerstone of Mia’s 19th-century collection. The painting depicts a frenzied scene that Delacroix witnessed during his travels to North Africa in 1832, in which members of the Aïssaouas, a fanatical Muslim sect, crowd the streets. Delacroix’s use of vivid colors and vigorous brushstrokes represent the artist’s signature style and ability to expertly capture the turmoil and urgency of his subject.

• Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1861), one of three Lion Hunt paintings Delacroix produced for dealers and private collectors between 1855 and 1861. This final picture differs markedly in its spatial definition from the flat composition of the earlier pictures—capturing a greater sense of depth and clearly articulated narrative while also maintaining intense and expressive brushwork.

• Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862), the artist’s first major work depicting modern urban life. The painting features a band playing for a fashionable crowd that includes several portraits of Manet’s friends—the poet Baudelaire, painter Henri Fantin-Latour, poet and novelist Théophile Gautier, and composer Jacques Offenbach—as well as his brother, Eugène, and the artist himself. To capture these portraits, Manet used photographs as his source of imagery, a technique often employed by Delacroix to underscore a distinct contemporary sensibility in his work.

• Paul Cézanne’s Standing Nude (c. 1898), a representation of a nude in an interior setting that evokes the traditional theme of a woman or goddess at her toilet. Although Cézanne frequently depicted female bathers in an outdoor landscape, the artist admired Delacroix’s The Morning Toilet (or Woman CombingHer Hair) (1850), which he copied shortly after it was exhibited in the 1885 Delacroix retrospective at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

• Paul Gauguin’s Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889), one of several religiously inspired paintings Gauguin created, in which a vulnerable Christ is depicted in isolation prior to his impending martyrdom—a pose derived from Delacroix’s Christ Shown to the People (1850). The work’s dark colors and gloomy tonality severely contrast against Christ’s flaming hair, further emphasizing the sense of alienation in this overt personification of the artist.

• Van Gogh’s Olive Trees (1889), one of 15 canvases of olive trees van Gogh created while housed in the asylum of St-Paul in St-Rémy in southern France. In his correspondence with his brother, van Gogh wrote of the olive tree: “It’s too beautiful for me to dare paint it or be able to form an idea of it…if you want to compare it to something, [it is] like Delacroix.” It was during this period that the artist created many of his most renowned works, and the vibrant yellow and orange hues in this painting suggest it was produced during the autumn.

• Odilon Redon’s Pegasus and the Hydra (1905), one of several depictions of ancient myths showcasing the artist’s increasing fascination with monster slayers. Influenced by Delacroix’s treatment of similar subjects—in this case, his Apollo Slaying Python (1851)—Redon conceived this work as a metaphor for the artist as an ostracized genius eventually vanquishing chaos and adversity.

Delacroix’s posthumous influence persisted undiminished for nearly five decades and over several generations of avant-garde artists, each of whom, however divergent their own aesthetic programs, discovered something of value in the legendary artist’s oeuvre and dynamic personality. Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, Symbolists, and Fauves borrowed Delacroix’s ideas as deduced from his varied and accessible painted works and profuse writings.

“This exhibition is a cornerstone of our 100th anniversary celebration and highlights one of the things that the MIA does best, creating remarkable, scholarly exhibitions that change how we and our visitors think about an artist, artistic movement, or era,” said Kaywin Feldman, Mia’s Duncan and Nivin MacMillan Director and President. “Mia founder James J. Hill was the foremost collector of Delacroix works in America during the 19th century, and we look forward to paying homage to his legacy and showcasing the best of our collection as we present a new chapter in our visitors’ understanding of the vital role Delacroix played in the genesis of modern art.”

“Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh” is co-organized with the National Gallery, London, where it will be on view from February 10 through May 15, 2016. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which comprises lead essays by Patrick Noon, Curator and Chair of Paintings at Mia and organizing curator of the exhibition, and Christopher Riopelle, Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London.

About Delacroix:

Orphaned at the age of sixteen, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) quickly abandoned his classical academic training at the Lycée Impérial in favor of self-study. He gleaned early insight and direction by copying old master works in the Musée du Louvre, as well as from his friendship with Théodore Géricault, a pioneer of the Romantic movement in French painting. Géricault, who advocated for individual over formulaic expression, profoundly influenced the development of Delacroix’s first publicly exhibited painting, Barque of Dante (1822), which was celebrated for its acute sentiment and imaginative composition. The work was immediately acquired for the Luxembourg Palace— establishing him as the next prodigy of French Romanticism—and became the most copied of Delacroix’s paintings during the 19th century.

By the time of his death, Delacroix had established himself as a champion of the avant-garde and was one of the most revered artists in Paris. His paintings continued to be distinguished by their expressive, improvisational brush strokes, which challenged the traditional techniques and attitudes of the period’s preeminent Grand Style and paved the way for younger artists’ stylistic experimentation and creative innovation.

Support: Major loans from national and international institutions include the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Uffizi Gallery, Florence; Musée d’Orsay, and the Petit Palais, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; St. Louis Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum; Art Institute of Chicago, and the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

Mineapolis Institute of Art - MIA
2400 Third Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55404
www.artsmia.org

Delacroix: The Late Work, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Delacroix: The Late Work
Philadelphia Museum of Art
September 15, 1998 - January 3, 1999

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the artist's birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Delacroix: The Late Work, an exhibition exploring the final years of the great French painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). Some 70 paintings and 40 works on paper by one of the most important artists of the 19th century, lent by museums and private collections throughout Europe and the Americas, are arranged by theme in six categories—animals, allegory and mythology, flowers and landscapes, literary illustrations, scenes of North Africa, and religion—that reveal the artist's immense achievement during the last 15 years of his life. 

Delacroix: The Late Work sheds new light on this monumental figure in the history of art, whom the renowned French poet Charles Baudelaire described in 1845 as "the most original painter of ancient or modern times." Considered the last "Old Master," Delacroix consciously placed himself in the painterly tradition of Veronese, Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt, yet he was also the driving force in the French Romantic Movement, a radical new approach to art developed in Paris in the early decades of the 1800s. Delacroix formed the link between the traditions of the past and the modern movements, ultimately having a profound influence upon the Impressionists, particularly Renoir and Cézanne, as well as such 20th-century masters as Picasso and Matisse. Cézanne said that Delacroix had "the greatest palette of France, and no one beneath our skies possessed to a greater extent the vibration of color. We all paint through him."

Eugène Delacroix was a remarkably prolific artist, creating in his lifetime over 850 paintings and more than 2000 watercolors and drawings. This exhibition focuses on the works of the mature artist, from the year 1848 to his death in 1863 at the age of 65. These last years of his life were a time of profound reflection for Delacroix, steeped in nostalgia and swept by deep, erotically charged, emotions. Among the great admirers of Delacroix's talent was the American novelist Henry James, who in 1872 remarked that the painter's "imaginative impulse begins where that of most painters ends."

The exhibition features a selection of Eugène Delacroix's late representations of North Africa, a place where the artist had spent several months in 1832. It was a visit that would have a profound effect on the light, color, and imagery of his painting for the rest of his life. These subjects, reconsidered some 30 years after his actual experience, are a vivid testimony to his love of North Africa and its hold on his imagination. Delacroix will conclude with an exploration of the artist's representations of religious subjects. It is one of the great paradoxes of modern art history that Delacroix, a worldly Parisian who confessed skepticism of any organized religion, should be the greatest religious painter of the 19th century. This exhibition presents a unique opportunity to examine the range and power Delacroix's biblical subjects, such as The Good Samaritan (c. 1850; Waterhouse Collection), which were executed with a deep awareness of similar works by such masters as Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, and Veronese, as well as the sequence of closely related compositions of Christ on the Sea of Galilee that also look forward to Monet's famous series paintings.

Delacroix: The Late Work presents paintings and works on paper that are multi-faceted and introspective, suffused by an increasingly complex and passionate use of color as well as a renewed spiritual intensity. Soon after the artist's death, Théophile Silvestre spoke to these same qualities in the final years of the artist's life: "Delacroix died, almost smiling...a painter of great genius, who had the sun in his head and storms in his heart, who for forty years played the entire keyboard of human emotion, and whose grandiose, terrible, and delicate brushes passed from saints to warriors, from warriors to lovers, from lovers to tigers and from tigers to flowers."

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 350-page catalogue, with essays on subjects including Delacroix's technique, how the artist was viewed by his contemporaries, and issues of continuity and variation in his work.

The exhibition has been organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in conjunction with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux in Paris. The curators of the exhibition are Joseph J. Rishel, Senior Curator of European Painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Arlette Sérullaz, Curator of Prints at the Musée du Louvre and Director of the Musée Delacroix; and Vincente Pomarède, Chief Curator of Paintings at the Musée du Louvre. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is the exhibition's only venue in North America.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
www.philamuseum.org