The best of Delacroix

An earlier post looked at why critics condemn Delacroix. Here, I am not begging forgiveness for any real or imaginary failures of Delacroix, but I am seeking to identify the quintessence of Delacroix, the part I can unreservedly celebrate. Which are the great Delacroix paintings, for me? And what do they tell us about Delacroix? I have chosen five works. All of them have in common Delacroix’s romanticism, by which I mean delight in action. Whether humans or animals, Delacroix picks moments of striving. Delacroix was capable of reflection and poise, but not here. These are not comfortable paintings.

The Barque of Dante (1822)

The grouping is very similar to the later Liberty leading the people: a small number of heroic figures in a standing or moving position, with various horizontal bodies below them. But what makes the painting remarkable is, in the words of Petra Char, « passion bursting forth from the scene ».

The Death of Sardanapalus (1827)

The remarkable contrast between the stillness of Sardanapalus and the frenzied, mortal action all around him. This is not the suicide of a neurotic in lonely isolation; here is a man who, like Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera, accepts unflinchingly the invitation of death, choosing to have all his possessions destroyed around him. Never has such a major painting attracted such criticism. Together with the wild action, the exotic details pull the viewer into the scene. This is not a painting to be observed in peace and tranquillity. As has been pointed out, this painting represents a moment of evil rather than good, but is all the more powerful for it.

Liberty leading the People (1831)

If any painting represented French 19th-century history, this is it. A glorious, memorable combination of allegorical female between two very realistic-looking human males. What a collection of hats! The males are believable portraits of different ranges of contemporary society, joined for this one cause.

The painting is so iconic that it has probably become more famous than the event it represents. By all accounts, the revolution of 1830 was not particularly revolutionary.

Self-portrait (1837)

I have included this painting as, in contrast to all the others above, nothing is ostensibly happening in it. And yet the human depicted is full of energy, from the hair to the tense pose, ready to spring into action, ready to depict a thousand Sardanapalus figures.

Jacob wrestling with the Angel (1861)

Here, figures are integrated with the landscape, more successfully than Claude or Turner ever managed. Yes, the painting shows the human body in action – that is how I define Delacroix’s Romanticism, but alongside the struggling bodies, the trees and natural surroundings are all alive with the same motion as the figures. Next time you visit a church, try to find another scene with figures and landscape so sinuously linked. The figure on horseback on the right, for example, seems in some incredible way to be following the same dramatic curve as the root of the tree. 

Five great paintings to enliven any art-going visit. 

Nina Stibbe - "England's greatest living comic novelist"?

I wonder if anyone ever went to a creative writing class proposing to write a comic novel. I didn’t think that creative writing and comic novels could be so opposed, until I read Nina Stibbe’s Reasons to be Cheerful (2019), which tries to be both at the same time. Behind a mask of comic fiction, I sense a sensitive soul trying to escape, dreaming of self-expression, as you would from a creative writing class in which you want to state significant things.

What made me think it was a comic novel? The TLS, no less. In a review by Ian Sansom, entitled “Bantz vs. humour: Differing approaches to the comic novel”, he compares her to other recent comic writers and states “she is in a different league”. In this novel, “Stibbe establishes herself as England’s greatest living comic novelist.” That’s good enough for me! I sat down to split my sides with laughter at Stibbe, twice shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. After all, David Lodge would be a good candidate for the role of greatest living comic novelist, and I found his novels hilarious.

I didn’t laugh. The novel, very unexpectedly, moved steadily away from the comic, to domestic tragedy. I haven’t read all of Wodehouse, but I don’t remember any of the major characters dying by accident three quarters of the way through the book. It kind of takes away the laughter, somehow – call me a curmudgeon if you like. Not only is a major character killed, but the rest of the novel describes the narrator coming to terms with it. I’ve never seen a comic novel moving to emotional self-examination.

The comic aspect is quite formulaic. The narrator, Lizzie Vogel, aged 18, gets a job as a dental nurse. She recites very convincingly all the dental characteristics of people she meets. At the same time, she claims to base her ideas on popular women’s magazines such as Woman’s Own. So, throughout the novel, we see trade names liberally used and mindless advertising slogans as part of the narrative. It’s not very funny. In fact the narrator – or Stibbe’s – approach to characterization is simply accretion, piling up personal idiosyncrasies, phobias, product preferences, and odd eating tastes, until we have some image for each character, based on their tics and consumption habits. Advertising slogans are used throughout in seeming belief:

I … stayed for dinner and watched a hard-hitting TV documentary.

If this is satire, then the character is a cipher. But if we are to believe the character, does she believe these publicity slogans? I suspect Stibbe is attempting to use cliché to arouse our sympathy and empathy with the character - which is ambitious, but not very comic. How else could you read this passage, near the end of the book, that is, in the 'emotional' part:

It struck me that I’d started to prefer the top half of a slice of bread to the bottom half. This hadn’t been a whim; I’d always eaten the crusted top half of a slice of toast, to get it out of the way before enjoying the softer underneath half. And now it was the other way round. It was a shocking realization. What had made me change? I don’t know – perhaps I was eager to change as many things as possible. I’d known sadness before, I’d seen it, but I’d not experienced the sort of pain that makes a person switch sandwich preference.

I’m prepared to read the first sentence as funny, but the paragraph moves towards the confessional. It’s as if Michael Frayn in the last act of Noises Off started to reveal his inner emotions when he wrote the play. But we, the viewers, aren’t interested, and mercifully the farce simply becomes more farcical than ever. Nor, I suspect, does P G Wodehouse go in much for genuine self-examination. I’m quite happy for Jeeves and Wooster to remain ciphers. It’s funnier that way.

Delacroix's failings

Self-portrait, 1837

In a recent post, I wrote about T J Clark’s very odd interpretation of Delacroix. This started me thinking: just what is the essence of Delacroix? What are his strengths and weaknesses? In this post I concentrate on the perceived weaknesses.

It’s always fascinating to see what people don’t like about a famous artist. While for the most part, works such as The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix (2001) do their best to see positives in Delacroix’s art, a few critics and reviewers are more condemning.

For Jason Rosenfeld, reviewing the vast Delacroix exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 2018-19, the essence of Delacroix is cats:

It is perhaps time to reconsider Delacroix’s achievement, to acknowledge his limitations. He was imaginative. He talked a good game in his journals. He was novel in his use of color and in accessing contemporary literature. He did not shy away from the large-scale canvases of the French tradition. But his project was a failure. His pictures are replete with tumult but lack human spirit. His women are ciphers for male violence and desire, and nothing more. Stick with the cats.

But are his paintings “ciphers for male violence and desire, and nothing more”? This is a rather glib judgement based on references in his Journals that he used to have sex with his models. Unfortunately, if we write off a male artist because of their failure to develop believable depictions of women, we will have to abandon Charles Dickens. And if we condemn artists who sleep with their models, we will have to cast off Picasso, Lucian Freud, and many others. There are plenty of depictions of women by Delacroix that are not “ciphers for male violence and desire”, for example his Jewish Bride of Tangier.

Jewish Bride of Tangiers, 1832

To summarise some of the complaints about Delacroix:

He is phallocentric (among many other faults). An essay by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in the Cambridge Companion condemns Delacroix for many things, including: “[Delacroix] continually conflated (hetero)sexual intercourse and the act of painting”, since he describes a new canvas as a “virgin” space. But her judgements on the paintings are more, I think, a dialogue with herself and her arguments than a genuine engagement with the picture. 

Massacre at Chios

Thus, in the Massacre at Chios, she seems to complain that the women, about to be taken into slavery, are not erotic, as in similar paintings by Delacroix’s contemporaries: “Delacroix … compromised the fiction of the viewer’s altruistic empathy with violated Greek women by offering a conflicting identification with the male aggressor.” As a modern viewer, I don’t feel any identification with any of the characters in this picture, Greek (victims) or Ottoman (oppressors).

Death of Sardanapalus

Grigsby’s view of Sardanapalus is wilder still. For her, the picture, from its subject matter, should be a wild male fantasy, set in “an Orient identified with his [Delacroix’s] own (hetero)sexual prowess”. This, however, does not tally with the figure of Sardanapalus, rather lacking in the aggression she seeks: “The circling dance of interchangeable nude women fails to secure the unimaginable phallic authority of an oriental despot whose diminutive head retreats from a swaddled body, which despite, or rather because of its preposterously enormous limbs, collapses into a uterine concavity”. This seems to mean he is curled up on the bed. If only poor Sardanapalus had been lucky enough to have a larger head.

He couldn’t draw (Rosenfeld: “There is hardly a “picture without a curious passage or two—an arm akimbo, a horse’s head that is laughably small, glances that miss intended targets by a wide margin.”). Art historians gleefully report any deviation from a photographic realism as if it were a fault. Ingres was another poor painter who couldn't draw the human figure. 

Delacroix wasn’t sufficiently left-wing. Clark, in The Absolute Bourgeois, 1973, writes: “D’s art in 1849-51 was bad because becoming a reactionary … was an experience [that] interfered too palpably with his strange amalgam—of reaction and revolution in art practice.”

His paintings “lack human spirit” (Rosenfeld). This is so much at odds with Delacroix’s major works that it is not worth refuting. His 1837 Self-Portrait is a work full of the passion of the man himself.

So was Delacroix good for anything? Well, he could draw and paint cats, and other animals in movement. Rosenfeld again:

The Lion Hunt of 1855 … is the usual mish-mosh of bodies with misaligned heads and appendages, relieved by deftly distributed color. But oh, the cats. Bristling musculature and rippling tawny fur, deployed claws and gnashing teeth. It is not new in concept—as ever with Delacroix, Rubens got there first—but few artists of the period could match this level of physical presence in their work.

So, yes to cats, and no to women, no to historical painting.  Not much remains from the legacy of one of the most famous 19th-century European artists. Perhaps it is time to look again at Delacroix, and to see if there is anything worth saving, as it were. That can be another post; but we do agree he can paint cats. 

Sex and violence in Delacroix

I have the greatest regard for T J Clark. His The Absolute Bourgeois (1973) and Image of the People (also 1973), and, most of all, The Painting of Modern Life (1987), were for me a model of how to write committed art criticism, aware of the context in which a painter was operating. This view was for me a revelation, to discover another way of seeing late 19th-century art without as a result feeling I should be buying myself an Impressionist calendar every Christmas.

So to see the Clark, now retired and in his eighties, writing about Delacroix (in the London Review of Books, 10 October 2019) was very welcome. Clark strikes a personal note in this article, remembering a poster of Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855) that he bought in 1966, and how the painting was for him a “talisman” that he compared with Jacob wrestling with the Angel, in the church of Saint Sulpice, Paris. But the conclusions Clark draws are not the way I see Delacroix.

For Clark, in these two paintings, “I was being shown what violence was, the full range of its beauty and monstrosity, and how deeply human beings can be in love with both”.

Certainly Delacroix, like Gericault, is a painter attracted in some of his paintings (but by no means all) to violence, or more specifically, to moments of animals and humans in distorted and non-classical movement, in dramatic conflict of the highest intensity. The lion hunt shows a lion that, despite the title, looks to be triumphant, having just landed on top of a horse and man, perhaps its rider. On the right of the scene, another lion is digging its claws into a horse. The scene is depicted with astonishing intensity, partly from the way the figures are piled on top of and alongside each other, partly from the way the canvas is filled with contrasting movement, with no space for any background or landscape. Clark gives more reasons for the intensity (he has seen the original, which I have not): the sheer scale of the painting, around 3.5 metres in width, and finally from the unfortunate fire damage that removed much of the top of the painting in the 19th century. As Clark, states, the result is ‘congested’; it is a magnificent painting.

Clark then refers to an article he wrote in 1969 about Delacroix, and how he concluded Delacroix was a “desolate reactionary, shipwrecked in the 19th century by the failure of Napoleon”, which means that Clark views Delacroix with an “unresolved mixture of admiration and distaste”.

 Although Clark’s article is several thousand words long, he doesn’t explain how he reaches this conclusion. I haven’t (yet) read what he wrote in 1969 (and he doesn’t give a citation), but I dislike people referring to other content that they don’t summarise or explain. He states (but does not explain why) the Lion Hunt was meant by its maker as an “antidote to Liberty Guiding the People”. Perhaps it was; please tell me why.

Finally, Clark concludes, the Lion Hunt and the Death of Sardanapalus (1827) are both about Delacroix’s view of sex.

“Sex and violence, Sardanapalus says, are completely and necessarily entangled.  Sex is antagonism … dominance and submission are indelibly part of it.”

I’m not sure about this; and I’m certainly not sure about Clark’s next statement:

Dominance and submission … in the years following Sardanapalus he [Delacroix] decided not to state the case so openly … but the metaphor he then fell back on, of combat between men and animals, was sufficiently easy to decode. The lions and tigers and shrieking horses in his pictures are to be understood as women. Men are truly endangered by them, and regularly lose their hard and fast identities in the struggle. The loss is unnerving, but delectable, for eventually the men will win … this is the story we call patriarchy.”

This is more about Clark than about Delacroix. In the Lion Hunt, the lion is winning. If Delacroix wanted to show the triumph of patriarchy, in Clark’s terms, he would have depicted a dead (or defeated) lion. Where is the evidence that Delacroix saw violence on animals as a metaphor for human sexual relations? In Clark’s terms, I could retitle this work “The Triumph of Woman”, and leave my audience mystified. 

I won’t go into Clark’s interpretation of Sardanapalus here (it does not seem very relevant to this discussion). But I will challenge Clark’s final comparison, between Jacob wrestling the Angel and Lion Hunt. He describes the Jacob painting as a moment “when violence transmutes to balance and mutuality … the great oaks looking down on the wrestlers, their branches mimicking but also dwarfing – ironising – the ways of man.” Well, there are no oaks in Lion Hunt, by which I mean no background to provide a context. And I don’t see much sign of balance in the Lion Hunt either; it is a moment of raw intensity. Perhaps, over 40,000 words, and with sufficient explanation, Clark’s argument would make some sense. But here, it does not.

David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy: a hilarious epitaph for the seventies

There have been some comments that this blog is too negative. I haven’t counted the number of approving or disapproving posts, but it’s probably true that the negative outranks the positive quite substantially.

So it is refreshing indeed to report not one but three novels that are entertaining, informative, and full of narrative energy. They are the three novels comprising David Lodge’s sequence, The Campus Trilogy. The first, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), dsescribes the exchange of two academics, Morris Zapp from the US and Philip Swallow from the UK, at each other’s institutions, with plenty of opportunities to contrast the UK and US academic systems. Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), introduces the character of Persse McGarrigle, a rather innocent young Irish researcher, and his search for the woman he thinks he loves, with rather obvious (but funny) echoes of Percival searching for the Holy Grail.

Finally, Nice Work (1988) expands the series well beyond higher education to include the world of a small industrial company in Rummidge, and the interaction of Vic Wilcox, the industry boss, and Robyn Penrose, junior lecturer at Rummidge, as part of a government initiative for academia and industry to get closer together. They do indeed get closer together, an episode that is a tour de force, given that it is highly unlikely an academic and industrialist would ever have any time for each other in the real world. 

One character, Philip Swallow, appears in all three novels, and much of the action (pretty much the whole of the action of Nice Work) is set in Rummidge, a loosely fictionalized Birmingham. Having enjoyed the novels so much, I am slightly reluctant to investigate too closely how and why they are successful, but as a former student of literature, I feel it is my duty to, ahem, show off my skills and discover how they work.

One achievement is that Lodge writes from the inside. As a former professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, he had an intimate knowledge of a redbrick university in a large industrial city. Fascinatingly, however, he doesn’t attempt to make the city or the university any more appealing than it is. He is a remarkably objective and often unsympathetic describer of the industrial midlands, particularly in the third novel.

Remarkably, Lodge is very aware, as an academic might be in Birmingham, but not in Oxford or Cambridge, that academic life is not the only way to live. Nice Work contains lengthy arguments between the industrialist and the academic, each defining their own existence, and the academic is by no means wholly successful. The academic career structure is shown to be elitist, unfair, underpaid, and often irrelevant to the local community, yet Robyn Penrose, dreaming of obtaining a tenured position, defends it passionately – even though she is likely to be a victim of the very system she defends.

Wilcox said, ‘Who were you trying to hurt?’

‘Hurt?’

‘A strike has to hurt someone. The employers, the public. Otherwise it has no effect.’

Robyn was about to say, ‘The Government,’ when she saw the trap.

It becomes clear to Robyn that the strike has little effect on the government, the students, or the general public. The exchange is revealing for Lodge’s remarkable balance. Few professors would have such a dispassionate and even jaundiced idea of their own profession; you feel that these novels could not have emerged from the far more precious world of Oxford or Cambridge, where there is no countervailing force to the academy.

Still more remarkable, the novels make a solid attempt to communicate some idea of literary theory. I came away from the novels with a refreshed idea of what terms such as metaphor, metonymy, and less common, aporia, meant, even though I had dutifully learned them years ago. In any case, my university education largely predated structuralism and literary theory.

Not only can Lodge balance academia and industry, he also succeeds impressively, to my mind, in balancing male and female attitudes. Admittedly, some of the female characters, notably Hilary Swallow and Mrs Wilcox, appear to be mere ciphers, but some of the other younger women in the novels are very believable, notably Robyn Penrose. She is believable partly because she is so centred in a place and time. Her slightly hippy clothes, her possessions, even the way her partner Charles massages her, are so typical of the 1970s and 80s. And yet she is more than just a cipher. Despite her innocence, she tries to make sense of the world around her and to respond to it towards some kind of success; it’s almost tragic, that both Wilcox and Penrose are almost doomed in their respective home and work environments, oppressed by forces they have almost no control over, and yet they continue to struggle and to fight a very unequal battle. Lodge does not write about industry as an insider, and yet his depiction of a small-scale British manufacturing company trying to survive in a declining industrial environment is moving and almost tragic. Wilcox’s company has few options other than cost-saving – something it has in common with Rummidge University, faced with endless cuts in funding and hence staffing.

So, a set of incisive novels that seem unerring in their depiction of fashions and styles of the 70s and 80s, set against a brutal realistic background that offers little hope for the main characters. Similarly, family life, notably the life of the Swallows and the Wilcoxes, seems to have just one direction: down. By the end of the trilogy, Swallow is reduced to a hard-of-hearing, rather ineffectual head of department, unable to do anything to respond to external events. And yet the trilogy was compelling to read. A remarkable achievement.