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.