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.