The Observed and the Imagined

John Haber
in New York City

Eugène Delacroix

Somehow I never thought to ask: where could Eugène Delacroix have ever seen a tiger?

He would have wanted me to ask. He took ten days to cross Tangiers and Morocco, a painstaking journey, to get to know for himself Arab camps and foreign lands. He spoke of an artist's training as the move from the observed to the remembered and then to the imagined, but he never left any one of them behind. And the Met makes the question inescapable by placing a powerful study of that powerful animal outside its exhibition of Delacroix drawings, all from a promised gift. It serves as a teaser to a full-scale survey of the artist this same fall. It also helps pin down just what he meant by observation, memory, and the imagination.

Naturally the retrospective has no shortage of animals either, not even counting a room not quite midway for studies of tigers, horses, and more. At the end of his life, Delacroix tried to regain his Romantic vigor with a lion hunt, while the subject of an early portrait holds a parrot. When he visits Morocco as part of a diplomatic mission, he sketches horses fighting, much as they fought in his imagination all along. He also shows an array of sex, violence, dignity, and exoticism in a brothel or with Arab men on horseback—but one cannot blame it all on either his European prejudices or the exotic culture that he so wished to know. He had found much the mix in art and literature. He wanted to find it, too, within himself.

Nobility in wildness

Museums rarely miss an opportunity to flatter a donor, here Karen B. Cohen. The Met Breuer exhibits the quirky Scofield Thayer collection of early Modernism almost simultaneously with twin shows of Eugène Delacroix—just a year after drawings from the collection of Robert Lehman in the Met's Lehman wing. More than one hundred works on paper by Delacroix even come with a suitably unctuous title, "Devotion to Drawing." Wall text boasts more than once of the rare opportunity to see his premières pensées, or first thoughts. The drawings have their reward, though, in more than just the artist's working methods. They also illuminate the Romantic imagination—and how quickly Delacroix moved beyond his first thoughts.

The tiger, for one, shows him thinking aloud, in 1839, at age forty-one. First comes a trademark of his drawings, patches of short, tight, slightly curved parallel strokes, here in ink. They do not exactly follow or cross a muscle group. They do not take the detailed, systematic approach of much academic drawing—although an early nude with stippling in graphite shows him quite capable of the Neoclassicism that he so quickly outgrew. They seem to proceed by instinct as much as observation. And then he sets his pen aside in favor of a brush for further thoughts, including looser but thicker curves embellishing the tiger's outlines and mere dabs for its spots.

He begins to lean on close parallel markings quite early, under the influence of Théodore Géricault, who did more than anyone to invent Romanticism and to carry art in France from David to Delacroix. Géricault, though, uses hatching for the human body while doodling for heads. The younger artist demands a greater unity for the entire figure—and then rethinks it. He does so in early visits to a hospital for écorchés, or studies of musculature. There red and white chalk serves for second thoughts. They also bring the newly dead to life.

In each case, he equates anatomy with not just structure, but also expression and motion. No wonder he prefers Paolo Veronese to Michelangelo when it comes to the Renaissance—and Peter Paul Rubens to anyone. Even when he copies the faces of ancient coins, he makes them look like portraits of the living. The show of drawings devotes its first room to sources like these, under the heading of "training the eye." Already one can see him copying art as much as drawing from life. Already, too, one can see him training the imagination as much as the eye.

Nowhere does he come as close to strength in motion as with the crouching tiger. It lowers its head, as if ready to spring, and its tail coils about its rear. The spots themselves appear to move. Delacroix, it suggests, equates matter in motion with nobility and wildness. It shows in his love of animals, especially horses, and his turn to the Arab world for a figure astride a horse in equal dignity. He has found his "noble savage," and he means it as the highest compliment—but then who could be wilder and nobler than his Liberty Leading the People?

Where, though, did he see a tiger? He found it not in the wilds, but in the Jardin des Plantes—a botanic gardens in Paris with a zoo. The more he turns to nature, the more he sees it in a domesticated or fully human environment, just as with horses or a herd of goats. He can move from observation to artifice because others around him already had. William Wordsworth at the birth of Romanticism described poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." Delacroix achieves much the same in art, but without letting tranquility get in the way of emotion.

Where is Lady Liberty?

When he does copy an older painting on paper, he does not copy it all. He bears in on Arab women, combatants, spectators, and worshippers, while leaving only faint outlines of the Holy Family. He has set aside the piety and the eternal in favor of the observable and the human. When he turns to studies toward his own paintings, he may omit the central figure entirely, along with what would become a patch of supernatural light. Was he just thinking aloud, building a composition body by body? Or did he have it in mind all along?

Could he have first imagined Liberty on the barricades without Lady Liberty or a Lamentation without a dead Jesus? It is inconceivable, and yet the show's second room, for the "application of drawing" to painting, seems to think so. It holds a single compositional study—and that already at an advanced stage, gridded for transfer to canvas. When he sketches figures for an architectural niche, he omits their constraints as well, although the full retrospective has him thinking aloud in oil sketches, an entire composition intact. And he surely imagined just that from the first, much as he boasted of grasping "the composition and the rendering in the same moment." So much again for first thoughts.

His work on paper also largely omits color, a hallmark of his painting, although a pastel on blue paper has the spectacular glow of J. M. W. Turner, but with a greater clarity. A third and final room of drawings, for "media and invention," promises a further look at the tools of his trade, but they were on display all along. It adds instead, then, a view of Delacroix as illustrator. He is once again concerned for spontaneity but also a finished product, with lithographs after Hamlet and Wolfgang von Goethe—and the full retrospective adds an entire series after Goethe's Faust, although with prints in different "states" of revision. He also again seeks the imagination in the already imagined. As with the tiger free of its cage but not of its menagerie, he makes it difficult indeed to know what counts as nature or art.

As usual, he seeks nobility in wildness. They appear in Shakespeare's prince intertwined with his mother. They appear, too, in Goethe's wounded knight, Goetz von Berlichingen, among gypsies. Is Delacroix condescending to outsiders like Arabs and gypsies, in yet another display of Europe's "orientalism"? He makes it hard to know even with a Jewish musician, in Moroccan costume and just short of caricature. And the artist proves quite capable of caricature himself, of a theater group and of Jacques-Louis David, his far older rival.

The curator for the drawings, Ashley E. Dunn, raises any number of serious questions without quite facing them. The show's artificial divisions verge on artifice, and they correspond only loosely to chronology. The lack of compositional studies could, for all one knows, stem from the donor as much as the artist. The collection also ends a good decade before his death in 1863, following protracted illness. Still, one can see the questions as guides to the very nature of Romanticism. One could only look forward to the Delacroix retrospective for more.

Romanticism's new classicism

The retrospective is ambitious enough—the first of a premodern legend to have hit New York in some time. It has its own works on paper, departures from chronology, and omissions. Although it originated at the Louvre, it cannot borrow Liberty Leading the People or The Death of Sardanapalus, which appears in an oil sketch and then again in a copy by Delacroix himself on the scale of that sketch from twenty years later. It opens with the artist's first triumphs, at the official Salon while still in his twenties, before doubling back for portraits, early work, and (yes) animals. Like him, it wants to boast right off of such classics from the 1820s as Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghia, with a pained but heroic woman as the beleaguered Greek republic. Like him, too, though, it cannot avoid an obsessive return to so many of the same themes.

One is Romanticism as itself a new classicism. Missolonghia's outstretched arms derive from any number of Christian saints. A painting of Jesus in the garden, with its orange robe and powerful movements, builds again on Rubens. Delacroix is not so much denying classicism in art as refusing to accept the Neoclassicism of his elders and rivals as classic. Early work includes an oil sketch after Veronese in the Louvre, where he must have spent day after day, and a closer look at Baron Gros from just a few years before. He started to find work of his own like that Agony in the Garden as too clear, firm, and bright.

He could not abandon musculature or movement, even at the cost of physical and emotional violence. When he returns to Sardanapalus, they only deepen along with the color. The sultan is not going down without the slaughter of his entourage, meaning his harem, and Delacroix seems equally invested in the sultan's composure and the slaughter. Nor could he stop seeing the scene in front of him through literature, art, and memory. The curators, Asher Miller with Sébastien Allard and Côme Fabre of the Louvre, title that very section of the retrospective "A Novel Sense of the Past." They may not have intended it, but I dare you to overlook the pun on a novel.

With so many major works missing, the retrospective can feel like a letdown—a mere prelude to other work, with overly dark walls and harsh lighting to boot. It muffles the artist's famed color, and it cannot help a focus on his first thirty-five years, to match his output. Still, it adds a great deal to his drawings, even apart from journals from both the 1820s and around 1850, thirteen years before his death. For one thing, it adds that color, brushwork, and compositions seen as an active whole. Without that, Romanticism would remain a mystery. The single greatest painting, the 1834 Women of Algiers, moves from a placid seated woman, past others looking at each other or within, to an African turning toward the apartment's depth, for all the complexity of the group's temptations, confrontations, and independence.

The show adds, too, a far better sense of the artist's development. And that includes another reason for his compulsive return to earlier themes—the felt crisis of his middle age. By 1850 Delacroix was more than famous: he was an old master commissioned to paint a ceiling in the Louvre. Yet he was also the Romantic in a time of realism and a growing trust in nature. And that led to sudden twists and turns in his art.

He lightens up, both with still life that looks back to the late Baroque and with sketches outdoors that look ahead. A cluster of trees could pass for the work of Camille Pissarro, while another study's white space approaches the crispness of Camille Corot in Italy or the sense of incompletion in Paul Cézanne and Cézanne drawing. No wonder his reputation revived after his death thanks to painters like Vincent van Gogh. And then more or less simultaneously, he returns to religion, myth, and lions but without the brightness that had defined his art, so that Jesus still lies sleeping through a storm at sea. The darkness is no doubt the felt darkness of age, but also a darkness in the animal and human instincts that Delacroix celebrated all along. Unlike Neoclassicism, he never exchanged his belief in liberty for a devotion to aristocracy and empire, but he learned early on that it was doomed.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Eugène Delacroix drawings ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through November 12, 2018, and his retrospective through January 6, 2019.