Eugene Delacroix Research Articles

The Contemplation of Desolation - On the Motive of the Ennui by Eugene Delacroix and the Aesthetic Experience as Melancholy

The Contemplation of Desolation - On the Motive of the Ennui by Eugene Delacroix and the Aesthetic Experience as Melancholy

Review: Visuality in Teaching and Research: Activist Art Education

Review: Visuality in Teaching and Research: Activist Art Education Laurie E. Hicks University of Maine This paper is much improved from first draft. I appreciate author's efforts to address reviewer's comments. However, I still maintain that paper lacks a single clearly organized focus or its focus is presented in such a way as to make it slightly opaque to this reader. In reading paper, I find five possible areas of focus: visuality (implied throughout but discussed primarily in first half of paper), lens media (discussed in latter half), art criticism (the primary focus in first half and implied in second half), activism in education (implied throughout but as an underlying theme) and interdisciplinary teaching in post-secondary education (a focus of latter half ). These are listed here in no particular order. Clearly, there are moments in text where these five components intertwine, but there is not sufficient integration for them to merge as a single focus and remain clear throughout. For example, author spends most of first 15 pages of text discussing issues related to visuality in criticism. At end of this section, author provides two examples of works created by students in an effort to respond critically to pieces created by Hans Haacke and Eugene Delacroix. The author provides a visual image of students' work accompanied by author's brief description and commentary. This section of paper provides reader with a theoretical discussion and practical application or examples of author's focus on issues of visuality in art criticism. However, aspect of it that is activism (as indicated in title) is less clear. This may be due to author's attempt to keep these practical descriptions brief, but nonetheless, this discussion does not clarify how such experiences help student see act of creating such responses as a form of basic Such a discussion would be extremely helpful in linking various elements of this paper together and in interweaving educational concerns and considerations throughout. A related, but somewhat separate concern, is that author provides us with an assessment of what he or she assumes individual response pieces were intended to imply instead of with an insight into students' sense of their work. This is a result of what I see as author's attempt to let visuals stand alone, without explanation. However, in so doing, author leaves us focused only on his or her interpretation of response works, not with an insight into how students saw what they did as a form of critical analysis or as a form of activism. As indicated before, such information would be extremely helpful in linking together various elements of this paper. This leads me to a question concerning counterpoint of visual vs. verbal: How did each student arrive at a response to work they were given? Was entire process visual, or were verbal (oral/written) tools used to work through student responses to work, and then to give these responses visual form? Was this part of author's consideration in his or her interpretation and assessment of student work? In closing this section of paper, author uses Fiske's distinction between popular culture and consumer culture to indicate how reproduction of an artwork, process used in creating response works of his students, opens the authority of work, critic and, ultimately both academic and economic branches of artworld for 11 critical Though appealing, author fails to develop how Fiske's concepts apply to students' work or how they opened up these bastions of Western art for critical review. I suggest more development is needed here. In what I see as second section of paper, author describes experiences with an interdisciplinary, team-taught course in which students were encouraged to use visual and rhetorical means to communicate critical social insights. …

Delacroix's Art Theory and His Definition of Classicism

With his showing of The Massacre at Chios (figure 1) in Salon of 1824, Eugene Delacroix became known as leading romantic painter of his day. This designation endured throughout his lifetime and has continued into present. Yet despite its popularity, Delacroix did not accept it and instead regarded himself as a classicist. Je suis un pur classique was response he gave when he was described as the Victor Hugo of painting.l The purpose of this essay is to give due attention to Delacroix's long-ignored self-perception. Delacroix's art theory, as revealed through his journal and letters, will be used to establish artist's definition of classicism. During late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, school of David in Paris played a crucial role in popularizing concept of classicism that was dominant in Delacroix's lifetime. This definition reflected

‘Whose colour was no black nor white nor grey, But an extraneous mixture, which no pen Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may’: Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios

While painting Massacres of Chios in 1824, Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal that ‘The mulatto will do very well.’ This paper asks why a ‘mixed‐blood’ would figure in a picture painted on behalf of the Greek War of Independence and argues that Chios must be understood as material evidence of the history of France's imperial aspirations, as a vestige of its confusions as well as its experiments. To broaden the geopolitical horizon of interpretation of Chios is to appreciate the extent to which global politics were performed and remembered in the studio space of an ambitious, insecure and sexually preoccupied young French male painter.

Delacroix: the late work

1998 marks the bicentennial of the birth of the great French romantic painter Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863). A pivotal figure in the history of 19th-century art, Delacroix stands both at the culmination of the great painterly tradition of Titian, Veronese, Rubens and Rembrandt and at the beginning of something quite new and modern, as witnessed by the reverence given to him by such artists as Renoir, Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse, who were profoundly influenced by his work. Accompanying an international exhibition that begins in Paris and travels to Philadelphia Museum of Art in September 1998, this book presents subjects ranging from saints and warriors to mythical goddesses, from Arab hunting scenes and tigers to sumptuous bouquets of flowers. Delacroix's late work reveals a deepening spiritual intensity that has more to do with aesthetic reflection and recollection than with the expansive narrative that characterized his grand public commissions. Focusing on the artist's last works allows further insight into this most remarkable and protean figure in the history of art.

Inventing Assyria: Exoticism and Reception in Nineteenth-Century England and France

Using aspects of postcolonial and reception theory, this article explores how mid-nineteenth-century France and England responded to the sudden rediscovery of ancient Assyrian artifacts. The conception of Assyria, exemplified in the paintings of John Martin and Eugene Delacroix, before the discoveries was variously transformed and disrupted in the different institutional, critical, social, and political situations of France and England during and directly after the discoveries. The result was a more complex and hybrid range of artistic representations of Assyria, in which judgments of aesthetic value, historical veracity, and gender identities were both restated and contested.

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Painting and the Journal of Eugene Delacroix By MICHELE HANNOOSH Princeton U. P 1995 pp 221, 54 b. & w ills £30 00 SARAH SYMMONS SARAH SYMMONS University of Essex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 37, Issue 4, October 1997, Pages 419, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/37.4.419 Published: 01 October 1997

Painting and the 'Journal' of Eugene Delacroix

Painting and the 'Journal' of Eugene Delacroix

The interaction of verbal and pictorial elements in the genesis of Eugène Delacroix's Sultan of Morocco

Critics are sometimes accused of burdening the silent force of paintings with unnecessary words. In the case of Eugene Delacroix's Sultan of Morocco, this charge is difficult to sustain, for the picture is enmeshed with language from the beginning, that is to say, not only from its original public appearance, which involved a complex discursive strategy, but also from its earliest conception. Any consideration of the genetic documents related to the work shows a strong interaction of verbal and pictorial elements. Such a presence of language could be considered as the counterpart, though not necessarily the mirror image, of the important role played by spatial and graphic elements in the manuscripts of literary works.

The Urbanization of the Body: Prostitutes, Dialectics, and Utopia in German Expressionism

When Heinrich Heine saw Eugene Delacroix's famous revolutionary painting Le 28juillet: la Liberte guidant le peuple at a major art exhibition in Paris in 1831, he stood in awe before it, touched by the Heiligkeit des Sujets.1 A holiness, conveyed by a half-naked woman, which for Heine embodied eine seltsame Mischung von Phryne, Poissarde und Freiheitsg6ttin.2 Generically related to the peripatetic female philosophers, Delacroix's liberte leading the people over the barricades reminded him not only of the followers of Aristotle but also of those otherwise peripatein or (street-)walking around, like the fleet-footed lovers on the boulevards.

Painting and the "Journal" of Eugene Delacroix

Painting and the "Journal" of Eugene Delacroix

A Pastel Study for "The Death of Sardanapalus" by Eugene Delacroix

A Pastel Study for "The Death of Sardanapalus" by Eugene Delacroix

Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863): paintings, drawings, and prints from North American collections

Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863): paintings, drawings, and prints from North American collections

The paintings of Eugene Delacroix: a critical catalogue. v.5: Text; v.6: Supplement and plates

The paintings of Eugene Delacroix: a critical catalogue. v.5: Text; v.6: Supplement and plates

Constable: The Making of a National Painter

John Constable is one of England's best-known landscape painters and greatest artists. While few will object to this statement, what it means will depend on when it is made. In the 150 years since his death in 1837, the terms of Constable's greatness have shifted several times. In the nineteenth century his scenes of the Stour Valley in Suffolk were valued as images of a particularly English countryside: the placid river with its locks and barges, great overhanging trees, and distant green water-meadows beneath massive cloudy skies. In this century, though the popular conviction of his Englishness persists, Constable is better known as Natural Painter.' As modernism rewrote the history of art, Constable was rediscovered as the man who excited Eugene Delacroix and other French artists in the 1820s: the natural painter whose freedom of technique, color, and chiaroscuro suggested a new way of representing the truth of landscape. The happy accident of his reception in France in the 1820s anchors English claims to participate in the development of an international style that moves through impressionism toward the more purely painterly and formal values of modernism. This Constable probably still dominates contemporary critical discussions of his work: the truthful student of nature who is also a painter's painter.2 There is more than a little chauvinism

Ingres's Pursuit of Perfection

Eugene Delacroix thought Ingres's exhibition of 1855 was “the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence.” With the exhibition In Pursuit of Perfection at the Kimbell Art Museum we can sample the completeness of Ingres's expression better than ever before. This exhibition, along with its scholarly catalogue by Patricia Condon and her collaborators Marjorie B. Cohn and Agnes Mongan, opens the door to a more extensive understanding of Ingres's obsessive and eclectic creative process. The exploration and interpretation of his working method are the stated goals of the exhibition. Consideration of what Delacroix called “incomplete intelligence” (and what others would call “ideology”) and of its historical significance in relation to Ingres's artistic method is, however, left to the viewer-reader.

Two Exotic Horse Paintings by Eugène Delacroix

Two Exotic Horse Paintings by Eugène Delacroix

Godfrey St. Peter and Eugène Delacroix: A Portrait of the Artist in The Professor’s House?

University of Nebraska L. B R E N T B O H L K E Godfrey St. Peter and Eugene Delacroix: A Portrait of the Artist in The Professor’s House? Godfrey St. Peter and his friend and student, Tom Outland, in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House have been enigmatic to readers and critics for some time. Both charactcrs leave one with a deep sense of curiosity about their personalities: during the course of the novel the Professor changcs profoundly, while Tom Outland has an almost mystical and mythical presence about him. Their relationship engenders jealousy between the Professor and his wife, creates a rift in the St. Peter family even after Tom’s death, causes a rupture in the Professor’s one profes­ sional friendship at his college, and leaves the Professor feeling unfulfilled. He regrets: that he had never got that vacation in Paris with Tom Outland. He had wanted to visit certain spots with him: to go with him some autumn morning to the Luxembourg Gardens, when the yellow horse-chestnuts were bright and bitter after rain; to stand with him before the monument to Delacroix and watch the sun gleam on the bronze figures — Time, bearing away the youth who was struggling to snatch his palm — or was it to lay a palm? Not that it mattered. It might have mattered, had not chance, in one great catastrophe, swept away all youth and all palms, and almost Time itself.1 1WilIa Cather, The Professor’s House (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 260. Further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 22 Western American Literature Well might the Professor have longed to stand before that “monument to Delacroix” with Tom Outland, for in that moment there would have been a kind of “communion of saints,” a rendezvous of kindred spirits, a meeting that would have transcended time and space. I Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798, near Paris. After a classical education at the Lycce Imperial and the deaths of both his parents he entered the Ecole des Bcaux-Arts. His early years were gregarious, social, active, intellectually stimulating, taken up with his painting, numerous love affairs, and his friends — among them George Sand, Dumas fils, Balzac, Baudelaire, Berlioz, Chopin, Hugo and Flaubert. When he was twenty-five, he journeyed to England and became fascinated with Shakespeare. In 1832, he traveled to Morocco and Spain and was ever after intrigued with the Moorish people and the mountains that he saw on that trip. In 1833, when he was thirty-five, he received the first of the public commissions that resulted in his work decorating dozens of buildings in the city of Paris, including the Palais Bourbon, the Library in the Luxembourg and the Louvre. His final commission and last great work was the decoration of the Chapel of Saint Sulpice, completed in 1861. After a long illness he died in April of 1863. “The bells of the church had just rung the morning Angelus.”" Although the reception of his work was mixed in his own time, today Delacroix’s place in the world of art is established. But the paradoxes within his work and his own personality have made him difficult to know. He was called a great romantic, yet he insisted that he was a pure classi­ cist. Living during a time of revolutionary fervor, he remained aloof, but “his outward reserve masked passionate inner fires. He could be a lover of women and an ascetic; a gadabout and a work fanatic; an adept at social trivia and a man of wide-ranging erudition.’” He was the last major painter who had a sure and definite feel and passion for classical subjects — myth, allegory, historical event, high drama — yet his varia­ tions on and from those subjects led to the advent of impressionism. His Journal (first published in France in 1893-95 in three volumes) is 2René Huyghe, Delacroix (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1963), p. 7. 3Tom Prideaux, The World of Delacroix (New York: Time Incorporated, 1966), p. 11. L. Brent Bohlke 23 an “invaluable commentary on the whole human...

A Mistress and a Master: Madame Cavé and Delacroix

The issue of the Revue des Deux-Mondes that appeared on September 15, 1850, contained an essay by Eugene Delacroix on “the teaching of drawing,” in which he reviewed a recent book titled, Drawing without a Master. It had been written by Marie-Elizabeth Cave, the attractive wife of the former Director of Fine Arts.1 Although the eminent master was seldom unmindful of the professional value of political tact, there were deeper, more personal commitments that would have drawn him to this particular task. Briefly his mistress and for long after that affair a devoted friend of the great painter, that bright and enterprising lady had a special call upon his loyalties. As a person of longstanding interest in the arts—she had herself gained some reputation as a painter— Mme. Cave had, moreover, discussed her ideas with him as a colleague and close friend who was himself much given to speculation about the nature of the arts. He must certainly have detected therefore echoes of his own precepts and sentiments as he...

Delacroix's Definition of Art

One of the most important sources of information open to the philosopher of art consists of the writings of artists upon their work. When a great artist is also an extremely prolific writer on the philosophical aspects of his work, the writing should command a great deal of interest. Eugene Delacroix is not only a major artist, but in his journal, correspondence, and articles, he has left nine volumes of comment on his own painting, painting in general, music, and literature.