On October 18, Mia opens “Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh,” a star-studded painting show with a historical sweep worthy of its protagonist. Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Renoir—they’ll all be here, along with the man they’re indebted to, Eugène Delacroix himself. Indeed, Delacroix has already arrived: In another of Mia’s birthday-year surprises, the French artist’s handsome countenance has been reproduced on the grand staircase of Mia’s 24th Street entrance. Bonjour, Gene.
A self-portrait by Delacroix from 1840.
But who exactly was he? In the 1840 self-portrait used for the staircase image (at right), he appears dark and dashing, at once wild and soft-featured—every bit the Romantic who would reject convention and push painting into the modern era. In reality, by 1840 he had become “slight, thin, sickly, sensitive to cold, and too delicate,” according to a friend who met him then. “Frail exterior but spirit of steel.”
In earlier images, like the photo above, it’s clear the dandy Delacroix was not entirely a fiction. Square-jawed, long-locked, fully mustachioed, he is the rugged, smoldering poet of the brush who sought the exotic in North Africa, scorned the academic, and wound the passions of man and beast in his paintings until they ached with coiled tension. As the poet Charles Baudelaire eulogized after Delacroix’s death in 1863, he was an artist “passionately in love with passion, and coldly determined to seek the means of expressing it in the most visible way.”
Delacroix on a 1951 French stamp.
He was both of these things: fierce rebel and thoughtful pragmatist. As Patrick Noon, the show’s co-curator and head of Mia’s paintings department, points out in his opening essay for the exhibition catalogue, Delacroix decried the musty confines of tradition even as he sought—and won—entree into all their conservative bastions, like the annual Salon exhibitions. In fact he was born into the establishment, in 1798, his father being Napoleon’s foreign minister, his older brother becoming a general in the army. Orphaned at 16, he was forced to succeed on his own. And he struck a path in which his Romantic tendencies—”the free manifestations of my personal impressions, my estrangement from the standards practiced in the schools, and my repugnance for academic recipes,” as he put it—could merge with the grand and decorative motifs of empire. “A volcanic crater artfully concealed behind bouquets of flowers,” Baudelaire observed. And so the painter succeeded in both scandalizing and surmounting the French art establishment.
“The Convulsionists of Tangier,” one of Mia’s prized Delacroix canvases.
His influence grew quickly, across borders and continents, as he defined the Romantic movement with his words and pictures. Ultimately, it was his experimentation, the fervor of his creative rebellion that would inspire beyond his death. Mia’s exhibition includes masterworks from Edgar Degas and James Whistler, Henri Matisse and Vassily Kandinsky. He became a patriarch before his time, and when he died there was little left to do but paint the homages.
The most direct of these was Hommage à Delacroix, painted by Henri Fantin-Latour a year after the master’s death. Surrounding a framed portrait of Delacroix are writers and artists, including Whistler and Edouard Manet and, of course, Delacroix’s friend Baudelaire. They are a black-jacketed cluster of admirers, as though at a wake, awkwardly assembled. It looks like they were Photoshopped together. Nevertheless, it makes the point: Delacroix was an icon. Without his worshippers, modern art would not be the same.