Civilization and barbarism were central, guiding ideas in the artistic practice of Eugène Delacroix. He wrote about them constantly in his journal, and they were the subject of his most ambitious mural project, the ceiling of the Library of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon, as well as numerous other paintings, both major and minor. Delacroix profoundly admired the achievements of European civilization: he saw himself as part of a long, grand tradition extending back to ancient Greece, and he was highly cognizant of the wealth and power that set Europe apart from the rest of the world in the nineteenth century. At the same time, civilization’s underbelly fascinated him. Like many in his generation, he was drawn to past monuments of art and literature and new forms of popular culture that dwelt on horrendous acts of violence and cruelty. He saw barbarism as an inextricable aspect of human nature, doubted the permanence of civilization, and even felt that modernity was in certain respects a return to barbarism. Many of his most important paintings, especially early on, explore episodes of horrific barbarism: rape, murder, torture, injustice, and degradation of all sorts. A partial list of such works—Scenes from the Massacre of Chios, The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero, The Death of Sardanapalus, The Murder of the Bishop of Liège, Medea About to Kill Her Children, The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, The Abduction of Rebecca, The Two Foscari—reads like a latter-day itinerary through hell. While some of his paintings located the threat to civilization outside its borders, others saw it born within, as part and parcel of civilization itself. As Charles Baudelaire summed it up, “His works contain nothing but devastation, massacres, conflagrations; everything bears witness against the eternal incorrigible barbarity of man. Burnt and smoking cites, slaughtered victims, ravished women, the very children cast beneath the hooves of horses or menaced by the dagger of a distracted mother—the whole body of this painter’s works, I say, is like a terrible hymn composed in honor of destiny and irremediable anguish.” Baudelaire admitted that occasionally Delacroix “found it possible to devote his brush to the expression of tender and voluptuous feelings,” but he was right to emphasize the painter’s “Molochism.”1
Delacroix was, in short, profoundly ambivalent about the idea of civilization. This ambivalence is especially poignant in a late painting, his Ovid Among the Scythians (fig. 1) of 1859, which depicts the Roman poet in exile, greeted by the barbarous inhabitants of the region on the northern edges of the Black Sea.2 It would be hard to overestimate Delacroix’s admiration for Ovid, whose poetry inspired many of his paintings, including such major works as the ceiling of the Apollo Gallery in the Louvre. Perhaps for this reason, commentators have often interpreted his paintings of Ovid’s banishment by the emperor Augustus as another example of the misunderstood artist, or the artist mistreated by officialdom, subjects that Delacroix explored in other paintings, most famously in his Tasso in the Hospital of St. Anna (1839, Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur).3 The subject also offered an opportunity to contrast Ovid’s refinement and sophistication with the rude manners of a people who have not really entered into civilization at all. The picture might be read as a meditation on exile, even an allegory for the predicament of an artist like Delacroix, devoted to the grand tradition and artistic achievement in a modern society where these things seemed to count for less and less.
FIG. 1 Eugène Delacroix, Ovid Among the Scythians, 1859. Oil on canvas, 87.6 × 130.2 cm. National Gallery, London. Bought, 1956. NG6262.
But none of these interpretations addresses the really distinctive aspects of the painting. To begin with, Ovid appears weak in relation to the Scythians who come to his aid. Delacroix’s short description of the painting in the Salon livret focuses on the Scythians: “Some study [Ovid] curiously; others welcome him after their fashion and offer him wild fruits, mare’s milk, etc.”4 In relation to the vigorous, muscular Scythians, Ovid’s features and curving recumbent pose appear decidedly effeminate. Ovid has the sort of strange, convoluted, almost misshapen body Delacroix often used for figures in distress. His clothes (blue and white, like those of the Virgin Mary) contrast with the savages’ seminudity, his white shoes with their bare or simply clad feet. He awkwardly spreads his scroll—writing, culture—on the ground, while they are completely at home in nature. They exist on the fringe of civilization—their architecture consists of huts with thatched roofs; their animals appear barely domesticated; presumably they still hunt and gather much of their food; their clothing, adornments, and weapons are crude—yet they hardly appear to suffer for it. For all their primitiveness, they appear kind and strong.
Delacroix does not seem to have drawn upon Ovid’s own descriptions of Scythia, which criticize the barbarism of its inhabitants and the harshness of its climate, but upon that in Strabo’s Geography, which refers specifically to wild fruit and mare’s milk.5 Strabo makes no mention of Ovid, but significantly, he emphasizes that the Scythians were not the frightening savages described in other accounts, who “sacrificed strangers, ate their flesh, and used their skulls as drinking vessels.”6 They were indeed primitive: “In fact, even now there are Wagon-dwellers and Nomads, so called, who live off their herds, and on milk and cheese, and particularly on cheese made from mare’s milk, and know nothing about storing up food or about peddling merchandise either, except the exchange of wares for wares.”7 Strabo uses this last detail to launch into a defense of the Scythians, turning their primitiveness into a virtue. He suggests that Homer had found them “most just” and “proud” because they did not “spend their lives on contracts and money-getting but actually possess[ed] all things in common except sword and drinking-cup, and above all things [had] their wives and their children in common, in the Platonic way.” He then offers an extended critique of the commercial aspects of his own Greek culture and its spread to barbarian outposts like Scythia:
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We [contemporary Greeks] regard the Scythians as the most straightforward of men and the least prone to mischief, as also far more frugal and independent of others than we are. And yet our mode of life has spread its change for the worse to almost all peoples, introducing amongst them luxury and sensual pleasures and, to satisfy these vices, base artifices that lead to innumerable acts of greed. So then, much wickedness of this sort has fallen on the barbarian peoples also, on the Nomads as well as the rest; for as the result of taking up a seafaring life they not only have become morally worse, indulging in the practice of piracy and of slaying strangers, but also, because of their intercourse with many peoples, have partaken of the luxury and the peddling habits of those peoples. But though these things seem to conduce strongly to gentleness of manner, they corrupt morals and introduce cunning instead of the straightforwardness that I just now mentioned.8
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It is impossible to know if this passage was on Delacroix’s mind when he painted Ovid Among the Scythians, but by 1859 he was prone to criticize modernity in similar terms. He had embraced a type of primitivism himself.
Delacroix wrote the title of his painting, Ovid Among the Scythians, next to the following undated passage in one of his notebooks: “Setting for the story about the feelings of a heart and of a sick imagination, those of a man who, after living a worldly life, finds himself the slave of barbarians, or cast onto a desert island like Robinson, forced to use the strength of his body and his industry—which brings him back to natural feelings and calms his imagination” (1552).9 Neither of the scenarios envisioned in this passage—enslaved by barbarians or marooned on a desert island—describes exactly what has happened to Ovid in the painting, but Delacroix obviously saw in the subject something of the same confrontation between the urbane and the uncouth, the effete and the healthy, and the last phrase suggests an embrace of nature and physical activity in the vein of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Delacroix often read.
The taste for nature extends beyond the narrative, into the landscape, which, exceptionally in the case of Delacroix, almost dominates the painting. Théophile Gautier was exactly right when he explained to Salon-goers that the painting was “a kind of historical landscape” in which “the landscape has as much importance as the figures.”10 What a magnificent, capacious landscape it is! The lake and mountains immediately establish the breadth and depth of the space, both in their lateral sweep and their nuanced atmospheric perspective, created out of every conceivable shade of blue and green. The eye moves easily into the picture: the diminishing size of figures guides it into the landscape, to the lake, and then to the distant valley stretching toward the horizon. The distance is measured by the alternating bands of light and dark pigment and by the overlapping ridges of mountains. The marvelous sky, with its white highlights on the clouds near the horizon, guides us back as well. Small passages of various colors and handling animate the landscape, suggesting changes in terrain or vegetation while remaining deliciously, yet frustratingly, vague. Are those trees or bushes indicated by the band of dark green on the far right side of the lake? Is there a beach or a shallows at the right edge of the lake? Is the distant valley marshy, as Strabo described Scythia, or is it forested? What does the patch of dark blue in the valley represent (fig. 2)?
FIG. 2 Eugène Delacroix, Ovid Among the Scythians, 1859 (fig. 1), detail. National Gallery, London. Bought, 1956. NG6262.
The more one explores the landscape, the more its painterly qualities become of interest in their own right. The textured, sensual handling calls attention to itself. It is often difficult to tell, at any distance from the painting, exactly how a particular color is formed, especially in the mountains, where soft, semitransparent strokes of muted pigments interact with those underneath and around them (fig. 3). Examined up close, the painting offers all sorts of interesting incidents. Bits of bright primary color appear here and there: a trace of yellow in the central green hill, a bit of red at the base of the mountain above the horse’s head, the touches of red, yellow, and blue in the central valley (fig. 2). The ridgelines of the lower mountains are emphasized with darker pigment but also by heightening the colors of the mountains just above and behind them. The contour of the highest peak is interrupted by bits of sky: strokes representing sky bleed into strokes representing mountain, and vice versa (fig. 4). Subtle variations of pale blue and wisps of red further complicate the passage. The foreground has its curiosities as well. The clothing of the figures runs through all the colors of the spectrum, from red to orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet, as if every hue had to be represented. The contours of the figures and especially of the horse are typical of late Delacroix in their wobbly, undulant forms. The spatial arrangement of the figures is peculiar: the horse and woman milking it (with her impossible left arm) appear out of proportion to the rest of the figures: they are much larger than the figures on the left, who are only slightly farther away. My point is not to transform Delacroix into Cézanne (though, looking at the painting, one can easily understand why Cézanne worshipped Delacroix); rather, I wish to indicate that Delacroix’s meditations on civilization and barbarism were also meditations on nature and on the sensual qualities of painting.
FIG. 3 Eugène Delacroix, Ovid Among the Scythians, 1859 (fig. 1), detail. National Gallery, London. Bought, 1956. NG6262.
FIG. 4 Eugène Delacroix, Ovid Among the Scythians, 1859 (fig. 1), detail. National Gallery, London. Bought, 1956. NG6262.
Ovid Among the Scythians demonstrates how quickly, in Delacroix’s hands, thoughts about civilization led to thoughts about barbarism, how his admiration for the achievements of civilization could give way to admiration for a primitive life lived close to nature. Barbarism and the primitive were only two of a number of ideas and entities that Delacroix placed over and against civilization. There was also the natural, the bestial, and then painting itself. At the core of Delacroix’s aesthetics was the notion that art should move the viewer in some immediate, spontaneous, sensual, even visceral way, beside which all the refinement of civilization was almost as nothing. Civilization implied a degree of discipline and the constraint of natural impulses. Emulating its great artistic and intellectual achievements required learning and the slow acquisition of skill. Part of the story here is about Delacroix’s effort to reconcile the erudite, literary, tradition-bound aspects of his art with his desire to reach the viewer in a more direct, unrestrained manner. His art would never propound any easy equation between the binary pair civilization/barbarism and other key oppositions that informed his understanding of painting, such as those between the discursive and the figural, the intellectual and the sensual, the didactic and the decorative, the cogitated and the spontaneous, the mediated and the immediate, and the cultural and the natural. But his thoughts about civilization and barbarism led him increasingly to privilege the second term in all of these antinomies, and he often found that he could access these qualities best in the primitive, the animal, the natural, and other categories of experience more readily associated with barbarism. Delacroix valued these qualities because he felt they could provide a transcendent aesthetic experience that released the viewer momentarily from the mundane concerns of everyday life and the complications of modernity, which for him had elements of both civilization and barbarism.
Civilization today is a vague and controversial idea, so much so that it is hard to imagine its power and centrality in Delacroix’s day. If it is still invoked by politicians and in the popular press, its hold on artists and intellectuals is far more tenuous and contested. Other ideas with which it was commonly discussed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—empire, colonialism, religion, culture, modernity, progress, race, and gender—remain major categories of scholarly analysis, but civilization, arguably the most common way of understanding historical development in the nineteenth century, resists disentanglement from the circumstances in which it arose. The concept of civilization has suffered in part because of the telos it usually proposes: a supposedly universal standard of progress, but one best embodied in European models. The idea seems inextricably bound to European feelings of supremacy and has bolstered Europe’s sense of pride and privilege in the global context, nowhere more so than in its perceived “civilizing mission” in the world. However much the European idea of civilization may have served to provide moral direction, a great many crimes were carried out in its name. The term survives more happily when used to designate non-Western social formations (e.g., Mesopotamian civilization, Chinese civilization, Far Eastern civilization, or Islamic civilization), but even here it suggests some normative standard of achievement and promotes a sense of deep and enduring social divisions. The use of civilizations in the plural has especially served polemicists on the right interested in pitting the West against its others.
In the nineteenth century, however, civilization seemed like a self-evident phenomenon. François Guizot, in his immensely successful History of Civilization in Europe, goes so far as to say that “civilization is a fact like any other—a fact susceptible like any other to being studied, described, narrated.” Civilization is “a sort of ocean, constituting the wealth of a people, and on whose bosom all the elements of the life of that people, all the powers supporting its existence, assemble and unite.”11 Most thinkers found the concept so obvious that they did not bother to define it. National reform agendas, international treaties, and transnational movements depended on the term. Major books proposing new political, historical, and cultural theories included it in their titles.
Something of its centrality to nineteenth-century culture is suggested by the fact that when artists were asked to decorate public buildings, they frequently chose the theme of civilization.12 James Barry precociously used it for his murals in the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts in London, executed between 1777 and 1784. By the middle decades of the century, the theme was seemingly everywhere. In Paris, extensive mural cycles focusing on civilization or closely allied subjects were painted by Horace Vernet (the Salon de la Paix in the Bourbon Palace, 1838–47), Théodore Chassériau (Stairway of Honor at the Cour des comptes, 1844–48, now destroyed), Paul Chenavard (the Panthéon, begun in 1848 and never completed), and Henri Lehmann (the Gallery of Festivities in the Hôtel de Ville, 1852–53, now destroyed). In Berlin, at the Neues Museum, a history of civilization was equally the theme of the six enormous mural paintings completed by Wilhelm von Kaulbach between 1847 and 1866. In Washington, D.C., Thomas Crawford chose the progress of civilization as his subject for the pediment located over the Senate entrance on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol building and completed in 1863. The theme was still being used for mural decorations at the end of the century. Edwin Blashfield chose the evolution of civilization as the subject of his ceiling painting for the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress, completed in 1895, and Fernand Cormon mixed it with fashionable racial theories in his ceiling for the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, painted between 1893 and 1898.
Given its ubiquity in nineteenth-century thought, it may be surprising to learn of its recent origins. The word was coined in the mid-eighteenth century, almost simultaneously in French and English, to refer to an achieved state of culture shared broadly in a society and resulting from progress out of an inferior condition.13 Early usages sometimes referred to the process by which this occurred—civilization was the process of becoming civilized—but the word soon came to refer to the end result of this process. It moved rapidly from a neologism to everyday usage, suggesting that it answered to a very great need. Most early formulations were markedly universalist: they asserted that civilization was the result of human agency (as opposed to that of a god) and proposed stages through which all societies advanced. Even before the invention of the term, a dominant idea in Enlightenment thought, particularly in Scotland and France, posited that all human societies underwent a stadial progression: civilization came to stand for the most advanced social states.14 Eighteenth-century thinkers pointed most frequently to climate, geography, commerce, and religion as the critical factors explaining progress, while race and nation became increasingly important to the nineteenth century. Early theorists, especially those in the Scottish and French Enlightenments such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Montesquieu, Victor Mirabeau, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Antoine Destutt de Tracy, employed non-Western societies in their arguments, but they primarily used the idea to criticize or promote modern economic and political systems in Europe, particularly in relation to the institutions of feudal society. Nineteenth-century thinkers deployed the idea more insistently to promote notions of national or European superiority vis-à-vis the rest of the world. In all cases, civilization was intimately linked to the notion of progress, and it also gave rise to much speculation about the primordial state that theoretically preceded the beginning of the civilizing process. It became an urgent question to determine whether primitive society existed in a happier state than that of modernity.
Scientific and technological advances, industrial growth, the democratization of politics, the spread of formal education, and the expansion of European power all fostered ever more triumphant visions of the future in the nineteenth century. Very much in the sanguine spirit of the preceding century, progress became the watchword of the age. To be sure, there were dissenters. Historicism, nostalgia, and primitivism, among other attitudes, all checked in various ways the period’s faith in progress. But until the end of the century, most historians portrayed history moving in a very positive direction over the long run. Prominent thinkers as various as Guizot, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Thomas MacCaulay, Herbert Spencer, Giuseppe Mazzini, and many, many others all saw the present as a pinnacle of civilization and offered theories of historical development that predicted still greater things for the future. Utopian visions proliferated, as in the work of Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, to name just two. Even thinkers highly critical of emergent capitalist societies, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, perceived at work in history a dialectical process that would lead to a better, more equitable society.
Doubts about the idea emerged only slowly as the century unfolded. Chapter 3 shows that French colonialism in North Africa raised concerns about its “civilizing mission” even before midcentury, but it was not until the end of the century that these gained widespread traction. Beginning around 1850, France witnessed renewed efforts to exalt the primitive and denigrate the modern. The trend grew through the end of the century, finding one of its most famous expressions in the self-serving primitivism of Paul Gauguin, for whom civilization had almost entirely negative connotations. Feelings of social alienation and problems accompanying industrialization further undercut the notion of ineluctable progress. Perhaps the biggest blow to faith in the superiority of European civilization came with World War I: four years of unimaginable slaughter facilitated by advanced technology and promoted by European governments fundamentally shook confidence in the direction of civilization. In his Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, Sigmund Freud made much of the modern ambivalence about the idea. He expressed astonishment at the contention that “what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.” He admitted, however, that “liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization” and that the “urge for freedom, therefore, is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization, or against civilization altogether.”15 Whatever betterment civilization brought to human society, it came at the cost of repressing or sublimating destructive instincts that Freud felt were constitutive of the human:
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men are . . . creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. . . . In circumstances that are favourable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien. Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War—anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view.16
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Delacroix had neither Freud’s psychoanalytic apparatus nor his experience of world war, but modernity inspired in him many of the same thoughts: the notion that savage, unruly emotions lived on in modern men, the image of man as wolf, even a fascination with some of the same premodern atrocities cited by Freud.
Delacroix came to the concept just as it was entering its heyday. His journal is filled with discussions of civilization that reveal both its immense importance to him and his many criticisms of it. In chapter 1, I summarize Delacroix’s opinions on the subject, but my main interest is in how these affected his artistic practice. I focus in particular on his belief that he worked in a time of artistic decadence, when modern conditions did not favor the production of great art. This, I contend, led him to develop a sort of primitivism and to embrace ever more strongly the view that the sensual qualities of painting could provide a sort of spiritual epiphany for the viewer.
Most of Delacroix’s writings concerning civilization come from the end of the 1840s and from the 1850s, by which time he had already struggled with the idea for more than a decade in his mural paintings. I turn to these in chapter 2, focusing on his murals in the Library of the Bourbon Palace—which explicitly take up the theme of civilization and barbarism—to elaborate his understanding of the relationship between civilization and art. Over the course of the project’s long genesis, he unpacked the contradictions inherent in the concept and essentially rejected the notion of continual progress. I trace the place of civilization in subsequent mural projects to argue, in short, that Delacroix moved away from the intense literary meditations of the Bourbon Palace to a decorative form of mural painting that eschewed the political and social implications of his subject matter in favor of an exploration of art-historical precedents and especially the decorative possibilities of mural painting.
Delacroix contributes most to our understanding of civilization not as a social or political philosopher but as an artist and writer. While he was thoroughly familiar with the leading social and philosophical perspectives on the matter, the most pressing question for him was whether the supposed progress of civilization truly provided for a rich, fulfilling existence that found expression in art. This question arose from his conviction that modernity diminished life in important respects by extinguishing or dulling certain dimensions of experience, and more immediately from concerns that the arts no longer possessed the same capacity to move viewers as they had in the past. Delacroix devoted his life to the arts and had no doubt that they enhanced it as nothing else could, but his doubts about the prospects for great art under the conditions of modernity led him to criticize celebratory accounts of recent European civilization, and especially the notion of progress.
With respect to modern life, one of Delacroix’s more idiosyncratic pet peeves was the effort to improve the lot of the poor in the nineteenth century. He repeatedly spewed venom at the proliferation of philanthropic organizations—with their “entrepreneurs of charity” and “professional philanthropists . . . all fat and well fed” (788)—and he heaped scorn on socialist and utopian philosophers such as Saint-Simon and Fourier, whose “baroque ideas of continual progress” (497) and ludicrous proposals to abolish “hierarchy of any sort” (394) outraged him. He erupted after reading a review of Émile de Girardin’s Universal Politics—Orders of the Future, which predicted, in Delacroix’s words, “the advent of universal well-being” as a result of mechanized agriculture, which would “contribute to the happiness of men in dispensing with work.” Hard work, Delacroix countered, rendered peasants “quite moral and quite satisfied with themselves.” Girardin’s plans would reduce the countryside to “nothing more than a factory of products, exploited by the large arms of a machine and leaving the better part of its production in the impure and atheistic hands of speculators [agioteurs].” Delacroix was just getting going and continued with more than five hundred words. Rural villages would disappear, filling new cities with idle men lacking any local culture and any attachment to the land, who would gamble away whatever pittance they had received for their property. He concluded,
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Oh unworthy philanthropists . . . ! Oh philosophers without heart and imagination! You think man is a machine, like your machines; you downgrade him from his most sacred rights under the pretext of tearing him away from labors that you pretend to view as vile and that are the law of his being, not only the law that demands he create for himself his own resources against need but also the one that lifts him up in his own eyes and employs, in an almost sacred manner, the brief moments accorded him.17
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Comments such as these might be dismissed as unfortunate ramblings or simply condemned for their politics; they certainly represent a side of Delacroix that seldom appears in the art-historical literature. I cite them, however, because they reveal several fundamental aspects of Delacroix’s discontent with dominant views of civilization and progress. In contrast to the Panglossian optimism that dominated nineteenth-century accounts of civilization, with their faith in the benefits of science, technology, and social reform, Delacroix was far more inclined to see the effects of “progress” as degrading or diminishing, even in the cases of professional philanthropy and mechanized agriculture. He was more concerned with the disappearance of traditional ways of life and their replacement with uniform, commercialized, and atomized forms of sociability. For Delacroix, there was something deadening in the way that modernity removed one from various sorts of raw experience—of nature or hard work or untamed passion. He often asserted that conflict, hardship, suffering, and the like were necessary parts of life, which itself often seemed to push individuals to cruelty and domination. Experiences of nature, adversity, or passion gave direction and meaning to life—a sense of deep purpose or desire, the very thing missing, according to Delacroix, in the controlled, complacent, stifling world produced by modernity. At the same time, Delacroix was deeply conflicted about the untamed or untamable aspect of humans: he railed against disorder when confronted with it in the form of modern crime or revolution, yet he was fascinated with it when he found it in history, literature, or nature. Delacroix believed that irrational, amoral, even violent forces were essential to human vitality, creativity, and strength. This is part of what drew him to the wild and the barbaric. Thus his disdain for a too-harmonized picture of life that edited out suffering, evil, and violence.
Delacroix attempted to remedy this situation in his own life in various ways: through travel, encounters with nature, and of course the arts, especially painting and music. In the 1840s and 1850s he used his practice as a painter more and more to explore, in imaginary forms, the types of experience that he felt were missing in modernity. In chapter 3, I argue that North Africa appealed to him in part because he could picture it as free of those aspects of the modern world he loathed most. His depictions of North Africa shifted from ethnographic accounts based on observations he had made there to fantastic pictures of a life lived close to nature, beyond the constraints of the modern world. He brought to the subject a quasi-aristocratic ethos, a vision of a manly, chivalrous, warrior society with the possibility of heroic exploits that seemed foreclosed in the new, modern world of equality and benevolence, where everything was flattened, utilitarian, bland, commoditized, bourgeois. In chapter 4, I posit that wild animals fascinated Delacroix because they belonged to a world completely apart from civilization, where all that civilization repressed burst forth with furious energy. Delacroix used animals to envision man’s darker impulses, but he also admired their direct, seemingly unmediated relation to the world. Observing them provided access to an instinctive, immediate form of experience. They lived in nature—they were nature—and as such they offered a means of imagining the simplest of lives. Their impulsive, unconstrained, cruel, and violent behavior was the very opposite of the shielded, dulled-down, pacified existence that he felt was overtaking Europe. Viewing animals awakened something in him that had been put to sleep by modernity. Opening himself to the inhospitality of nature in the form of ferocious beasts provided him with a sense of being alive—something beyond the controlled, shallow world of everyday life—as if part of him had been stifled by modernity.
At the same time, Delacroix expected far more from painting than the semblance of a richer universe. While paintings could conjure up illusions and spur intellectual reflections, they could also move viewers in more mysterious and immediate ways through their sensual qualities. Delacroix became ever more fascinated with this latter possibility, especially when he took up subject matter that thematized the primitive, the animalistic, and the natural. Some of his paintings of North Africa and of animals are among his most daring in terms of the freedom he allowed himself with brush and paint. The relationship between civilization and an art that appealed to the viewer in a sensual, immediate fashion was not simply one of opposition, however, for in Delacroix’s view some of the greatest artistic achievements of civilization shared this quality. Titian and Rubens, for example, possessed it in the highest degree, as did modern music. He valued sensuality for the ways in which it transported the viewer beyond everyday experience. It was particularly welcome under the conditions of modernity, where art could above all else provide a fuller, more impulsive, freer mode of existence.
Delacroix attempted many times in his journal to define the unique qualities of painting that rendered it, in his opinion, superior to the other arts, with the occasional exception of music. The qualities that Delacroix found most inspiring and particular to painting included its materiality, its use of color, line, and handling, the fact that viewers took in a painting all at once, the force of the illusions it created, and its silence. Color and materiality received special attention. What certainly made painting superior, however, was the immaterial effect it had on the viewer. Here again Delacroix had difficulty formulating a clear description, often pointing to the fact that this effect was “mysterious,” “vague,” and “above” or “beyond” thought, which was part of its power. Nonetheless, he emphasized again and again painting’s ability to “move profoundly,” “possess,” or “lift up” the “soul” or the “mind.”18 As early as 1824 he referred approvingly to the idea, found in Mme de Staël’s writing, that “painting, as well as music, are above thought. Whence their advantage over literature, by their vagueness” (118; Delacroix’s emphasis). Here is another example: “Of all the arts, painting is, without contradiction, the one whose impression is the most material in the hands of a vulgar artist, and I maintain that it is the one that a great artist drives the furthest toward these obscure sources of our most sublime emotions, and from which we receive these mysterious shocks that our soul, released in some way from earthly bonds and pulled back into what is most immaterial, receives almost without knowing it” (1567). For Delacroix, this power took on special force as an escape from, negation of, antidote to, or consolation for modernity.
Over the course of this book I suggest ways in which Delacroix’s artistic practice relates to an emergent modernism, a term I use here to refer to growing doubts about painting’s ability to offer an illusion or to deliver a narrative, and to an accompanying self-reflexivity, an exploration of the properties unique to the medium. No one denies that Delacroix was the most important artist of his generation when considered as inspiration and example to key figures who developed modernism in the fifty years or so following his death. Nonetheless, he is curiously absent from recent histories of modernism except as a premodernist source. There are some obvious reasons for his exclusion. Delacroix never doubted the illusionistic possibilities of painting, and on the few occasions when he considered a purely abstract painting, without subject matter, he dismissed the possibility. Moreover, few nineteenth-century artists were more attracted to the erudition and high-mindedness of grand-style European painting or more engaged with European civilization’s long history of artistic and literary achievements than Delacroix. He was one of the last painters to achieve major success with large-scale paintings of classical, biblical, and literary subjects that emulated the great masters of the Renaissance and the Baroque.
And yet Delacroix prized, above all else, moving his viewers spontaneously with his medium, in ways that defied rational understanding, like music. In his journal he wrote extensively about the properties of painting, particularly through comparison to the other arts, always trying to define what was unique to painting itself. He speculated on how painting affected the viewer purely through its formal properties, considered quite separately from its illusionistic and narrative aspects. I turn to this aspect of his art and thought in the conclusion and consider how it might inform our understanding of the advent of modernism. My concern here is neither to elaborate a pedigree for modernism nor to quibble about when modernism begins or who belongs in its canon. I suggest that modernism be viewed, not as something born whole, all at once, or in a single artist or movement, but as something that emerges partially, irregularly, and piecemeal in response to certain modern conditions—conditions to which Delacroix’s art points. His relationship to tradition and his still-literary conception of painting in many ways separated him from modernism, but, on the other hand, he sought transcendence in the sensual experience of the medium and a release or escape there from perceived deficiencies in contemporary life. He frequently viewed his art as a negation of the values that dominated, as he saw it, his excessively complacent, materialist, self-satisfied century. For Delacroix, questions about the proper function of painting and its potential as a site of spiritual fulfillment surfaced most urgently in his speculations about civilization, barbarism, and modernity, to which I now turn.