Exiled in Modernity

Conclusion

The primary purpose of this book has been to explore the theme of civilization in Delacroix’s art, but that project has necessarily thrown light on another aspect of his artistic practice. Some of the most characteristic features of what might be called Delacroix’s “late style”—simplified compositions dominated by strongly geometric elements, distinctive color schemes with complex harmonies and contrasts, and ever more conspicuous handling and meticulously textured surfaces—relate to his changed attitude toward his subject matter. As the previous three chapters demonstrate, his mural paintings on the theme of civilization moved away from overt philosophical or moral content, emphasizing instead decorative effects and an engagement with the art of great masters of the past, and his North African and animal paintings relied ever more heavily on formal effects to communicate the idea of emotional and spiritual release. How might we understand Delacroix’s desire for a more immediate expressivity through the sensual qualities of painting in relation to his attitudes toward civilization, barbarism, and modernity?

In his journal Delacroix often attempted to differentiate painting from the other arts and define its particular expressive qualities. Chapter 1 has shown how he used the simile of a bridge to suggest the solidity with which painting communicated illusions of real things to the mind. He wished to suggest that, for the viewer, painting conjured up illusions more effortlessly, immediately, and magically than writing or music, but he was often at pains to stress that illusionism was hardly the totality of painting. At another moment, when he was again using the image of a bridge, he was struck by the fact that even though painting was “material,” the bridge it created was immaterial: it stretched from “the mind of the painter to that of the spectator” (528). This led him to another thought that recurs in his writing: “Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or it expresses, is the entirety of art.” Delacroix often observed, particularly when discussing color and contour, that expression through formal means was far more important than realistic representation. His main point was to stress that painting, unlike literature, was richly sensual and could communicate meaning and pleasure quite independently of subject matter; at the same time, it could create illusions that made one sometimes forget that the material surface was there.

For Delacroix, the comparison to music was particularly illuminating. Music frequently struck him as the quintessentially modern art. He once argued the case concisely as follows:

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Art must triumph with the means proper to it: the poetry of sounds, like that of colors, has nothing in common with that of words, and it is precisely this variety that is a great source of pleasure.

Music is thus essentially a modern art: it goes to the imagination by means that the ancients did not know or only glimpsed. (1797)

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Delacroix suggests that “a modern art” relies in particular upon qualities proper to its medium, and because of this, music has found new means to communicate to the imagination. It supposedly touches the viewer in more direct, unmediated ways. At another moment, after again asserting that music is the most modern of the arts, he elaborates:

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In this marvelous art that gives wings to the imagination and lifts it well above what one can paint with words, in this art where the vague is the most powerful means of making an impact, the symphony seems to be the most characteristic form of progress and comes to sum up everything that is given to music to produce. It is art itself, given over solely to its own resources: there, no alliance with a rival art, no confusion in the feeling of the soul, and I say “the soul” because in music that accompanies words, there is always something that involuntarily seizes the mind and that speaks to what we call the mind. (1796; emphasis added for clarity)

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Both quotations assert that music is superior to literature. It moves the imagination more than words for at least three reasons: it is “vague,” an aesthetic quality attributed to music by some of Delacroix’s favorite writers (Senancour, de Staël) and that, for Delacroix, could elevate both painting and music “above thought” (au dessus de la pensée, 118) because of its immediacy, indeterminacy, and ineffability;¹ it is detached from other, nonartistic forms of experiences (“It is art itself”); and it relies only on its own “resources,” that is, on its unique qualities, different from those of the “rival arts.” The meaning of the final clause above is unclear, but Delacroix seems to assert that even when music is accompanied by words (or, presumably, embodied in words), its musical aspect somehow appeals to the mind separately from the words. Music, for Delacroix, communicates in a more uncogitated, nondiscursive, and immediate manner.²

Most surprising in these quotations is the positive valence Delacroix assigns to “progress” and the “modern.” As already noted, these were normally for him bugbears or worse: he often associated them with ennui, mindless distraction, false hopes, or inhuman and alienating experiences. Yet the modern and progressive qualities of music rendered it superior to the other arts. How might this contradiction be explained? The answer is, I think, that music provided an experience that separated itself off from, canceled out, counteracted, or otherwise obliterated the deleterious aspects of modernity. Music’s immediate expressivity and imaginative force detached it from other forms of experience, providing a purely aesthetic awareness. Music was modern in a positive way because its purity negated all else.

Prejudices derived from traditional understandings of the liberal arts occasionally made Delacroix defensive about the special qualities of music and painting. In 1857 he wrote down this brief passage: “Superiority of music—absence of reasoning (not of logic). . . . Enchantment that this art brings about in me. It seems that the intellectual part has no role in the pleasure. Which has made pedants classify the art of music at an inferior rank” (1178). Few artists in the nineteenth century were more intellectual than Delacroix, but in his final decades he mused nonetheless about an art that appealed to the viewer in a manner that obliterated reasoning, that transported the viewer magically and effortlessly out of the here and now. He similarly defended the materiality of painting (an aspect of it that had traditionally been used to exclude it from the liberal arts): “You think that painting is a material art because you only see with the eyes of the body these lines, these figures, these colors” (1567). No matter how material painting might be, Delacroix went on to assert, a sensitive viewer also felt its spirituality.³

Normally, however, Delacroix argued for the superiority of painting precisely because of qualities that separated it from the all the other arts, with the possible exception of music:

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The pleasure caused by a painting is a pleasure very different from that of a literary work.

There is a kind of emotion that is quite particular to painting; nothing in the other art [literature] gives any idea of it. There is an impression that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of light and shadow, etc. It is what I will call the music of the painting.

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Delacroix went on to speak about how a painting could affect viewers profoundly before they even understood what it represented:

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The lines alone sometimes have this power through their grandiosity. Here lies the true superiority of painting over [literature]; because this emotion addresses itself to the most intimate part of the soul: it stirs feeling that words can only express indistinctly, and of a type that everyone, following his particular inclination, understands in his own way, whereas painting transports you there in reality. Like a powerful magician, it takes you on its wings and carries you away. It adds to what would be the spectacle in nature, this element that invigorates and that chooses, the soul of the painter, his particular style, etc. (1528)

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At various moments Delacroix marveled at other qualities of painting: it hit you all at once, instantaneously, “all of a sudden”: “the good parts jump to your eyes in an instant; if the mediocrity of the work is unbearable, you quickly turn away your eyes, whereas the sight of a masterpiece stops you in spite of yourself, keeps you in a meditation brought on by nothing except an invincible charm” (842). Painting possessed a “grandiose and abstract ideal” (1551) that poetry did not.⁴ Much more could be said about the special qualities and abilities Delacroix claimed for painting, but its preeminent feature was that it miraculously transported the viewer through form, before words made sense of the experience.⁵

Delacroix’s stress on purity in the arts, on each art’s finding the qualities proper to it, may remind some readers of various definitions of modernism, but much separates Delacroix from artists more readily associated with this artistic development. Modernism as it is usually defined in relation to painting—as a fundamental doubt about painting’s ability to offer an illusion or to deliver a narrative, and an accompanying self-reflexivity, an exploration of the properties unique to the medium—does not describe Delacroix’s art well.⁶ Delacroix was completely devoted to—convinced of—the narrative and illusionistic possibilities of painting, no matter how much he enjoyed disrupting an easy grasp of the motif, with bravura brushwork, oddly shaped bodies, or landscape elements that rise up toward the surface of the picture or cut through the top edge of the canvas. To be sure, he emphasized the material means of his craft, but not in a way that fundamentally questioned whether painting should or could offer a window into space. He could not envision an abstract art, nor could “flatness,” to borrow Clement Greenberg’s word, be thought of as a central signifier in his art. He said as much when, in response to Chenavard, he asserted that if painting were “only a question of having an effect on the eyes by an arrangement of lines and colors, that would just mean: arabesque” (662). He returned to the idea when considering whether music or painting was the more modern art: “Painting is the particularly modern art. It is the same with music.—One can prefer a more abstract art, but you have to admit that painting has only fulfilled its purpose when it has called to its aid the means of illusion permitted to it. Imagination demands these absolutely” (1789). That Delacroix contemplated an abstract art at all perhaps reveals some degree of uncertainty about painting’s purpose, but however much his late work may invite us to relish its brushwork or marvel at its peculiar shapes or bands of color, it does not seriously undermine our confidence in the illusion or our understanding of the story.

Delacroix saw himself as inheriting and extending the grand tradition of European painting from the Renaissance forward. He recognized that this tradition was in peril and offered various reasons for this in his writings, but it remained very much alive for him. He felt comfortable with older models of emulation: he studied and built directly upon the example of the Old Masters in a way that suggests his own art was a continuation of theirs. Tradition was not a problem for him as it was for many of his contemporaries, and certainly not as it was for younger painters such as Édouard Manet. For Delacroix, painting could provide a special liberating experience by recalling great works of the past. As with Ingres, the grand tradition provided Delacroix with a welcome escape from the present. The work of the Old Masters was slipping into the past, but it could still be accessed and enjoyed as an antidote to the current fallen state of art and the world. Delacroix’s ceiling for the Apollo Gallery in the Louvre offered at one and the same time an escape into decorative painting and a celebration of European painting’s long great tradition. His Lion Hunt of 1855 was both a liberating departure from the Exposition universelle’s celebration of modernity and a tribute to Rubens. He was self-conscious about modern artists’ distance or estrangement from grand-style painting, but he nonetheless believed that that tradition could be extended. This sort of relationship to the Old Masters was no longer available to the leading artists of the next generation, who felt compelled to break with tradition or at least signal some degree of irony in their relationship to it.

Delacroix’s relationship to European literature and scholarship was similar. He was perhaps as versed in the classics as any other painter of the nineteenth century and read well beyond the canon in many fields. While he drew upon newly fashionable authors and experimented with novel subjects in his painting, he remained attached to long-standing historical, religious, and literary narratives. He worked in many genres, new and old, but never abandoned history painting. He was still keenly committed to a philosophical and moral art, and many of his subjects allowed the viewer to ponder fundamental questions of history, love, or the human condition, or questions about man or God or law. Though he had great success in the emerging system of art critics and dealers and with private collectors, he valued recognition most in long-standing institutions such as the Salon and the Academy. He was essentially content with the existing hierarchies of cultural value and legitimacy. Whatever “progress” he saw in art, it was not a matter of renouncing its heritage or abruptly breaking with the past.

On the other hand, Delacroix negotiated the constraints and contradictions of his moment in ways that later became central to artistic practice. Important aspects of Delacroix’s art arose from his discontent with the present and were meant to offer something that was lacking in contemporary life. I have observed this primarily in his attitude toward civilization. His portrayal of the course of civilization in both his mural paintings and his writings made it out to be, more and more as he grew older, unpredictable, fragile, capable of turning into barbarism at any moment. Modernity was falsely equated with civilization and in many ways deeply barbarous. While the ceiling of the Library of the Bourbon Palace began as an effort to publicly praise the values of Western civilization and their particular embodiment in French history, the project became a personal, critical, and inconclusive questioning of assumptions about civilization. His Orientalism became a primitivist paean to a disappearing or disappeared way of life, to all that modernity had supposedly displaced or destroyed. His animal paintings provided the polar opposite of celebrations of progress and pictured a raw violence and self-interest found equally in men and beasts. North Africa and the animal kingdom appealed to him especially because they allowed him to construct imaginary worlds free from the constraints, trivialities, and compromises that he felt surrounded him in his everyday life. The same might be said of many of his subjects drawn from historical, mythological, religious, and literary sources. So many of his subjects were negations, implicit critiques, or protests of contemporary society. Sometimes they were laments for the passing of older values or forms of sociability, or explorations of experiences no longer available in the present. This is not to deny that on some level his art promoted some broadly shared, modern values, such as bold, uncompromising, individualistic ideals central to nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology. I only wish to emphasize how much Delacroix’s thematic interests sought release from the here and now. On this level his subject matter relates in intriguing ways to his formal interests. He expressed his desire to provide a transcendent experience through painting’s formal attributes in similar terms: as a flight, an enchantment, a pleasure unmediated by reason, the intellect, or language. His fascination with the transporting qualities of art is intimately related to his dissatisfaction with modernity.

Yet Delacroix’s art was negative in the sense that it was consciously created in opposition to many of the prevailing values of the society in which he worked. In the various binary oppositions that Delacroix used to map the world—civilization/barbarism, modern/primitive, human/animal—it was the second term that he increasingly valued, and somehow the sensual aspect of painting aligned itself more with this side of the antithesis. Delacroix turned to the barbaric, the primitive, and the animal because of their potential to embody protest, refusal, escape, or release, and at least the last two of these attitudes motivated his embrace of an art that communicated immediately through form and color. His understanding of civilization was formulated especially as a reaction against a nascent modernity. He accommodated his subject matter less and less to the present, instead using it to contest, disrupt, or outrage commonplace beliefs, often from disturbingly conservative or antisocial perspectives. The expressive qualities of the medium, however, promised some solid ground for aesthetic and spiritual fulfillment, even if now it was confined to ineffable, vague, or inchoate sensations. Art was to provide an experience that was at a minimum an antidote to cultural decline, ennui, and the emptiness and self-satisfaction of bourgeois society.

It might be objected that writers had long celebrated the ability of works of music and painting to transport the viewer through formal means, quite apart from their subject matter, both in older formulations such as those of Roger de Piles and newer ones such as those of Germaine de Staël or Stendhal.⁸ Perhaps, too, all art has an element of negativity, a remainder that exceeds or resists the institutional and ideological pressures under which it is created, even when it finds itself at the very center of a community.⁹ But Delacroix’s art was explicitly motivated by a desire for release from the culture that surrounded him. The difficulty of appreciating those aspects of Delacroix’s art that link it to modernism is, I think, partly a result of our tendency to view modernism as something that is born whole and that occurs as a radical break within art history, as an epochal change that appears suddenly in the work of a school of painters or even a single artist or work.¹⁰ Surely we might expect so complex and widespread a cultural phenomenon to manifest itself in artistic practice partially, unevenly, and piecemeal, articulated on the edge of, in conjunction with, or spinning off from established and dominant modes. The case of Delacroix is especially interesting because the aspects of his art that anticipate modernism were not the result of an allegiance to a progressive political, social, or even artistic philosophy, nor do they originate in an effort to give form to new social, political, or cultural formations. On the contrary, the discontentment that motivated him to dream of an art that transcended the present arose especially from his conservative political and social views. Delacroix’s example disrupts the widespread and debilitating conviction that in the modern period artistic advancement and progressive politics always go hand in hand.

Delacroix was an especially transitional figure, coming at a moment when advanced artistic practice was moving from an aesthetic hierarchy based primarily on literary, philosophical, and moral values to one centered far more on immediate sensual experience. However we fit Delacroix into a larger history of art or situate him in relation to modernism, there can be no question that he stood as the most important artist of his generation in inspiring modernist painting. What other artist can claim tributes and influences such as Henri Fantin-Latour’s homage to Delacroix, fundamental aspects of the Impressionists’ technique and palette, Vincent van Gogh’s and Paul Gauguin’s theories about color, Odilon Redon’s copies of the ceiling of the Apollo Gallery, Paul Signac’s account of modern art? This list of Delacroix’s fundamental importance to the leading figures of modernism could be greatly extended: Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, virtually every major figure of modernist painting before World War I. Most of all: Cézanne’s hero worship of Delacroix and the very different roles Delacroix played both in Cézanne’s early art and his mature style. Of course, Delacroix did not come to these artists unmediated: he occupied a central place in the Third Republic’s efforts to create national cohesion around a cult of great men.¹¹ By the 1900s Action française also laid claim to him as the embodiment of a true French tradition.¹² But regardless of the precise political and social meanings ascribed to Delacroix and his work, his example helped artists to envision an art that relied more heavily on the unique qualities of painting for communication. Far more than embodying all that was coming to a close circa 1850, Delacroix anticipated and inspired the practices of advanced art in the century following his death.

To the various allegorical readings of Ovid Among the Scythians (see fig. 1), with which I began, I might add another. The poet faces a choice. In exile he can continue with his past practice—his elite, classical, literary art—or he can embrace his new world, primitive, animal, rugged, rustic, surrounded by nature. Could this rude society, or this untamed nature, provide the ground for a new art? Delacroix experimented with primitivism and devoted a significant portion of his art to animals, but he never abandoned his attachment to traditional subject matter, nor could he envision an art based in the details of modern life. On the other hand, in the last decades of his life he acquired a penchant for long walks in and sketching after nature. The experience of nature became increasingly a spur to his creativity and an antidote to the city (590–91). It entered his art in new and important ways—as the Ovid makes clear. Even if he never devoted himself fully to landscape as an independent genre, he left behind beautiful sketches and pastels, especially in the last decade and a half of his life. Looking at Ovid Among the Scythians, one wishes he had pursued this vein more. Delacroix could never really leave the old world behind, but his example would nonetheless loom large when subsequent generations addressed themselves to a new world.