Delacroix, Drunken Silenus after Peter Paul Rubens (detail), 1840. Graphite on paper. Metropolitan Museum of Art, promised gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection.
A legendary rivalry existed between the two megastars of nineteenth-century French painting: the arch-Romantic Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)—the subject of an exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum, through November 12—and the inveterate classicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867).1 But on one thing they agreed: Drawing is the essential foundation of art.
As Ingres famously declared, “Drawing is the probity of art.”2 Delacroix’s verbal acknowledgment of that central fact was less direct. “Colour always occupies me,” he once confided, “but drawing preoccupies me.” His conviction regarding the fundamentality of drawing to his art was evident in practice, however, as the Met’s show demonstrates.
Entitled Devotion to Drawing, the exhibition presents 130 drawings from the Karen B. Cohen Collection. The collection (promised as a gift to the museum) includes diverse examples of Delacroix’s lifelong and wide-ranging engagement with graphic art.
Often Surprising Models
There is nothing remarkable about the exhibition’s first image—a typically academic male nude drawn from life by the young Delacroix as a student under Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.
Delacroix, Figures from Raphael’s Vatican Loggia, ca. 1833–35. Pen and iron gall ink. Metropolitan Museum of Art, promised gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection.
What is surprising is that the artist frequently turned to classical models in later years, even after his own much freer style had evolved. He made drawings not only of antique sculptures and coins but also after prints of ancient reliefs. And while he had the greatest stylistic affinity with the baroque master Rubens—in whose work he saw “expression carried to the utmost limit” (as in The Drunken Silenus and the Adoration of the Magi)—he also admired the classical “perfection of drawing, grace, and composition” he found in Raphael, as attested by several drawings after prints of the latter’s work. In his copying, Delacroix rarely drew entire compositions. In the example shown here, he selected three male figures and a group of women and children from four different Raphael frescoes for the Vatican. Using reproductive prints as his direct source, he copied freely, adapting the engraving into his own drawing style. In the curator’s view, the isolation of these figures from their context suggests he was mainly interested in their various poses.
Delacroix, Hamlet Reproaches His Mother, ca. 1834. Preparatory pencil sketch for lithograph. Metropolitan Museum, gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection.
More fuel for Delacroix’s fertile imagination came from drawings based on countless other sources, ranging from English caricatures and medieval arms and tomb effigies to wild animals at the zoo, picturesque scenes from his travels, and flayed cadavers. In addition, he continually used drawings as the basis for important commissions and projects, from works of religious art to ambitious series of lithographs illustrating literary classics such as Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
All in all, Delacroix’s example merits emulation by today’s would-be artists and art teachers, too many of whom have forgotten that drawing is indeed the foundation of visual art. A notorious example is Damien Hirst—one of today’s leading “artists”—who declared in an interview with talk show host Charlie Rose that the one thing he regretted being unable to do in his work is “represent the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface.” Nonetheless, he has the chutzpah to call himself an artist, and the artworld lionizes him as such—along with unthinking journalists like Rose, who fawningly follow suit. Would that this exhibition might prompt some rethinking on that score!
Delacroix, Normandy Sketchbook, 1829.
Graphite and watercolor. Metropolitan Museum, promised gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection.
Notes
- See “Ingres vs Delacroix: An artistic rivalry spills over at a party,” The Artstor Blog, June 17, 2012. ↩
- Significantly, Ingres added: “To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling.” Probité, the French term used by him, could also be translated as “integrity” or “truth.” ↩
A parallel exists between Delacroix’s phenomenal sense of line and that of his friend Chopin, as witness the melodies which continue to captivate listeners. “Line” in Delacroix declares its entirety at once – the thrusting diagonal in Sardanapalus, the stabilizing triangle in Liberty Leading, the circularity in Dante’s Barque. “Line” in Chopin is revealed in time as melody unfurls and so-called form results from sequential occurrences and recurrences. Within Delacroix’s compositional form, countless expressive lines speak to both the artist’s acute vision and his hand’s technical skill. What is there of these men’s qualities with which Damien Hirst’s “manufactured artefacts without content” (Peter Maxwell Davies) might compare?
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Thanks for that intriguing and illuminating analogy with Chopin’s music, Frank. (For readers unfamiliar with Delacroix’s paintings, I’ve inserted links to images.)
This is a good review of the Delacroix/Ingres show. Both artists were genuine masters of drawing, still unsurpassed in representing the two poles of the graphic mark: one agitated, searching, more about the movement of mass; the other resolved, serene, the idealized edge. But Kamhi stretches her insight in contrasting the two 19C masters of drawing with the conceptual artist Damien Hirst. Nowadays, artists’ identities and practices are far more diverse than they were in the past. Just as more kinds of things and activities are valued as serious art today, so too are there more artists of very different interests and their work relates to different traditions than, say, drawing and painting. However Hirst is to be judged as an artist it will not be for what art traditions he does not pursue but for the traditions and contexts he does address, even if they fall beyond what some, like Kamhi insist on.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
For the record, the Met show was devoted only to Delacroix. It was I who added the reference to Ingres. More important, contrary to William, I maintain that the different “art traditions” represented by the work of Damien Hirst and other leading “conceptual artists” developed out of the anti-art gestures of the 1960s and therefore ought to be called by some other name—as even its inventors initially acknowledged. To consider them alongside traditional painting and sculpture is logically untenable in my view, though that position puts me fundamentally at odds with virtually the entire art establishment.
“To consider them alongside traditional painting and sculpture is logically untenable in my view, though that position puts me fundamentally at odds with virtually the entire art establishment.”
Exactly right. This is precisely my position also. There is no continuity between Delacroix and Hirst and this can be pointed out by looking at their respective parallels in music. As Frank Cooper suggested above, Chopin could be a musical parallel of Delacroix. Who is musically parallel to Hirst? Well, Lady Gaga is the perfect fit. Is there any continuity between Chopin and Lady Gaga? Of course not. So, why is such continuity implied in the case of Delacroix-Hirst?