Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)

Transcript (PDF)

The 19th Century
Presentation 5 of 13

Eugenè Delacroix (1798-1863)
The Greatest French Romantic Painter and Theorist
Towards Impressionism from Classicism
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 3, 1984

Transcript:

We are tracing an era, the 19th century; the importance of the era for us is paramount since most of the cultural forms that we find ourselves surrounded by originate, at least the seeds were sown in the 19th century, and our feeling-toned substructure to our personalities were formulated, largely, in ideas that came to fruition and manifestation in the 19th century. We do not like to hear about the 19th century. The fact that there are very few people here tonight is just indicative. If we were speaking of something ephemeral and entertaining we could draw hundreds. But the fact is, in our search for an understanding of ourselves, we have been pursuing the history of our species moving person by person rather than moving ideationally or politically or militarily. So we have been stepping outside of the traditional ways in which history has been rendered. We have in fact been working on a development of the old Plutarchian theme, that human character is the only accurate index to reality and that consciousness is but a reflection in form of the flow and the vicissitudes of the tone, the music of character. So that if consciousness is the notation of character we should look to human beings as our models and not to the ideas ground out by second-rate pedants who know neither themselves nor anyone else.

In the movement of the 19th century we have become acquainted already in four lectures with an astonishing discovery that most of the powerful names, in fact, are names of extraordinarily perceptive and powerful high moral-minded individuals whose works have been manhandled and mistranslated misappropriated so that the junkyard of the 20th century is largely due to the mal-nipulation of their themes and ideas. We found in the case of Marx and Wagner, in the case of Bentham, that in fact a great deal of energy in the 19th century went into the attempt to net, in some grand fashion, a portrait of human nature, a portrait of man complete. It had been a legacy delivered ever since the beginnings of the Enlightenment that man would in fact find in himself the capacity to delineate the complete scope of himself. The 19th century, as an epoch, as a century, reveals the career of one genius after another attempting to formulate some ingenious way of netting the reality bringing it together, fishing it out of the waters of history, out of the waters of nature, out of the waters of the mind, and pulling up from those depths those efforts, those extensions the mighty truth about ourselves. And next week when we take a look at Charles Darwin we'll see yet another titanic effort to characterize man, once and for all, and that each succeeding effort put further and further out of the reach any possibility of ever doing just that.

Our figure tonight is much maligned and misunderstood: Eugene Delacroix. In art histories, or in cultural histories, or just in the coffee klatches of faculty members who attempt to teach humanities, he's called a romantic, and everyone runs to their reference books and looks up romanticism and under the hypnotic spell of waving ideational pom-poms they suppose that they have understood something about Delacroix, something about art, something about French culture in the 19th century – and nothing has been achieved at all. So we retract ourselves from the hoopla and we begin before recounting Delacroix's life and significance as much as we can from himself to start with a photograph. The photographer's name was Nadar. Nadar was one of the earliest of photographers, and this was a photograph near the end of Delacroix's life. He was 62 when this photograph was taken. What we find is the tremendous coolness of assessing the inner capacities for envisioning and in Delacroix's serious mien we find the truth of the statement that Charles Baudelaire made of Delacroix early in his life. He said of Delacroix that, “his great genius was to try and portray human passion totally.” And that in fact it was the desire to bring all of man's feelings, all of man's capacities, out in the open in one grand work. And that in this, as Baudelaire said, wrote, “Delacroix was passionately in love with passion and coldly determined to find ways of expressing passion in the most visible manner.”

That is to say there is an irony in the character of Delacroix and the irony that we find is the motion of expression was very close to the romantic rebellion formulated largely by figures like Victor Hugo to attempt to cast man free of all the confines that had been placed upon him in the enlightenment and in the Age of Revolution. But in fact, Delacroix is not a Romanticist. In fact, the -isms are exactly those qualifiers that destroy our vision of the man. So after showing you this photograph of the tough Delacroix coldly determined to portray passion. I refer us to one of Delacroix's masterpieces towards the end of his life called, The Medea, painted in 1862 when Delacroix was 64 years old. Now the way to see this is to realize that this is a Delacroix Madonna. But the Madonna is no longer a transcendental purity archetype but is a woman that has joined the world. Medea married Jason, had two children by him, and then was thrown over for another woman. Medea, the dark magical lady from the Black Sea area, slew both children and served them up to Jason. We have here the Delacroix Madonna and instead of holding the Christ Child as a spiritual manifestation she is preparing to kill him. And instead of having the little baby, John the Baptist, healthy he is about to die. The dark shadow over the top of Medea's head, like a mask over her eyes, is the tell tale sign of Delacroix's envisioning that somehow the great transcendental archetypes that had led man on a grand history of evolvement had come to a dead end.

That in fact the Age of Revolution was symptomatic of a desire to break out of a prison that had more and more captured the soul of man. His mind was being freed and in many respects his body was being freed. But what was being enslaved by a deadening process was his soul. And so we have a statement by Baudelaire who was the only man of his time to really understand Delacroix and his spiritual profundity wrote, “Many others besides myself have made a point of stressing the fatal consequences of an essentially personal genius and after all it is quite possible that the highest expressions of genius not in the azure sky but on this poor earth where perfection itself is imperfect have been achieved only at the expense of an inevitable sacrifice. But no doubt sir, you will ask, what is this mysterious je ne sais quoi which Delacroix to the glory of our century has translated better than any other artist? It is the invisible, the impalpable; it is the dream, the nerves, the soul.

And so Delacroix should not be considered a romantic but in fact should be considered a man in search of an overwhelming medium to present a unified vision of man's soul on earth. There are so few writers who even come close to appreciating Delacroix that I refer you to Walter Friedlander whose great book, David to Delacroix, traces the tremendous movement from David's classic, or as they were called at the time, Neoclassic portraits. One remembers David's great portrait of Socrates drinking the hemlock with all of the men clustered around the Greeks and Pathos and Socrates sitting up on his pallet reaching for the hemlock and the other finger pointing up towards freedom. Where one thinks of David's amaranth with him collapsed in his tub with his final letter in one hand and the pen drooping down. And one also thinks of David's great portraits of Napoleon. But Delacroix moved completely off the map of any cultural lineage. That is to say, Delacroix, by the time that he was painting the Medea in 1862, had become a universal genius clearly on a level with Wagner, and clearly on a level with some of the other individuals that we will take up.

Friedlander has this to say about the Medea, “Delacroix reached his greatest artistic height in a monumental single figure, the ‘Medea.’ It combines clarity of form, psychological penetration, and tragic sentiment with great strength and beauty of color movement.” – color movement – “The suggestion of the theatrical is not far distant but here we are not reminded of it by props, ready-made passages, excited gestures, or historical handling. This is theater, but great theater, and Medea is played by a tragedian of genius – outwardly calm amidst all the passion of despair, with noble bearing even in the last horrible, dramatic moment. Delacroix’s ‘Medea’ is the purest, strongest expression of his conceptual power.”

What was he conceiving? He was conceiving of the possibility that man at a particular poignant moment in his life sees the whole design of his life as a composition and that he must be prepared to live that moment fully, to have prepared himself so that he may understand that moment in all of its ramifications. So that a man's life, a person's life, like some gigantic work of art constantly shaping itself, moving toward a moment a denouement where what is revealed is the essential natal capacity of his comprehension. And that man must be ready, he must have prepared himself, for that moment in his great journals that Delacroix kept for some twenty-five years he wrote once, “there is but one great moment in a life too bad for the artist who misses it.” The secret of Delacroix is that very early he received a tremendous vision and an envisioning of what the artist's role, responsibility, capacity, could be. And from this Delacroix never deviated, constantly grew.

So now we have to trace him. He was in fact born in 1798 outside of Paris. His father ostensibly was Charles Delacroix, a very high official, a man who under the directory was an ambassador. But when one looks at the bulldog-like features, the severe features of Delacroix, one notices that there is a grand resemblance in facial structure and bearing and so forth to none other than Talleyrand who was a friend of the Delacroix family and Delacroix’s mother died very early in his life but had come from a very famous family in the Paris regions. And the family knew Talleyrand quite well. It is conceivable and I should rather think it probable that Talleyrand himself was the father of Delacroix. Almost all books on Delacroix mention the fact no one comes to a definite statement although Baudelaire and Friedlander both assume that the reader will be perspicacious.

Delacroix consequently was given extraordinary advantage as a youngster. That is he was admitted to all kinds of events. Schooling. He received a tremendous education. Above all Delacroix is the example of the learned artist, the man of grand culture, of formed mental capacities, of understanding that is disciplined and ordered and his literary background alone qualified him. He was going to write a philosophic dictionary of fine art. He never got to it. But like a Frenchman– Poussin, a century and a half before him. He was a tremendous intellect and so when he dealt with his subject matter he generally had a background of comprehension. When he was ninteteen Delacroix became acquainted with one of the fabulous artists of Paris, Géricault who was at this time working on his grand masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa. Géricault filled with the enthusiasm of the French Revolution the Napoleonic era – this was 1817, 1818 – was attempting to portray in one grand painting the tone of the French universe. At the moment of his time. The raft of the Medusa was consequently one of the largest canvases ever painted. It measured twenty-one feet by fifteen feet and Géricault had to rent a special studio to house this enormous canvas and all the appurtenances that go with painting something like this. The canvas was about half or three quarters finished when young adolescent Delacroix spent an afternoon with Géricault, and mad with enthusiasm, rushed home and began building stretchers to make large canvases and began having his mind and his sensibility churning with envisioning. And in fact the first painting that Delacroix managed to produce was a large-scale painting of Dante and Virgil in Hell. And where are they? In hell. But in a boat. And the two of them are looking grandly over the horizon seething with demonic figures mankind attempting to extricate themselves from hell and climb into the boat with Dante and Virgil. I'm sorry I haven't slides for you but the painting is quite famous and available around. I have it here in a book and you can see the enormous similarity of themes of The Raft of the Medusa and Dante and Virgil in Hell. This of course was shown in the Paris Salon in 1822 and every critic in Paris derided it. There wasn't anyone who liked the work. There were a few friends, persons who became friends of Delacroix, who enjoyed the work. The musician Chopin, George Sand his literary friend and great genius. And in the background of course Baudelaire would be coming in. But most of the critics derided this as the death of painting. Why so? It was because Delacroix had lifted color outside of the representational forms that traditionally had carried it. Delacroix in attempting to portray passionate movement was already experimenting in his first canvas with the massings of color in motion contrasts so that there would be the constant movement of the eye on the canvas directed not by line nor by volume placement but indicated like a pot boiling over by the seething bubbles of color moving around the canvas. Why? So that the audience, the individual addressing himself to this canvas would find his senses churned and his attention raised up to involve him in the quest – Where is this motion leading to? And of course in his early works Delacroix was not quite capable of bringing it to a conclusion so that the eye just kept roving over the canvas. One can look to the expressions, the grand expressions of Dante or Virgil, one can look to the horrific figures. One man is trying to chew the prow of the barque. Another man is biting the ear of another. These are the damned in hell. But the eye finds no repose. But the attempt was there. The next attempt was a large painting exhibited two years later. The salons in Paris were the way in which most art was shown at this time and at the annual showing two years later he showed a large canvas of The Massacre of Chios.

Chios the Greek island in the Aegean nearest to the Turkish coast and the Turkish military had invaded the island and had slaughtered tens of thousands of Greeks who had lived there from time immemorial. The Massacre at Chios though which looks on the surface like the perfect example of romantic nightmare is an advance of Delacroix's technique of raising the seething motion of color and its concomitant roving of the eye toning of the passionate feelings towards some sense of a composition. That is the movement would make some pattern of unity. This is what he was trying to achieve. It would not be until later in life that Delacroix would be able to finally master this technique. He was derided by the French critics so much accused of actually being a far– again ahead of his time. A wild beast. Someone who did not belong in the salon. Someone who should not be painting. And so Delacroix quite intelligent quite sensitive to the whole situation realized that he was struggling with a vision that was not to bear fruition for him in Paris at that time. He had been trying to use as one of his models of Rubens, and Rubens tremendous fullness of– of life on his canvases was something Delacroix was– was seeking to bring the color to manifest in a life form, a unified organic pattern and it wouldn't fit, it wouldn't quite gel.

So Delacroix went to London. While he was in London he became very close with Turner – J. W. M. Turner, Constable and the whole school of English painters who were attempting to carry mood by color. And Delacroix there regaining his bearing realised that what was necessary was to combine a surface movement on the canvas of color in motion grandly but to have a pathos and a theme underneath that constantly wove the dynamic of the colors back into the tragic pathos of the conception. That while the perception would be seething with live color everywhere; the conception that would occur out of it would be a sombre tragic pathos. So that the contrast between the one and the other would wrench an individual wholly out of his habitual form into some new mode of being.

So he set to work to find a theme. He came back to Paris. He was– since he had spent a lot of time in England for the last year he had pored over English literature and he came to a tragedy by Lord Byron called Sardanapalus. And the tragedy appeared to him to have great possibility. Historically Sardanapalus was a king of Nineveh. This was about the beginnings of archaeological excavations when one good thing Napoleon did was to bring the sense of archaeology to the fore the whole notion of the Rosetta Stone et cetera. Nineveh, Assyria, in very early classical times, had been a great kingdom and one of the traditional king stories about Sardanapalus came from Alexander's time. In fact Arrian the classical biographer of Alexander he wrote the Campaigns of Alexander records the story that when the Greeks, under Alexander, traversed the area where the ruins of Nineveh were they found a great monument half buried and Alexander had sand removed and they found an inscription and the inscription read: “eat, drink, and play, for these are the only realities of life.” And this saying was attributed to Sardanapalus one of the ancient kings of Nineveh. Byron in writing his tragedy and Sardanapalus had brought the theme to a fullness. He had found the perfect character to float the sense of ennui – the sense of boredom on the surface and a restlessness on the interior. And so Sardanapalus was in Byron's tragedy a figure who became bored with the luxuriance and wealth of his exterior life and completely fearful for the anxieties within himself which could not be assuaged by the exterior wealth, and women, and song. And so he had a grand funeral pyre built around his throne and before he was immolated he had the eunuchs in the palace kill all of his wives before him, all of his women, his favorite horses, his dogs, and the destruction of all the life that had permitted him a life of grandness and enjoyment was dismembered before him. And then with the bleeding remains of the royal harem and the royal stables laying against the pyre he was set on fire and burnt.

Lord Byron in writing Sardanapalus in fact dedicated it to Goethe. He wrote in his dedication to the grand voice not only of German literature but of European literature I dedicate this tragic vision by someone not capable really of writing it but who could not leave the theme alone. Delacroix was fascinated by the possibilities. He began sketching and working on a grand painting which was– when it was finished was called The Death of Sardanapalus. And what he was attempting to do was to take that moment in the life of Sardanapalus where all of the capacities of the man's life that had run into the boredom on the surface would be transposed by Delacroix's technique of enlivening by color, the passions, converting the boredom of Sardanapalus into the Passion of Delacroix and at the same time converting the deadened terrific interior of Sardanapalus into a moment of realization and unity. For he who could view this painting and understand it. It was to be a tremendous alchemical transformation of the perfect theme into the perfect work in terms of what Delacroix was searching for. He sketched mightily. He drew and finally brought together and it was shown in the 1827 salon and The Death of Sardanapalus by Delacroix, one of the great masterpieces of Western art. I'm sorry I don't have them on slides. You can view these later.

The painting fell on deaf ears. Those critics who attend these salons constantly for their life’s bread dismissed it. The judges had nothing to say about it whatsoever. It was in fact given some minor mention but received no prizes, was not bought by the government. So Delacroix, disappointed that he had achieved a vision, had achieved a technical proficiency to bring the vision to manifestation that it had not been seen. He went home to brood and Delacroix by this time was beginning to have that quality that would characterize him later in life. He was to become a solitary being. It's true that as long as Chopin was alive Delacroix would invite him to share his canvases. He loved having a few friends in and talk about what he was doing, how the work was going. But increasingly he was jaded about the capacity of other men to understand and yet driven compulsively almost by the ethical commitment that having seen a great vision having attained the capacity to manifest it what damnation would await a man who spurned this opportunity from the gods? So he pursued his art.

While he had been working on the death of Sardanapalus– of course being an extraordinarily literate man he realised that Byron had dedicated his tragedy to Goethe. So he began reading Goethe. He began reading The Faust. And as he read The Faust he became entranced. And Delacroix then seized upon a technique which was new in the late 1820s – lithography was just coming in where the artist could work directly on the stone and so Delacroix illustrated Goethe's Faust by 17 great lithographs and it was published the following year, the year following the exhibition of the death of Sardanapalus in the Paris Salon, in 1828. Delacroix's illustrations to Faust go along with the death of Sardanapalus; they are together a declaration of Delacroix's coming of age of his great capacity at the age of thirty in being able to carry a great vision through to manifestation.

In the illustrations, the first frontispiece was Delacroix's portrait of Goethe one sees the nobility. He sent a few of the lithographs in proof to Goethe who was greatly joyed at the man and his ability. In fact, one of the lithographs sent him was the first one in the illustration of Satan Over the Cityscape. And notice how the cityscape are sharp spires so that if Satan falls he will be guaranteed by the church steeple sticking up. But notice the contorted body, the Michelangelo-like contortions and muscularity of Satan, and how every angle every muscle is strained and tensed and with him the bulging eye and the finger pointing up almost as if David's Socrates became Delacroix's Mephistopheles. And the long fingernails and the wry sense of not pointing to a triumph but pointing to a little complication by which he would ensnare, increasingly, his prey. On through the work one finds a sense of contrast. The portrait of Faust shows him opposite, completely denuded of energy. His body slouched forward. He is caught between a skull and a guttering candle and a bottle of poison up on the shelf and Faustus wonders whether he's going to end it all. And this dejection, the sapping of man's strength through ennui and sentimentality – these were the enemies. These were the symptomatic diseases of civilization that should be cured by art.

And so the great work went on with Delacroix but he finally felt with the illustrations to The Faust and The Death of Sardanapalus that he had reached some sort of turning point. So he searched around for somewhere to go, something else to enter in to his life. He took a trip to Morocco and there with a friend, the Comte de Mornay, in the months that he spent in Morocco going out into the Atlas Mountain regions, the wilderness, it began to occur to him the tremendous natural dignity of the Arab Berber peasant, the Arab Berber warrior, the individual who was able to live in this stark landscape, live in this non-Europeanized situation without the amenities of the Paris Salon, without the amenities of London, without having the grand literary tradition of the European civilization behind him. And so Delacroix began to introduce into his works a sense of classical dignity.

The first painting from this period is one called Algerian Women in Their Apartments. Since Delacroix initiated this they have been imitated so many times. Matisse would do many odalisques on that theme. But Delacroix’s was the first painting done of this ilk and it showed the Algerian women and their beautiful bangles and homemade cotton dyed batik clothes sitting at their leisure and chatting with each other and grand dignity and the ambience of the work was such that the surface was chock full of color but the composition of the whole work had a classical severity to it. And underneath the implication these Algerian women with their dignity put to shame the European man seeking to find that dignity elsewhere other than themselves. The European man seeking to find that dignity in the external world was increasingly losing it, so that the more that they strive to find their dignity in the material, the more tragically they were sapping themselves almost like a contrapositive of Faust on the interior level.

When he came back, the new Delacroix, capable of such a tremendous envisioning but by now in his mid thirties capable of also painting almost on a level with the great Italian Renaissance Masters, almost on a level with Titian or Raphael himself, finally began to draw notices. When he exhibited works, the stunning capacity of Delacroix simply penetrated to everyone. The critics who had railed against him were silenced. In fact there came a sense of awe. The government which had not bought any of Delacroix's works suddenly feeling that they had almost been guilty of a national crime of wasting such a titanic talent as Delacroix began to give commissions to him. The first great commission was to decorate the newly built Palais Bourbon and Delacroix was given the task of decorating the interior, much like the Renaissance artists were given the opportunity to decorate the Vatican, or the interior of a church. Here the French government was beginning to appeal to Delacroix to decorate our buildings, our civic buildings, which for our civilization, our time, are the temples of human power and meaning and dignity. Not only this but for the next thirty years Delacroix would become the great national painter of France. He would be given almost every major commission and when the Louvre was redoing the Apollo Gallery, the grand ceiling was given to Delacroix. Because of the incredible, busy, architectural ornament the problems were astounding. Delacroix had to work with exceedingly impossible conditions. In fact the photograph that I have here – I'm sorry I don't have it on slide – this is the ceiling of the Apollo Gallery in the Louvre and you can see the architectural ornament is just a plastered group, upon group, upon group, figure upon figure. How could anything be seen?

And so, Delacroix searching in his envisioning for a theme, realizing the Apollo Gallery what was that moment in the archetypal Apollo’s life where he became Apollo? That moment was when he slew Python. Apollo gained his godlike assurance in the slaying of Python like Saint George and the Dragon. And so Delacroix took that moment and began to flesh it out in terms of color and form and development. And at one lower end of the canvas he had the writhing python not just a python that one might see in a jungle. This was the all time python that exists as a nightmare in every lurking subconscious oceanic tidal wave that would deluge the Apollonian consciousness of man. So this python was a dark dark green almost a black green and curled around in a writhing form and then the upper body rearing back and the mouth open ready to strike. Not a python that in the natural world would squeeze its prey but a python that could bite and squeeze and do everything that a serpent of universal capacity would do in its evilness. That at the lower end of the canvas and then through an array of gods pulling back in grand motions almost like Michelangelo returning to the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Only in this time instead of there being a series of small paintings worked into a geometrical composition Delacroix brought it all together to one moment one composition and all of the writhing figures seeking to flee the serpent seeking to flee the whole radiated resonance of evil from the serpent except one figure at the top the other end of the canvas there riding in his chariot with the horses – Delacroix loved horses, he loved to draw them and paint them – and the horses of Apollo's chariot leaning back in their grandeur almost as if trying to bite the center of their back in their lunge of energy to pull this chariot to the moment of truth. And in this glow of solar capacity. Apollo with his cape furling behind him and his hair furling out from himself and every muscle bent to pull the bow and loose the arrow that would kill Python. And it's that moment where the arrow has been loosed and all the development of the entire canvas, all of its structure, all of the color, all of the significance to the flight of Apollo's arrow that inevitably will kill the python. Delacroix found it exactly in that moment and placed it in the center of the ceiling of the Apollo Gallery of the Louvre.

When one looks at a list of the holdings of the Louvre of Delacroix's paintings one notices that they have bought almost every single painting of Delacroix up to the 1840s. If one wishes to see Delacroix you have to go to Paris. There are other canvases but almost all of them up to the mid-1840s are owned by that institute. These great public murals were there not for the few but for the many: the population of Paris, of France, of Europe that came into the Palais Bourbon or the Louvre. Enormous capacities of insight were given to millions. Delacroix's vision became the vision of his time. He became the figure who personified more than anyone at the time in France, even more than Victor Hugo. Delacroix became the finest expression of the French contribution to Western civilization.

He was paid enormous sums. One of his compositions alone netted him some 60,000 francs and involved him for many years. Baudelaire, in seeking to give us some insight into the man – and he is the only one in his time to really formulate completely. This is a translation, Baudelaire, Eugene Delacroix: His Life and Work. He has this to say.

“He has done this – and mark it well – with no other means but color and contour.” He has achieved this tremendous vision for man without words, without music, without movement, color, and contour. “He has done it better than anyone else; he has done it with the perfection of a consummate painter, with the discipline of a subtle writer, with the eloquence of a passionate musician. Moreover, it is one of the symptoms of the spiritual temper of our century that the arts strive, if not to supplement one another, at least to land each other new strength. Delacroix is the most suggestive of all painters.” He suggests music, he suggests literature, he suggests Philosophy. Delacroix’s works in fact bring together in a matrix moving towards a unity that almost impels one to flesh out the coordinates and the implications. One can read into Delacroix almost indefinitely. So much would this become the bugbear of 20th century art, that they would finally come down to the old existentialist aesthetic, saying that one cannot take any information that you had before seeing the work into account in the experience of the work. This was an attempt to discredit and to move away from the achievement of Delacroix.

But Delacroix was already moving into another realm. His late last works almost seem to lift the color completely out of the formal aspects. It no longer matters what natural forms are being showed or portrayed what the story might be. The feeling capacities in the motions of the color are new and in fact one moves very very simply and easily from Delacroix to Renoir. The eye of the late Delacroix and the early Renoir moves with very great ease and one can see that the genius of Renoir, the Impressionist, comes to the surface. That is to say, when one has Delacroix achieving consciousness, one has Monet, one has Cezanne, one has Renoir. It is Delacroix who is the root source of the great transformation of art. It is he alone who stands there at the juxtaposition of the whole tradition of pictorial representation going back to the classical times and bringing it up to a quality of radical envisioning which paltry critics have called Romanticism. But so transcends Romanticism that it's not even worth discussing. It makes palpable, as Baudelaire has said, the invisible, the soul, the spiritual, so that man is ready to portray something else.

Baudelaire, talking about other artists, he says. Outside of their studios. What do they know? What do they like? What do they express? Eugene Delacroix was not only an artist in love with his craft he was also a man of broad general culture in contrast to other modern artists most of whom are a little more than famous or obscure dabblers sad specialists and pure craftsmen some able to paint academic figures others fruit and still others animals. Eugene Delacroix loved everything, could paint everything, appreciated all kinds of talents. His mind– his mind was open. And so it is this openness of Delacroix this capacity to bring the seething surface to a boil and have that boil flow inward to a point of repose. That made Delacroix a universal genius able to carry man by his art to the capacity to be prepared for that moment in their lives when all would be clear to them. To gain the technique necessary to compose a life of worth of depth and of significance. Learn the workings of it and bend it by effort, diligence, and concentration to create increasingly that moment of comprehension. So that a human being was not just some romantic hero enjoying a triumph, but was some spiritual form coming to completio. This is the significance of Delacroix. Baudelaire says these superficial minds do not realize that the two faculties can never be completely separated – the material and the spiritual. They can never be completely separated and that both are the result of an original germ that has been carefully cultivated. External nature only gives the artist an ever reoccurring opportunity to cultivate this germ. It is but an incoherent mass of materials which the artist is asked to bring together and put in order an awakener of flagging faculties. What is the social value of art? It is the clarion call of comprehension, of completeness, of honing perception to its ultimate movement its internalization from that far extension in the material to bend back and come to a focus in the spiritual.

Delacroix, exhausted by thirty years of painting large grand murals on the walls and ceilings of almost every important building. All of his work that was done for the Hotel de Ville, the City Hall of Paris – which was burnt by the Germans in 1871. Most of the rest of his works survives. It survives there as an indelible experience for he who would look; in fact if one would consider Marc Chagall's Ceiling of the Paris Opera you would find a mandala in the mode of Delacroix presented for the French and world public of today. It would be a wonderful contrast to show this some time: the ceiling of Apollo killing the python and the ceiling of the Paris Opera; Delacroix and Chagall. One would find a great deal.

Line and color he wrote. Line and color. Both make one think and dream. The pleasures deriving from them are of a different kind but completely equal and absolutely independent of the theme of the painting. And in this little quote from Delacroix's journals you get not only the beginnings of Impressionism but the beginnings of Abstract art. Delacroix magnificent universal genius, opening the door, the possibility for 20th century art, to early 20th century art, to carry this to a grand culmination. One looks at Chagall and Kandinsky and Cezanne, Renoir, Monet. There is Delacroix lifted out of his solitary Paris apartment. It became a national museum after he died. And in 1863 when Delacroix did finally pass on he left such an enormous quantity of work that it never has been completely catalogued, never completely brought together. The Arts Council in London, in 1964, for the centenary of the death of Delacroix, brought together some two hundred works and it was just a token exhibition.

There are so many aspects of Delacroix that I would wish to point out but I should end with this. We are taking individuals in a linear sequence, but remember that almost everyone that we are dealing with in the 19th Century course overlapped in their lives and were all alive together at one time so that the significance of this movement is like a lecture presentation of a Delacroix mural. All of the figures need to be montaged in your experience together in order to get the movement, the interior point of focus of the 19th century. It is that focus that is important because it is that focus which is invisible to us today. And it is only from that vantage point from that calmness of cultural comprehension that we are able to see the distortions that we take for reality in our time. It is only by perceiving the distortions that we may renovate and realize something better.

Well next week yet another, Charles Darwin.