This Day in Art History (Birth of Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic Rebel)

Apr. 26, 1798— Eugène Delacroix, a French Romantic painter who moved his country in a different artistic direction through works abounding in exotic, extravagant color, was born Charenton (Saint-Maurice), Val de Marne departement, in the Ile de France region near Paris. 

Instability marked the painter’s youth and early manhood. In short order, France experienced Napoleon Bonaparte, at his zenith, in defeat and exile; the overthrow of the revived Bourbon monarchy; and the acquisitive desires of a bourgeoisie unleashed after the French Revolution and a quarter-century of war with the rest of Europe. 

The fortunes of his family mirrored the national unrest. It was widely believed that his father, Charles Delacroix, was infertile, and that his real male parent was Talleyrand, successor to Charles as minister of foreign affairs. With his debt-ridden father dying when Eugene was seven, his mother following nine years later, and Eugene himself suffering from various medical conditions that would plague him for years, it was no wonder that the boy grew up solitary and intense.

Make that solitary, intense and independent. Though excelling in his studies of the classics and drawing at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, he left to pursue painting. A short stint with the influential painter Pierre-Narcisse Guerin likewise left little impression.

Widespread notice—bur hardly the approval of the French artistic establishment—came to him in his twenties with two paintings that caused scandals: The Massacre at Chios (1824), which alluded to the repressive Bourbon restoration, and The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), which depicted a decadent Assyrian king ordering the murder of his servants, concubines and animals. 

Anti-monarchical sentiment also informed what might be Delacroix’s most famous painting, Liberty Leading the People (1830), in which the Goddess of Liberty, triumphantly holding aloft France’s national flag, leads a vanguard of French citizens moving forward, even as soldiers lying dead in the foreground demonstrate the tumult and cost of freedom. 

Before long, an alternative source of non-French, non-classical subject matter began to appeal to Delacroix. Unlike prior French artists, who traveled to Italy for their models, he went in another direction, toward Morocco, where he found an atmosphere that spurred his interest in sensual environments. (He met with less success in convincing women of this region to pose for him, because of traditional Moslem strictures mandating that women be covered.)

A contemporary of Honore de Balzac, the painter gave the novelist through his work an example of how to use color in the short novel La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl With the Golden Eyes) that formed the final portion of The History of the Thirteen. Yet, while Balzac acknowledged the debt by dedicating the novella to him, Delacroix did not reciprocate the affection, at times scathingly criticizing him.

“I dislike rational painting,” Delacroix once observed—and, indeed, intense emotion burst beyond the frames of his paintings. It wasn’t only in his sensational, even melodramatic, subject matter (e.g., massacres), but also in the bold brush strokes that anticipated Van Gogh and Gaugain.

Because much of  Delacroix’s work—particularly in the latter part of his career—consisted of public art, a visit to France is still the best way to view much of his work. But New Yorkers will soon get to experience firsthand a large portion of it, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts an exhibit of 180 of his works that had been first on display at the Musee du Louvre. The exhibit will run at the Met from September 17, 2018 to January 6, 2019. 

There, we should understand anew what Delacroix meant by “The great artist roams his own domain, and there he offers you a feast to his own taste.”

(The image accompanying this post is Delacroix's self-portrait, painted in 1837.)

Quote of the Day (John Lindsay, on the Man Born to ‘Make the Mummies Dance’)

“Tom has a natural, unstudied political talent. There's nothing he can't do....He is a thoroughly civilized man. He understands the dynamics of institutional life. In the [Metropolitan] Museum [of Art], he’ll make the mummies dance.”—New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay on Thomas Hoving, quoted in John McPhee, “A Roomful of Hovings,” in The John McPhee Reader (1976)

Longtime supporters of some institutions might praise them as “stable,” but other “s” words would spring to the lips of detractors, such as “staid,” “starchy” and “stultifying.” Thomas Hoving—born on this day in 1931 in New York City—belonged to this latter group.

John Lindsay, who campaigned into Gracie Mansion on the strength of the juicy Murray Kempton quote, “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired,” saw a kindred disrupter in Hoving, who left his job as the mayor’s Parks Commissioner after only a year to take over the Met. Hoving lasted in his new post for a decade, but in many ways his controversial leadership there shaped him even to his death in 2009.

Like many a born plutocrat (his father, Walter, was the formidable head of Bonwit Teller and Tiffany’s), Hoving harbored populist aspirations. At the Parks Department, he sponsored “Happenings” where people could fly kites, paint on canvases, and build castles of plastic foam, and he spearheaded the building of vest-pocket parks throughout the city, including its most poverty-stricken areas. At the Met, he organized crowd-drawing blockbuster exhibits, including the one that absorbed much of his energy toward the end of his tenure, on King Tut.

One of Hoving’s most controversial practices was deaccessioning, or removing an item from the museum, usually through a sale to raise money for new acquisitions or for closing budget gaps. As Hilton Kramer wrote in 2005 for The New Criterion, the practice is not illegal and can even be justified if the item lies outside the mission of the institution, but is often ethically shady because it results in the loss of a property given in good faith. Hoving’s resort to this, involving the sale of important impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, seemed particularly questionable.

Eventually, the Met board, tiring of Hoving’s high-flying ways and unorthodox manner, forced his ouster. In 1981, he took over Connoisseur, shaking things up there as thoroughly—and, perhaps, more catastrophically—than he had at the Met. Under his leadership, the publication switched its focus to examine the inside world of museums, giving full vent, for instance, to Hoving’s beefs about the Getty. Connoisseur went under in 1991.

His memoirs written after his Met stewardship, King of the Confessors and Making the Mummies Dance (the latter drawn, of course, from Lindsay’s colorful remark), told great stories but at the expense of Hoving’s reputation for probity. The man who could write, “I had always been able to lie convincingly,” did little to persuade longtime critics that his departure from the Met was an awful thing. At the same time, they demonstrated why he felt that leading the Met not only required “a gifted connoisseur, a well-trained scholar, an aesthete, a patient diplomat, a deft fundraiser, an executive, and a conciliator,” but also “part gunslinger, ward heeler, legal fixer, accomplice smuggler, anarchist, and toady.”

McPhee’s profile, written for The New Yorker only a few months after Hoving took over at the Met, is, like another early piece on Bill Bradley, an affectionate look at a fellow Princetonian. It does not overlook its subject’s wild youth (including expulsion from Exeter for slugging a Latin teacher for only giving him an A-). But it also captures his lack of snobbishness and his longstanding cultivation of his powers of observations—honed at first in an unhappy stint at a clothing shop in his youth, where he sized up quickly the apparel and footwear tastes of prostitutes and gays, then later as a low-level curator for the Met in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Hoving was a curious figure who practiced his curiosity to the utmost, especially in his abiding interest in forgeries. His remarks to McPhee on the subject say much about the primary instrument for anyone involved in the study of art:

“Your eye is king. Get in touch with other scholars - everybody you think is expert . . . Learn the history of the piece - where it is from, what collections it has belonged to, all the information surrounding its discovery. Then get the work of art with you and live with it as long as you possibly can. You have to watch it. Watch it…. A work of art will grow the more it is with you. It will grow in stature, and fascinate you more and more. If it is a fake, it will eventually fall apart before your eyes like a piece of plaster."

Photo of the Day: Pretty Peony

I snapped this shot this past Sunday while up at The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in New York City. In another few weeks, the garden outside this branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, devoted to the art and architecture of the Middle Ages, is going to look amazing…