In Quarantine for Despair
A despairing tone. An attraction and repulsion between the pleasing and the shocking that lurched between the violent and the sensuous. Eugene Delacroix is the representative icon of the French romantic school. His dramatic and romantic content were distillations of a clear expression of passion and the product of his almost obsessive religious pursuit for the representation of this passion and its unleashed forces.
Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus
The sublime forces collided in sometimes violent fashion, freed from the shackles of Rene Decartes theories of dualism, romanticism exploded out of the gate and Delacroix reinforced and expanded the aesthetic of the movement with his own interpretations of color and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Ambiguity and interpretation in favor of literal reproduction.
In a sense the Romantic art movement was not an evolution, a progress, but rather a return to unfinished past business. An act at closure that could not resolve and reconcile the unfinished business of a long held grudge. It was a point of transition from which turning back meant turning inwards and was the cousin to nationalism and the rigid classicism which was in turn a reaction… again love-hate relationship within a form of symbiotic dance with the ”other”.
Delacroix, The Fanatics of Tangier, 1837
At its best, Romantic painting is not per se Romantic, but instead a ”contrapuntal” art form combining schools of thought which are independent and sometimes in opposition yet together form part of a homogenous texture. Classicism’s harmony of the line results in a more brilliant and sophisticated expression through a ”melodic” interaction of styles and intentions. The genius of Delacroix was his articulation of this ”clash of civilizations”. This resulted in an explosion of simultaneous ideas on the canvas and their struggle for at least implicit acknowlegement,coexistence and some resolution.
Like Turner or Byron, whom he admires, Delacroix was born with the same intense imagination which fed his great clarity and refined his sensibility.
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