Delacroix Eugen Biography

I do not know if he is proud of belonging to romanticism, but this belonging is undeniable, because, in the general opinion, he has long, with the advent of his very first canvas, became recognized by the head of a modern school. I begin this part of my work full of bright joy. I slowly choose the latest feathers, I want calmly, with. In an effort to draw more convincing conclusions to which I will come to this chapter, I have to return a little back and remind the readers of some documents that have already been given earlier critics and historians, but now I need to complete the presentation.

However, I am sure that the disinterested adherents of Eugene Delacroix with the living pleasure will re-read the chapter on him from the report of Mr. Thor on the salon of the year, published in “Come on,” not a single picture foreshadows, in my opinion, to such a great creative future as the canvas of Mr. Delacrois “Dantrue and Virgili in hell”. It is in this thing that there is a bright take -off of talent, a powerful impulse of the rising talent, from which hopes come to life, which have already faded at the sight of more than the moderate advantages of the rest of the paintings at the exhibition.

Dante and Virgil intersect the hellish river to the rook of Haron, with difficulty paving their way through the host of sinners who besiege the boat, trying to climb into it. Dante's face belonging to the world of the living is covered with sinister pallor; Virgil is crowned with a dark laurel wreath, the seal of death lies on his person. Unfortunate sinners, doomed to forever strive for the opposite shore, are crowded around the boat.

One eagerly clings to the side, but his movements are too hastily, and he falls into the water again; The other, grabbing the stern tightly, repels those who, like himself, tries to swim closer; The other two are in vain trying to stick their teeth into an elusive wooden board. Everything is imbued with hellish despair and egoism of hopelessness. Despite the appearance of exaggeration in the interpretation of the plot, a strict taste and sense of proportion reign in the picture, giving a hill for a drawing that other harsh, but not very perspicacious judges could reproach with a lack of nobility.

The smear is wide and confident, the flavor is simple and strong, although somewhat sharp. In addition to the poetic imagination inherent in both the painter and the writer, the author has the actual artistic imagination that could be called plastic, completely different from the imagination of poetic. The author scatters figures, groups and bends them with the courage of Michelane-Jelo and the freedom of Rubens.

I do not know which of the great artists of the past comes to my memory at the sight of this canvas; But I feel in it their unbridled, passionate power, which naturally and without effort surrenders to its impulses. I do not think that I was mistaken: Mr. Delacroix is ​​endowed with brilliant talent; Let him confidently go forward, let him take up the largest and most responsible works - this is a necessary condition for the development of great talent.

And let him serve as support that the opinion expressed here is divided by one of the corphytraces of modern painting. These enthusiastic lines are equally striking in both insight and insolence. If the editor -in -chief of the newspaper believed how it is natural to assume that he was versed in painting, then the thoughts of young Thier should seem quite eccentric to him. In order to clearly imagine a deep confusion, into which the picture “Dante and Virgil” plunged the then minds,-amazement, dumbfound, anger, delight, curses, enthusiasm, mockery and laughter, who raged around this beautiful canvas the faithful sign of his revolutionaryness, recall that among the students of Mr.

Herten, the painter of high dignity, but the desirable and herpical and herpyn The intolerable, like his teacher David, existed at that time only a small handful of unknown artists who quietly studied old masters and timidly exchanged sung thoughts under the canopy of Raphael and Michelangelo. No one has yet dared to think about Rubens. The harsh and harsh with his young student, Mr.

Geren became interested in his picture only in connection with the noise she caused. Jeriko returned from Italy shortly before, where, as they say, under the influence of the great Etruscan and Florentine frescoes, he renounced some of his almost original principles; He, with such heat, carried the young and at that time a still shy artist who completely embarrassed him.

It was this picture, or perhaps, “placed on Khios” [1], a little later than the Baron of Gerard himself, who, apparently, had more likely a living mind than a picturesque gift, exclaim: “We have a new artist. This man walks without fear on the crests of the roofs! Honor and praise to the gentlemen Thieshu and Gerard! Of course, from the “Rook of Dante” to the murals of the Chamber of Peres and Deputies, the artist went a long way.

With all this, the life of Eugene Delacrois is not rich in external events. For a person endowed with such courage and such passion, the most exciting fights have to lead with himself.For decisive battles, immense spaces are not required; The most significant events, the most violent coups take place under the arches of the skull, in the close and mysterious laboratory of the brain.

The artist expressed himself and continued to express everything with more and more power the allegorical picture “Greece”, “The Death of Sardanal”, “Freedom” and others; The new current attracted more and more adherents every day, and in the end, the arrogant guardians of academism were forced to pay attention to young talent. One fine day, Mr. SOSTEN de la Roshfuko, the then director of the Academy of Fine Arts, invited E.

he uttered a lot of flattering words to him, and then expressed his regret about the fact that the artist, endowed with such generous imagination and such excellent talent, does not want to, despite the whole favor of the government to him, at least to die of his stubbornness; In the end, he asked straighten if the artist would not agree to change his creative manner.

Delacrois, in amazement after listening to the ridiculous conditions and nobles, in a fit of almost comic indignation replied that since he was writing so, then, therefore, he finds it necessary and that he could not work otherwise. After that, the artist fell into disgust and had no order for seven years. This situation stretched up to a year. Meanwhile, Mr. Thier published another, very enthusiastic article in the Globe.

Delacrois made a trip to Morocco, who left a deep trace in his memory; There he was lucky to see people living an independent and primordially clean life, to admire their movements, in which health and bodily power were through; All this helped him more deeply comprehend the antique beauty. The composition "Algerian women" and many sketches were made, apparently, during this period.

To this day, we were unfair to Egen Delacrois. An ignorant criticism did not bring him anything but bitterness, and, except for several noble exceptions, then even her praise should have been touched by the artist. With the name of Delacrois, people still most often have a vague idea of ​​unbridled, rebellion, almost about ecelled inspiration and erratic inconsistency. According to the philistine concepts, even the most outstanding works by Delacrois owe their appearance to chance, a devoted to the maid of talent.

In the unfortunate revolutionary era, which I spoke above in connection with many of its errors, Eugene Delacrois was often compared with Victor Hugo. Once a romantic poet appeared, it means that the romantic artist was also required. This need at all costs to look for similar phenomena and see analogies in various forms of art sometimes leads to ridiculous misses, and the aforementioned example shows the entire short -sightedness of the then criticism.

I am sure that such a comparison did not at all like Eugene Delacroix, and maybe both masters. For if, based on my definition of romanticism, intimacy, spirituality, etc. The parallel between them exists only in the field of banal template representations, and both of these errors still confuse many unstable minds. It's time to end these absurd concepts once and for all. Everyone who needs to develop their own aesthetic credo, who wants to judge the causes by investigations, I recommend carefully comparing the works of these two artists.

Mr. Viktor Hugo, whose nobility and greatness I do not intend to belittle, much more skill than imagination, is more inherent in a hardworking rationality than a creative impulse. Delacroix is ​​notable in execution, but in everything that he does, he invariably appears to be a genuine creator. And in the lyrical and dramatic paintings created by Mr. Viktor Hugo, we notice the same system of monotonous parallels and contrasts.

Even the eccentricity itself gains symmetric forms. He knows perfectly and calmly uses all the shades of rhyme, all means of contrasts, all the tricks of rhetorical repetitions. This is an artist of the transition period, who owns the tools of his craft with a truly rare and worthy admiration for dexterity. Mr. Hugo, by his very nature, was an academician, he was written on his family, and we live at the time of fairy-tale miracles, I would eagerly believe that the bronze lions of the institute, who were greening from time to time, whispered prophetically when he passed by their swaggering sanctuary: “To be an academician to you!

His works are a kind of poem, great, naive [2] poems created with the relaxed insolence of genius. Hugo’s poems, on the contrary, leave nothing to guess; Their author is so reveling in his skill that he does not miss a single blade of grass, not a single glare from a street lamp. But in the poems of Delacroix, even the most whimsical imagination of the viewer finds plentiful food for himself.The first appears before us in a calm pose, even, perhaps, in a pose of some contemplative egoism, which is why a chill of restraint is hovering over all its poetry; The second, in stubborn and gall passion, with which he fights with the difficulties of craft, is not always capable of this restraint.

One comes from the detail, the other - from penetration into the very essence of the plot, so that often the first gets only its shell, while the second bakes into its very gut. Too materialistic, too committed to the outside of the phenomena of Mr. Viktor Hugo became a painter in poetry; Delacroix, invariably devoted to his ideal, often, without knowing it, is a poet in painting. The second misconception, an exaggerating role of chance, is even more unfounded than the first.

Yes, this is the top of the impudence and absurdity - to indicate such an outstanding artist, erudite and thinker, like Delacrois, that he is supposedly in debt to God. Then it only remains to shrug. In art, as in mechanics, there is no place for chance. A happy finding is a direct consequence of the correct reasoning, during which intermediate conclusions are lowered; In the same way, the error is a consequence of the false parcel.

The picture can be compared with the machine, the entire mechanism of which is understandable to the experimental eye; Everything is justified in it if the picture is good; Each tone in it advantageously emphasizes the neighboring, and another error in the figure is sometimes even necessary for the sake of preserving something more important. The invasion of Delakray’s painting is all the more implausible that it belongs to the number of few artists who managed to preserve their identity even after they tasted from so many true sources, after their indomitable personality experienced, each time overcoming it, the powerful influence of so many great masters.

Today, a sketch made by Delacrois from the picture of Raphael would have struck many today - this is a genuine masterpiece of patient and thorough copying; Few people remember today about lithographs made by the artist based on medals and Kama. I will give several lines from the article by Mr. Henry Heine, which quite accurately explain the method of Delacroix-like all strong personalities, his method is the result of his temperament: “In art I am a supernaturalist.

I believe that the artist cannot find the types he needs in nature, but that the most significant of them, as it were, by revelation, are his soul, similar to the innate symbolism of innate ideas. One newest aesthetic, the author of “Italian research”, tried to restore the old principle of imitation of nature, claiming that the artist should look for all types in nature. Bringing this situation to the highest basic law of plastic arts, the aesthetic completely forgot about the oldest of these arts, namely, the architecture, the types of which now retroactively began to see in arbors and grottoes, but which, of course, were not found for the first time there.

They were concluded not in external nature, but in the human soul. ” So, Delacroix proceeds from the principle that the picture should first of all express the innermost thought of the artist, who rule over the model in the same way as the Creator - over his creation; The second follows from this principle, at first glance, as if contradicting the first, namely: the painter must be very meticulously treated by the tools of his labor.

Delacroix is ​​a fanatic of the cleanliness of the tool and extraordinary thoroughness in preparation for work. And in fact: painting is an art that requires deep thought and the simultaneous combination of many different factors, and it is very important that the hand, taking up the brush, meets as few obstacles as possible and with instant readiness to perform divine cerebral commands - otherwise the ideal will disappear.

For a long, thoroughly, concentratedly he hatches his plan and rapidly carries out it. We note, by the way, that this property of Delacroix relates him with another master, in which public opinion is used to seeing his antipoda, with Mr. Engr. It is one thing to bear the plan in yourself, the other is to embody it, and both of these lazy ones in the appearance of the nobles from painting, taking up the brush, with wonderful speed they cover the canvas with paints.

So, for example, Mr. Engr several times completely rewritten his “St. Symphorion ”, and at first there were much fewer figures in the picture. Eugene Delacrois Nature seems to be a huge dictionary, the pages of which he endlessly turn over, peering into them with an accurate and insightful eye; His painting is based on the memory of the artist and facing the memory of the viewer.

The impression that the viewer’s soul receives corresponds to the expressive means of the artist. The canvas of Delacrois “Dante and Virgil”, for example, always leaves a deep impression, and the power of its effect increases with time. Consistently sacrificing the detail for the sake of the whole and afraid to weaken the freshness of the image with a calligraphically thorough execution, the artist reaches an incomprehensible originality, in other words, a deeply larger interpretation of the plot.Any sharply predominant quality can develop only to the detriment of the rest.

An excessive tendency to one requires victims, so the masterpiece usually represents a one-sided display of nature. That is why we must calmly put up with the losses that the great passion entails, whatever it may be, should take talent in all its predestination and not bargain with the genius. This is what those who mockery of Delacrois did not think about, in particular, the sculptors, which were still less than any measures, capable of common sense than architects.

And in general, the sculpture, which is contraindicated in the color and the movement is barely accessible, should not interfere in the affairs of the painter, engaged in mainly by movement, color and atmosphere. These three elements inevitably lead to the uncertainty of the contour, to light, oscillating lines and insolence of the smear. Delacrois is the only one of the current artists whose identity was not suppressed by the dogma of direct lines; His figures are constantly in motion, the fabrics are fluttering.

From the point of view of Delacroix, the line as such does not exist, because, no matter how thin it may be, some sly geometer can always assume that it contains another thousand others. And for the colorist, striving to convey the eternal thrill of nature, the line seems only to the border of the merger of two colors - as in a rainbow.