Volume 3, Number 2 · September 10, 1964
Delacroix
By Francis Haskell
Delacroix
by Lee Johnson
Norton, 123 pp., $3.95
Delacroix
by René Huyghe
Abrams, 424 pp., $35.00
Delacroix, the most intelligent and complex of nineteenth-century French artists, was torn by conflicts. Classic or Romantic? Racine or Shakespeare? Mozart or Beethoven? Again and again the famous diary struggles with the opposing values implied by these names, and he was never able to harmonize them into final reconciliation. It was the same in his private life: 'A revolutionary in his studio,' said Victor Hugo, 'he was a conservative in the drawing room.' And Baudelaire, whose analysis of his character remains the subtlest, pointed out that his temperament 'contained much of the sauvage…and much of the man-of-the-world.' Curiously (or inevitably) this awareness of some basic split in his personality seems to have conditioned the approach of nearly all who have written about him.
Review, 1093 words
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