If you go into almost any museum or art gallery
and look at French art of the second half of the 19th century, well into the 20th century,
you see artists who were looking at, thinking about, Eugène Delacroix
using his art to advance their own.
This exhibition, 'Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art', traces that story.
Eugène Delacroix was born in 1798.
He was largely self-taught as a painter.
He made his debut at the Paris Salon of 1822
and from that moment on he was a famous artist,
famous as the greatest of the Romantic masters,
and he was also a controversial artist – a kind of lightning rod for criticism.
This exhibition constitutes a survey of Delacroix's achievements
and you see here some of his most powerful experiments in colour,
powerful experiments in dramatic subject matter,
in imagery of violence, in an art that moves beyond mere representation
to the spiritual plane as well.
But you're never seeing Delacroix alone.
You're always seeing him in relation to his contemporaries
and then in relation to those artists long after his death
who were still feeling the impact of his art:
Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Redon,
right up to Matisse and Kandinsky at the verge of abstraction.
It's something we have largely forgotten today;
the impact of Delacroix on the development of modern art,
and what this exhibition tries to do is to return our attention
to the extraordinary role he played.
