Word: delacroix
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Cezanne was fascinated by Gericault, Daumier, Delacroix and the revolutionary Realism of both Courbet and Manet. But he had no facility at all; the impression given off by his early style couillarde--his "ballsy style," as he called it--is of a thwarted, tumultuous, half-articulate imagination bashing against the limits of its own abilities. He produced dark, macabre paintings of murders and orgies whose motivation, despite the guignol of their subject matter, remains as mysterious as their muddy paint and overladen black tonalities...
THERE CAN'T BE MANY PEOPLE TOday who would think of putting Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) among the giants of 19th century French painting--Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Monet or Cezanne. Yet in his lifetime he was regarded as one of the greatest landscapists who ever lived, and for most cultivated Frenchmen the very idea of comparing a bungler like Cezanne with their beloved Corot would have seemed faintly barbarous. The big show that opened in Paris last month--drawings and prints at the Bibliotheque Nationale, 163 paintings at the Grand Palais--marking the 200th anniversary of Corot...
...young man, he worked with Gustave Courbet. He knew, and was respected by, some of the finest artists in Paris: Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet. He appears (with Baudelaire, Manet and other French luminaries) in Henri Fantin-Latour's group portrait of the rising art stars of 1864, Homage to Delacroix. "This American is a great artist, and the only one of whom America can be justly proud," said Camille Pissarro. And Marcel Proust turned part of his name, unpronounceable by the French, into an anagram: he became the painter Elstir in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu...
...point about visual influences. When Chereau stages the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, he has the entire tradition of French art behind him. The artfully twisted limbs and contorted white bodies come not from "Schindler's List" but from The Raft of the Medusa and The Death of Sardanapalus. Delacroix and Gericault sit on Chereau's shoulders like twin angels of visual excess. (Chereau also includes nods to Rembrandt; Pascal Greggory as Margot's brother Anjou is a dead ringer for Rembrandt's Polish Rider...
...legacy of Delacroix's mission to Morocco...