PMA displays art of master Delacroix

Eugene Delacroix -- last of painting's classical masters, the father of Impressionism, renowned for his vivid palette and whirling violent scenes. And now, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, Delacroix's art is the focus of a spectacular new show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Seventy paintings and 40 works on paper executed by the French artist between 1848 and his death in 1863 are on display through January 3. The works -- a virtually complete set of the artist's most important pieces from this period -- provide a glorious look at the increasingly complex and passionate style Delacroix adopted in his later years. They are characterized by the artist's ever bolder and more sophisticated uses of emotive color, light, and spontaneity, ideas that inspired the Impressionists who followed him. But the lack of paintings from earlier periods leaves one with little sense for Delacroix's evolution as an artist, instead capturing him only at one particular point in his artistic life. The exhibit is thematically grouped into six galleries -- animals, scenes from literature, nature, mythology, scenes from North Africa and religious works. Large wall signs introduce each gallery, and smaller signs by the individual paintings do a masterful job of explaining the contents and context of each work. An audio guide featuring the exhibit's curator -- available for an additional charge of $4 -- provides information and anecdotes about the artist and his work. Much of the information can, however, be gathered from the wall signs. The paintings, previously on display in Paris, were assembled by the museum in conjunction with the Reunion des Musees Nationaux in Paris. The two institutions most recently collaborated on a 1996 Cezanne show at the PMA that drew more than 550,000 visitors to Philadelphia. The Delacroix show is expected to fall well short of that number, attracting upwards of 250,000 people, although museum spokesperson Sacha Adorno emphasized that the two shows were put together with different expectations. Delacroix is not as well known as Cezanne, and the new show features fewer works than the 1996 exhibit. Delacroix's importance stems from his historical position between the European masters of the Middle Ages and the Impressionists of the late 19th century. Delacroix's use of emotive and flamboyant color marks him as the father of Impressionism, although his attention to detail and the formal renderings of his subjects place him in the line of classical European masters. Delacroix frequently painted the exotic costumes of North Africa, portraying the region's loose clothing in a palette of brilliant reds and blues. The colors inspired the French poet Charles Baudelaire to remark, "Never have more beautiful or intense colors penetrated the soul through the channel of the eyes." Indeed, one of Delacroix's oil paintings of flowers hung above Cezanne's bed, inspiring the Impressionist to paint his own version. But many of Delacroix's contemporaries were less taken with his choice of colors. One critic, viewing an 1855 piece called The Lion Hunt, termed Delacroix's palette "savage." Both Delacroix's brilliant hunting scenes and his renderings of battle make use of densely-packed, swirling groups of combatants to create a claustrophobic atmosphere and heighten the viewer's sense of tension and drama. Cutting a striking contrast with these pieces are Delacroix's more-contemplative landscapes, which focus on the emotive power of color rather than the details of the seaside scene -- precisely the things that make him a conceptual father to Impressionism.