ART REVIEW : Met’s Delacroix Show an Engaging Trifle

Trying to fathom a motive isn’t easy for the exhibition “Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863): Paintings, Drawings and Prints From North American Collections.” Because the show is pointedly circumscribed by Delacroix holdings found in Canada and, especially, the United States, the assumption is that it will shed some light on the history of taste in North America--a hope that goes unanswered.

Essential shows of the great French Romantic painter are certainly rare, particularly in North America, and this laborious gathering of 105 works does include a number of delectable visual pleasures. Yet it adds virtually nothing of substance to our long-established understanding of Delacroix’s art--either in terms of its own internal development or of the Frenchman’s larger impact on Western culture. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it remains on view through June 16 (it will not travel), the show seems an engaging trifle.

To be sure, no exhibition of modestly scaled pictures could do full justice to Delacroix, whose feeling for monumental canvases speaks of an essential drive for epic grandeur in French Romantic painting of the early 19th Century. Consider his enormous “The Death of Sardanapalus” (1827-28), which hangs in Paris’ Louvre Museum. Among the wildest paintings ever, its raucous orgy of erotic violence practically spills out of the canvas and into the room, through a previously unheard of amalgamation of contradictory pictorial perspectives.

This vivid painting displays a sense of savage threat. Yet its menace is not only directed at the large and voluptuous harem of the Assyrian king, Sardanapalus, who, upon news of his impending demise, has calmly ordered their vicious slaughter. Delacroix’s fearsome threat is also sounded against established canons of officially sanctioned French painting of the day. With a trace of wit amid the awful carnage, his huge picture slew the prevailing calm and gravity of neo-classical art.

The very small version of this painting on view at the Met, which Delacroix painted as a memento when he finally sold the monumental canvas almost 20 years after its initial display, tells of the special place occupied by the painting in the artist’s aspirations. Only the monumental canvas, however, which isn’t likely ever to leave its berth at the Louvre, conveys its dramatic urgency.

Certainly the exhibition touches a number of important bases, and it includes numerous works, especially drawings from private collections, that aren’t often shown. It has also provided the occasion for a cleaning of “The Abduction of Rebecca” (1846), a magnificent picture acquired by the Met in 1903 and probably inspired by a scene from Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe.”

Pressed into the foreground before a deep space composed of flickering brush strokes and ethereal color, Saracen slaves furiously hoist the stolen woman onto the back of a leaping charger. Bodies are summoned in vaporous flashes of light, carried by quick pigment. What gives Delacroix’s otherworldly picture its palpability is the intricate composition, in which the limbs and torsos of the three figures and the horse are tightly braided together, as if a Persian rug woven on a loom.

Several juxtapositions in the show are also revealing, notably two versions of “Christ and His Disciples Crossing the Sea of Galilee” with the small “Sardanapalus” nearby. About 30 years separate the three, but all employ the same basic composition, in which the figures slip across the surface of the painting like plates and dishes sliding down a precariously tilted table top. For each, Delacroix devised a different scheme with which to pin his storm-tossed supplicants to their fate.

As a whole, however, the show is a puzzlement. It doesn’t leave you pondering the work of Delacroix as much as it makes you stand in certain awe, rightly or wrongly, of the great, devouring maw of the hyper-acquisitive Met.

About 40% of this ostensible survey of the depth and breadth of North American passion for Delacroix’s art is drawn from the museum’s own holdings. Another 40% has been borrowed from a single private collection. The collector, Karen B. Cohen, has assembled a superlative group of 35 drawings and five paintings, most on paper, including a vigorous oil sketch for the great wall decoration, “Jacob Wrestling With the Angel,” which graces Paris’ church of Saint-Sulpice. (One pleasure of the show is the reunion of this oil sketch with two separate drawings for the same mural.)

On the surface, then, the show would seem to contradict itself, suggesting as it does something less than a diverse and widespread craving for Delacroix’s art. But let’s assume that Met director Philippe de Montebello is correct when he asserts, in the opening line of his foreword to the catalogue, “The artistic achievements of Eugene Delacroix have been appreciated by American collectors of French paintings for a very long time.” The show’s chief disappointment lies in the failure of any effort whatever to examine why this should be so.

The book offers a general introduction to Delacroix’s art as compellingly informative as any one might wish for, by the British compiler of his catalogue raisonne , Lee Johnson. But what was it about Delacroix’s art that eventually came to speak so persuasively to foreigners across the Atlantic?

Was it the flashing brilliance of his innovative use of broken color, which had done so much to set the stage for Impressionist painting several decades later--painting that was gaining a new American audience at the beginning of the 20th Century?

Was it his frequently exotic subject matter--North African harems, Arab and Turkish warriors, battling lions and tigers--which reflected the colonial expansionism of France in the 19th Century? The previously isolationist United States was, likewise, engaged in a period of global adventuring when Delacroix’s art began to catch the fancy of North Americans.

Was it the great Frenchman’s willingness to consider specifically American mythology as a fitting subject for his ambitious art--specifically in “The Natchez,” which represents a scene from the epilogue of “Atala,” Chateaubriand’s fable of American Indians along the Mississippi? In this strange and tender picture, acquired by the Met in 1989, Delacroix literalized the Enlightenment fascination for the so-called “noble savage,” rendering a New World nativity with classical feeling.

Or did something else entirely entice initial American collectors? On that score, “Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863): Paintings, Drawings and Prints From North American Collections” has nothing to say. Instead, it’s content to merely hang its hat on a hook affixed to the history of established taste. Given the rambunctious spirit of its protagonist, that’s a rather ironic posture for the museum to take.