"It's a Cruel World"

When I have painted a fine picture, I haven't expressed a thought. Or so they say. What fools people are!

So wrote Eugene Delacroix, one of the 19th Century's most earnest painters. In an exhibition of Delacroix and his contemporaries at the master's old Paris studio last week, students were searching for the thoughts in some of his best works. On the surface, many of the paintings looked like mere blood & thunder illustration. Delacroix had applied his fierce imagination and brilliant, Rubensesque draftsmanship to an endless series of somber myths, tiger hunts and desert duels. His chief thought seemed to be: "It's a cruel world, and one in which men play a bravely ineffectual role."

A Rose Horse. But moderns were more interested in what Delacroix had thought about color, for his free & easy use of it sometimes foreshadowed the Fauves ("Wild Beasts") and modern art. In last week's Saturday Review of Literature, Critic James Thrall Soby described the storm that one of his canvases, La Justice de Trajan, raised in the Salon of 1840: "The picture barely survived the Salon's jury, an astonishing fact when we consider that Delacroix had been painting professionally for more than 20 years and was famous throughout Europe . . . Once accepted and hung, the picture created a furor . . . Delacroix had painted Trajan's horse a pinkish-rose color, which the classicists and academicians immediately decried as without precedent in nature."

Poet Charles Baudelaire had eventually come to Delacroix' defense with the simple assertion that, whether or not such a horse ever existed, the painter was perfectly justified in inventing it. Even with such a shield-bearer, Delacroix lost the battle. When he died in 1863, almost everyone still agreed that his rose horse was awful.

A Brand New Horror. To Delacroix, color was a means of expressing thought and feeling; he saw no point in mixing his pigments in slavish imitation of natural hues. And in time his heresy became modernist orthodoxy. Though his contemporaries sometimes considered him just a prodigiously talented nut, posterity had, in fact, carried his philosophy of art to a subjective extreme that would have left Delacroix himself speechless with horror.

Last week the Societe des Amis d'Eugene Delacroix, which now rents the master's quiet Left Bank studio for exhibition purposes, was sputtering through its collective white spade beard about a brand-new horror. At year's end Delacroix' place would be up for sale, and rumor had it that a nightclub was dickering for the property. The Societe felt that Delacroix, who had been a close friend of Chopin, would conceivably have found le jazz hot even weirder than the art of his modernist descendents.

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