Delacroix show at Minneapolis Institute of Art offers a feast for the eye – and a debate

Asked to name the most influential painter of 19th-century France, even experts might squabble.

Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse would all have their partisans. Arguments can be made for any of them. And often are.

Now, along comes an unexpected candidate, Eugène Delacroix, whose case is championed in a lavish exhibition opening Sunday at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

With 75 paintings from 40 museums and private collections around the world, "Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art" proposes that it was the passionate iconoclast Delacroix whose colorful paintings sparked a century of avant-garde experimentation.

"Delacroix was a genius, and arguably the most influential artist of the 19th century if you take French art as the bridge to modernism," said institute curator Patrick Noon, who conceived the show.

A painting must be "a feast for the eye," the artist once wrote. In that spirit, the show offers a grand visual feast of pictures by virtually all the Euro stars of the time, including Cézanne (seven pictures), Gauguin (five), Van Gogh, Degas, Renoir and Matisse (three each). Plus 30 by Delacroix himself and more by others in his orbit, including a spectacular portrait by John Singer Sargent.

Noon developed the "Dela­croix" exhibit — and its exemplary catalog — with Christopher Riopelle, a painting curator at London's National Gallery. After closing in Minneapolis on Jan. 10, the show will travel only to London, from Feb. 17 through May 22.

So who was Delacroix, and why the fuss?

To the influential poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, Delacroix was "the most original painter of ancient or of modern times." To Cézanne, Delacroix was "one of the giants." His work even inspired Van Gogh to move to southern France to study "color and modern sentiment."

Such extravagant admiration teases art historians to dig deeper. Noon discovered references to Delacroix everywhere, especially after 1822, when his dramatic "The Barque of Dante" was first exhibited. Inspired by classical literature, it depicts the poets Virgil and Dante being rowed across the river Styx as drowning men grapple in turbulent water before a flaming city.

At a time when officially approved artists of the French Academy were still obsessed with pristine finish, classical modeling and statuesque figures, Delacroix's emotive approach was revolutionary and objectionable. Even so, the government bought the painting and most of the artists in the show copied it over the decades, among them Édouard Manet, whose version is included.

"Delacroix is a major alternative to what was being taught in the French Academy, where you have a very hierarchical system of patronage and style," Noon said recently.

Born in 1798 during the waning days of the French Revolution, Delacroix came of age at a tumultuous moment in his country's history. He was just 17 when Napoleon was defeated and banished for a second, and final, time. After two decades of war, the French set about mending fences, including with their traditional nemesis, England.

Delacroix was soon in thrall to all things English, mesmerized by the romantic poetry of Lord Byron, the historical novels of Walter Scott, the shimmering portraits of Thomas Lawrence, the landscapes of John Constable and the experimental techniques of his British painter-friend Richard Parkes Bonington.

"Basically, my thesis is that modernism has its roots in Anglo-French romanticism and Delacroix is the purveyor of those ideas," Noon said.

A tempestuous personality himself, Delacroix dropped out of art school, studied with a mentor and copied paintings in the Louvre museum. Though much admired for his bohemian attitude, he also sought official recognition and painted allegorical ceilings in Parisian churches, government buildings and even the Louvre. A government-sponsored 1832 trip through North Africa inspired his exotic "Orientalist" pictures.

Yet, in an era when funeral cortèges for the famous would block Paris streets, it was chiefly his literary and artistic friends who mourned his death in 1863.

Four thematic sections track Delacroix's influence on virtually every key 19th-century artist and movement from Orientalism to Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism and more.

"Emulation" features paintings by artists who admired or copied Delacroix, including Sargent's insightful portrait of a haughty English baron whose pose is very reminiscent of Delacroix's sensitive portrait of an elegant painter friend. An unusual Cézanne nude echoes a rare Delacroix nude, and Odilon Redon responded to Delacroix's Louvre ceiling, seen here in a sketch.

"Orientalism" highlights Delacroix's influential North African exotica, first imagined from literary sources, then vividly observed on travels and later re-imagined.

Highlights include one of the institute's most famous pictures, Delacroix's "Convulsionists of Tangier." Painted in 1838, it depicts a frenzied crowd of religious fanatics writhing in a Moroccan street under blazing sun and blue skies. Its bravura style and intense colors enhance the immediacy and excitement of a scene that the artist and a friend witnessed from an attic nook where they hid in fear of being attacked.

More Orientalist pictures are paired with related work by Cézanne, Renoir and others.

"Narratives" includes literary and religious motifs including a crucifixion, "Christ on the Sea of Galilee" and dramatic saints by Delacroix, Gustave Moreau and others. Among them is an extraordinary 1889 Van Gogh "Pieta" in which the Dutch artist reinterprets a Delacroix picture in cobalt blue and chrome yellow with Van Gogh's own face on the body of Christ. Gauguin weighed in that year, too, putting his own face and orange hair on a mournful "Christ in the Garden of Olives."

The final section, "Legacy," tracks Delacroix's influence to Tahiti, where Gauguin breaks out vivid, non-naturalistic colors inspired by Delacroix's experiments decades earlier. Bright flower paintings by Redon, Matisse, Van Gogh and others pay homage to Delacroix's color theories and monumental still lifes.

"What these artists are seeing is not just his use of color, it's the way he applies paint to a surface and the fact that he was capable of distorting form and color to get across his message," Noon said.

"What's important and modern about him is the way he defies convention to get where he wants to go."

Or as Cézanne wrote, "No one under the sky had more charm and pathos combined than he, or more vibration of color. We all paint in his language."

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431