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Painting and the Journal of Eugene Delacroix

By (author) Michele Hannoosh

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The Journal of Eugene Delacroix is one of the most important works in the literature of art history: the record of a life at once private and public, it is also one of the richest and most fascinating documents of the 19th century, as Delacroix reflects throughout on the relations betweeb the arts, especially painting and writing. Indeed, he approaches the question from a unique perspective, that of a painter who wrote extensively and theorized his own writing in the Journal , a painter who had a passion for literature and a powerful literary imagination, a narrative painter whose work is rooted in literature and the library. This book explores the importance of this relation for Delacroix's aesthetic theory and artistic practice. Countering the long critical tradition which sees his writing as the inverse of his painting, it argues that, through his diary and art criticism, he sought to develop a painter's writing, proper to painting itself, and that such a writing is closely related to his conception of pictorial art. This approach has significant implications for interpreting the narratives of his public decorations, four of which are analyzed here: the library schemes of the Senate and the Assemble Nationale, the Apollo Gallery in the Louvre, and the Chapel of the Holy Angels at the church of Saint-Sulpice. Delacroix's ideas on the theoretical and practical relations between writing and painting, narrative and the image, are shown to be central not only to his aesthetic, but also to his views on civilization, history and culture, and on the role of the artist in the modern world.