Art: Before Your Very Eyes

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Exotic and Erotic. Throughout the history of art there have been such painters of intellect, but there have always been, too, those who paint only with passion. Had Delacroix not been the illegitimate son of the influential Talleyrand, he might not have had so easy a time getting his work shown, and even so, he shocked as well as awed. Battles intrigued him, massacres fascinated him, the combination of blood and splendor, of luxury and pain, seemed to inspire him. In his mind, he traveled over India and the Near East, filling it full of glittering jewels, gilded swords, muscular slaves, milk-skinned concubines. He was one of the great melodramatists of all time, and his melodramas were always superb. His Sardanapalus was inspired by reading a dramatic poem by Lord Byron, and the picture he painted has the impact of an orgy. The figures are so arranged, in an almost circular composition, that they seem to swirl and dance, much like the flames that will soon over take them. This is romanticism at the boiling point—an extraordinary mixture of the exotic and erotic, a masterpiece so filled with the thrill of the sadist that, as he grew older, Delacroix himself became reluctant to even mention it.

"That which is most real to me," said Delacroix, "is the illusions that I create with my work. The rest is shifting sand." Each artist has his own vision, and part of it is left with those who will stop to share it. But in the best of the shows of May 1963, there is something in common: the "inner necessity" of which the Blue Rider movement spoke, combined with a sense of interdependence. From ancient Greece to Rodin to Lipchitz is a distant course but logical. From the lushness of Delacroix to the colored orchestrations of the Fauves is hardly a giant leap; and the abstract expressionists have claimed Turner as a father. In this one week, the world's walled museums are helping to build Malraux's museum without walls by bringing to millions at firsthand a cross section, however fortuitous, of the history of the last two centuries of art, and thus expose the ordeal of the artist himself. For the artist, said Rodin, "it is not thinking with the primitive ingenuity of childhood that is most difficult, but to think with tradition, with its acquired force, and with all the accumulated wealth of its thought."