Keywords

modernity, civilization and barbarism, philosophical interpretation

Abstract

Hailed as both one of the last of the Old Masters (“je suis un pur classique”) and as the quintessential Romantic rebel (“the Victor Hugo of painting”), Eugène Delacroix stands as a towering but liminal figure in the history of art. In Exiled in Modernity: Delacroix, Civilization, and Barbarism, David O’Brien explores how Delacroix’s later artistic period is deeply engaged with pressing issues of the age, including the development of civilization, the processes of modernity, the conceptualization of the Other, the place of nature, and so on. While acknowledging the place for political interpretations of Delacroix’s work, the author is instead interested in mining the considerable philosophical dimensions to the artist’s art and writings. He maintains that the artist’s paintings from the late 1830s through the 1850s, along with his written musings, articulate his convictions in complex and compelling ways. Delacroix’s ceiling murals in the Palais Bourbon, Palais du Luxembourg, and the Louvre, along with the later paintings of North Africa, can thus be read as the manifestoes of an artist who was ambivalent towards civilization and modernity, preferring the primitive and barbaric.

Original Publication Citation

Review of Exiled in Modernity: Delacroix, Civilization, and Barbarity by David O’Brien (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). For H-France, online reviews for the Society of French Historical Studies 19: 185 (September 2019).