David and Delacroix from Louvre to Morgan
Back in the 1990s, the Morgan Library lent some 200 drawings to the Louvre Museum. The Louvre has now returned the favor, and in impressive fashion. David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre, currently at the Morgan, is a stunning selection of 80 of the museum’s drawings.
The works date from a particularly turbulent time in French history, from 1789 to 1852, when the country veered through periods of revolution, empire and monarchy. Befitting the era, the drawings reflect a kaleidoscope of styles, from the rococo frothiness of Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (son of the famous Jean-Honoré) to the neo-classicism of David and Ingres, the romanticism of Géricault and Delacroix and the earthy naturalism of Corot.
Théodore Géricault’s “The Artist’s Left Hand,” watercolor, with black and red chalk, Musée du Louvre, Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. Photography by Michèle Bellot.
But beyond historical context and style, the works glimmer with the power of the artists’ personalities. Mix conservatism and sensuality in equal parts and you might get something like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, that micromanager of drawing represented by 10 sheets of drawings in the exhibition. In the unkind words of one peer, Ingres “wore his vest too tight and liked it that way”—indeed, aiming for the perfection of Raphael, he is prone to overshoot. But the results can be wondrous: On a sheet with two graphite studies for his renowned painting “Grande Odalisque,” the figure’s spine stretches like taffy and yet the intervals—hip to knee, knee to heel—fill the paper with complete conviction. On the same sheet, a close-up of a hand deliciously catches the crooks of fingers with emphatic, delicate shading.
In several portraits, lively eyes peer from orchestrations of increasingly fainter details: collars, limbs and eventually hands. Among them, one self-portrait stands out for its rakish air. Did labor ever look so unlabored? (Sixteen additional Ingres drawings from the Morgan’s own collection are on view in a concurrent installation a few rooms away.)
At the opposite end of the obsessive-compulsive scale, Eugène Delacroix famously held that an artist should be able to sketch a man falling from a fourth-floor window before he hit the ground. His nine sheets of drawings at the Morgan, however, locate the critical masses and details with an authority equal to Ingres’. Particularly fine is his study for the iconic painting “Liberty Leading the People”; Delacroix’s fervent marks neglect a hip in order to forge, palpably, something more crucial: the ardor of a young woman brandishing a flag. Several ink drawings—tempests of coiling lines and saturated darks—also stand out, but the biggest surprise is a pale graphite sketch of Dieppe harbor, with masts and sails rising tremulously into the light.
Muscular and moody, Théodore Géricault’s drawings of figures and animals ply a darker vein of romanticism but hardly prepare you for the artist’s vibrant watercolor-and-chalk drawing of his own left hand, produced when he was on his deathbed. In a sunset view of the Roman skyline, François Marius Granet’s wash drawing captures much of the mysterious, interior light of Claude Lorrain’s sketches from two centuries earlier. The exquisitely rich tones of Honoré Daumier’s tiny chalk portrait honor the hard-set features of a working class woman.
Several chalk drawings by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon seduce with their blended, velvety tones, and his portrait of a shyly smiling woman becomes all the more affecting when we read that the subject, Prud’hon’s lover, was to take her own life two decades later. And yet, this artist’s work never achieves the kind of poignancy—the eloquence of interval—that makes the compositions of Ingres or Delacroix so momentous.
No works tie more explicitly to contemporary events than the drawings executed by Jacques-Louis David in various combinations of graphite, chalk and ink. Multifigure sketches by the artist—including a scene of a lavish reception for Napoleon and Josephine—impress for their complexity. But more compelling is the small, crisp portrait of a prison mate, produced when the artist was serving jail time for his participation in the revolution. We don’t know the sitter’s name, but the portrait conveys, in sensitive, straightforward fashion, a full sense of his pride and resolve.
The most striking works in the exhibition, though, tend to stand apart from the topical. And in some intriguing moments, the artists seem to depart even from their usual selves. Two of the most remarkable drawings are a pair of spontaneous studies by the elderly Ingres for his celebrated “The Turkish Bath.” A tiny ink sketch hacks out several figures with the alacrity of Matisse. The broad, robust crosshatchings in the second impart a supple chunkiness to several female nudes, rendering them at once graceful and thoroughly fleshy. It’s as if Ingres, approaching his 80th year, was subject to his own internal revolutions.
David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre
Through Dec. 31, Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave., 212-685-0008, www.themorgan.org.
