Delacroix's Legacy

...Delacroix remains indeed the first great French painter whose Orientalism was founded on immediate personal experience and observation of Islam, and on a passionate personal interest in the exotic North African life that he depicted...

...Now, of course, imperialist ventures in North Africa appear to be a closed chapter of French history...

...As a critic, Baudelaire already sensed this quality in Fromentin—whom today we sadly neglect—and praised him for his sensitivity as an artist whose Orientalism was always truthful and sympathetic rather than derivative and manneristic as that of so many inventors of fancy-dress genre scenes set in an Islamic context...

...The work of Delacroix stands, however, not only as an achievement perhaps as important as that of Rubens or of Rembrandt...

...Sometimes, his nudes were even copied from other works of art that had no Oriental context at all...

...The richness of these implications were suggestively pointed up a few years ago in Vocation de l'Islam by the Algerian philosopher Malek Bennabi...

...A few years before his death, as part of a French literary discussion group, I had occasion to broadcast in Paris with Albert Camus...

...He sensed, too, that its socio-economic structure, founded mainly on slavery, produced customs and situations that were more closely related to those we find described in the more "realist" writers of antiquity—such as Plautus, Terence or Petronius—than anything that can be found in neoclassicist descriptions which projected upon antiquity the Empire Style of the early 19th century...

...Nor does it appear a coincidence that this year's magnificent exhibitions of his work at the Louvre, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, at the small Musée Delacroix and elsewhere in Paris, as well as at the Fine Arts Museum in his native Bordeaux, immediately followed the granting of Algerian independence...

...Art historians have already pointed out some of the sources of details in scenes of Oriental harems or hammams that Ingres painted...

...In a harem scene by Narcisse Diaz, a later disciple of Delacroix, we likewise discover, revealed through the arches of the interior's architecture, a woodland landscape that is typical of the Barbizon area near Paris...

...Matisse in his Odalisques, for instance, relied heavily on borrowings from Ingres and Delacroix rather than on personal observation of North African life...

...Only Pascin, a Bulgarian Jew of the School of Paris on whose work Matisse may also have drawn, seems in our age to have been able to recapture in his North African sketches the sympathetic spirit of observation that also animated Delacroix...

...But his earlier visions of the Moslem world, like those of his great rival Ingres, until 1832 were somewhat conventional and derivative, if not actually naive...

...I asked him whether he had never been urged by mere curiosity to learn the language spoken by the majority of the population in whose midst he had grown up and lived...

...But the ambivalence of this phenomenon of the relationships between imperialist and colonial peoples as an expression of a far more general cultural trend has not yet been fully analyzed in all its implications...

...As time went by and more and more Frenchmen had occasion to become acquainted with Islamic North Africa, these qualities of the work of Delacroix and Fromentin nevertheless appeared no more frequently in French art...

...Applied with vision it could indeed have provided enough spiritual guidance to last over 100 years for all French politicians, colonial administrators, army men and settlers who were destined to deal with North African affairs or to live in the French colonies, protectorates or departments established there...

...Whether in India during the reigns of Louis XIV and XV, in Egypt under Napoleon, in North Africa after 1820, or even in China and Japan, the Orient retained a fascination for the French...

...Several years before traveling to Morocco, Delacroix, as his letters reveal, had already begun to collect Islamic costumes and curios in his Paris studio, and to paint a few Orientalistic works...

...In his published letters, in his Journal, in his innummerable North African sketches and in all the Orientalist works that he painted after his return from Morocco and Algeria, Delacroix continued to produce a veritable monument of sympathetic and passionate understanding of North African Islam...

...Like a modern cultural anthropologist, he sensed that the technology of the Islamic world, its arts and crafts, were still to a great extent those of classical antiquity...

...Visiting this year's exhibitions of the works of Delacroix and then reading again his Journals and his letters, I could not help feeling that, in spite of his known difficulties in mastering any foreign language, he was always inspired, in all his North African observations and memories, by the kind of sympathetic curiosity that Camus lacked...

...In the earlier Orientalist works of Delacroix there are similar borrowings and absurdities, mainly of an obviously Byronic origin...

...Nowhere in his writings has Camus left us such detailed and understanding descriptions of contemporary North African Islamic culture and life as Delacroix, who has given us what is easily the most impressive monument we have of more than a century of présence française in Islamic North Africa...

...Edouard Roditi, a frequent contributor here, is currently editing a collection of Delacroix's letters...

...I was shocked to discover that, though born and educated in Algeria and still obsessed with le tirante nord-africain, Camus was unable either to speak or understand any Arabic...

...In the letters that he wrote from Morocco and Algeria to his Paris friends, he fondly describes how in the people he has rediscovered the customs and the life of the Maghreb, the survival of all those aspects of Greek and Roman antiquity which he had failed to find in contemporary neo-classicist descriptions of this vanished world...

...Long before Delacroix enthusiastically agreed to travel to Morocco in order to record in his sketches the official visit of a French envoy to the Sultan, in fact to anticipate the tasks of a photographic reporter, French literature, art and political life had been haunted by exotic visions of romance and adventure in Oriental lands...

...This spirit, by the way, is even lacking in some of the North African scenes painted by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer, a somewhat conventional Parisian painter of society portraits who was the first French artist to be a native of Algiers...

...In this respect, Delacroix was far ahead of most other thinkers and artists of his age...

...it is an example of what can still be accomplished by French politicians, writers and artists of vision, genius and good-will with a proper understanding of North Africa's past and its present problems and aspirations...

...Colonial expansion, Bennabi notes, among other things implies a corresponding "mood" in the culture of the colonized country which, because of its inertia and underdevelopment, acts as a vacuum and perhaps unconsciously exerts an attraction on the more highly developed nations...

...Camus neglected to answer my question...

...In the summer of 1963, the many French art exhibitions which celebrated the centenary of the death of Eugène Delacroix, the great Romantic painter, stressed the significance of his work as a chapter in the turbulent history of the political and cultural relations between France and the peoples of North Africa...

...Surely, it cannot be a coincidence that the painter's trip to Morocco in 1832 immediately followed the French occupation of Algiers in 1830...

...Thus he himself provided a vivid example of the tragic misunderstandings of le drame nord-africain, which arose from the lack of any real communication between the French and the North African Arabs and Berbers...

...In respect to fidelity to the region, the painter Eugène Fromentin, among later Delacroix disciples, proved to be a reliable observer of North African life, though less gifted than his master...