Sunday, April 13, 2003

Medpundit Art History Lesson: Europe in 1830 was not a restful place. It was a peaceful place for the first time in centuries, but it was not restful, for the peace came at a great price. The powers of Europe, the monarchs who had so recently been sent running by Napoleon, were determined that those liberal “French ideas” of liberty and republicanism would be stamped out forever, and they united in their purpose to see that this happened. Ruling families who had fought viciously among one another before Napoleon, now were united for the first time in history in a common goal. They would aid one another against the usurpation of the common man. This European alliance enforced the peace with secret police and harsh punishment for anyone who dared to breathe a word of the rights of man. But even a people exhausted by endless war can only stand so much repression, and in July of that year things came to a head in - where else? - France.

The last of the Bourbon kings, Charles X, had as his primary political goal, the re-establishment of the ancien regime - the monarchy as it had been before the first French Revolution. He strengthened the power of the clergy, restricted voting rights, silenced the press, and disbanded a newly elected liberal cabinet. The people’s response was swift and violent. The July Revolution lasted only a few days, but by its end, Charles X and his ministers were gone, and the liberal ideals of the first French Republic stirred to life once again across all of Europe.

One of those standing and fighting (or at least observing) on the barricades of Paris that July was the Romantic painter, Eugene Delacroix (1798 - 1863), an event he commemorated by painting, Liberty Leading the People.




In it, we see Liberty portrayed with all the accoutrements of the first French Republic. She wears the breast-exposing dress so fashionable in the early days of the First Republic and the revolutionary Phrygian cap, which was not only the headware of choice of freed Roman slaves, but is also a term used in medicine to describe an anatomical variant of the gallbladder. Above her head she hoists the Tricolour. There’s nothing pretty about the scene. The people following Liberty can only be described as a mob, brandishing their swords,spikes, and guns with wanton disregard for safety. Even the young are not immune to the frenzy, as demonstrated by the pistol-toting boy at Liberty’s side. In the background, in a smokey haze, stands Paris. Liberty carries in her hand, a gun, and beneath her feet lie the dead of the current regime, one of whom is ingloriously stripped of his trousers. The message is clear - Liberty comes at a price. It is not a gift that rulers give freely to the ruled, but a gift that must be fought for, and protected, no matter what the cost. The painting hung in the palace of Louis Philippe, the "Citizen-King" who replaced Charles X to remind him that his power came from the people, not from divine right. At least it hung there until he tired of being reminded of that fact and took it down. Not surprisingly, his fate was also to be dethroned by a revolution.

Some art historians consider this the first political work of modern painting. If so, it’s fitting that it should have been painted by Delacroix. For, although his true parentage was the subject of considerable gossip, there’s no doubt that his was a political heritage. His father of record was Charles Delacroix, the foreign minister in the first French Republic, until he was replaced by Talleyrand. Eugene was born after Charles had a highly publicized surgery to correct a testicular deformity. Gossip had it that Talleyrand replaced him in more than just political office, for Eugene Delacroix bore more of a resemblance to the master politician than he did to Charles Delacroix.

The artist was himself a political animal, a member of the French National Guard, and agitator for the ideals of liberty and republicanism. He painted himself into his portrayal of Liberty Leading the People. That's him, directly behind Liberty, wearing a top hat and carrying a gun.

Delacroix was in the vanguard of the Romantic movement. He eschewed the clean, sober, idealized work of the previous generation of neoclassicists, for the gaudy, dramatic imagery of the neo-Baroque. Some found his style so offensive that they described his Salon piece, Massacre at Chios, as the “massacre of painting.” But it was the dawning of a new age, both in art and in politics, and his style soon became the accepted art form throughout all of Europe. By the time of his death from tuberculosis in 1863, he had completed 1,000 paintings, 2,000 watercolors, and 9,000 drawings. Prodigious by any standard.

 

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