ART 328 - Eugene Delacroix: A Painter of Passions

This seminar focuses on the spectacular paintings, exotic drawings and innovative watercolors, and literary prints and sketchbooks of the French romantic painter, Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863). Delacroix is perhaps best known for his revolutionary painting, Liberty Leading the People (1830) which has become a popular symbol of revolution in many cultures for nearly two centuries. Our seminar will investigate the many facets of this painter so interested in color and imagination including his trip to England where he developed a new kind of painting based on watercolors, his exotic voyage to Morocco in 1832 which challenges the current theories of Orientalism, and his public clashes with the conservative French Academy which challenged his approach to painting. Although he denied it, Delacroix was widely proclaimed the leader of the Romantic movement in France as well as the father of modernism. As the nineteenth century art critic Charles Baudelaire once said of Delacroix, “He is passionately in love with passion and coldly determined to find the ways to express it.” Good words to live by. It is time to reexamine the works, critics, and life of this enigmatic painter now that over twenty years have passed since exhibitions all over the world were held in 1998 to dedicate the bicentennial of his birth.

I am especially delighted to offer this seminar this semester because Delacroix has been the center of my academic pursuits for my entire career both here and in France. It is open to all students, but I am sure that Francophone students would find it especially interesting as well!

Counts for the French and Francophone Studies major and minor