PREPARE TO GRAPPLE WITH the cosmic grandiosity and optical hot messes of that 19th-century French freak of painterly nature Eugène Delacroix, whose churning, turgid, crimson-tinged floridity has enkindled the respiratory systems of artists since he debuted at the Paris Salon of 1822—and given many others agita.
Now, at the Met, comes the first large-scale North American retrospective of his epoch-altering work. How did it alter his epoch? Delacroix’s style is so uncontained, convulsive, and atmospheric it’s hard to pigeonhole as simply Romanticism.
Fuzziness, smears, fibrillating paint, irradiated color that destabilizes space and emulsifies objects—Delacroix’s technique fuses the Italian, Flemish, and Spanish painterly dash of Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez. His art also points directly at Cézanne, Manet, Gauguin, Renoir, and van Gogh (all of whom name-checked him in painting titles) and…