Uncivil Alliances: Delacroix, the Private Collector, and the Public Author(s): Elisabeth A. Fraser Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1998), pp. 89-103 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360698 . Accessed: 13/03/2011 09:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Oxford Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org Uncivil Alliances: Delacroix, the Private Collector, and the Public Elisabeth A. Fraser Eugene Delacroix was probablythe most controversialartist of the Bourbon Restorationperiod in France. Shiftingcritical alliances coalesced around his work, and none sustainedand embracedhis art; 1. The most important study of images from yet evenly whole-heartedly the Greek War is N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer's, his works shown at the Salon exhibitions were the object of heated and FrenchImages Jom the GreekWar of Independence, extensive discussion. Received ideas about Romanticism historiansto 1821-1830; Art and Politicsunder the Restoration prepare be to this of the of Delacroix's career, (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, receptive part story early yet they 1989). Other major works on the painting obscure another equally important facet of it: his success. Within the first include F. Haskell, 'Chios, the Massacres, and eight years of his career, Delacroix received private and public commissions, Delacroix', in J. Boardman and C. E. and all but one of his were for the Musee du Vaphopoulou-Richardson(eds.), Chios:A major paintings bought Conferenceat the Homereionin Chios, 1984 Luxembourg. Rather than being a detour on the way to acclaim, his early (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1986), pp. 335-58; career defined a direct route to it. L. Johnson, The Paintingsof EugeneDelacroix, A In a in which administrationsstill determinedthe CriticalCatalogue (Clarendon Press: Oxford, period government largely 1981), vol. 1, pp. 83-91; F. Trapp, The success of artists, this combination of official endorsement and public Attainmentof Delacroix(Johns Hopkins Press: controversy needs closer exploration. Internal conflicts in the arts and G. Baltimore, 1971), pp. 29-48; Busch, administration the Salon of 1824, and the of 'IkonographischeAmbivalenz bei Delacroix; Zur concerning royal purchase Enstehungsgeschichtedes "Szenen aus dem Delacroix's Scenesdes massacresde Scio (Scenesfromthe Massacresof Chios),the Massakervon Chios"', in Stil und Ueberlieferung most discussedwork of that exhibition,provide a singularglimpse of the effect in der Kunstdes Abendlandes, Actes des 21. of on a regime committed to an Ancien Regime InternationalenKongresses fur Kunstgeschichte 'public opinion' symbolically in Bonn 1964 (Berlin, 1967), vol. 3, pp. 143- notion of royal prerogativeand authority. After documenting and analyzing 8. this effect, I will suggestthe relevanceof privatecollecting to an interpretation 2. I argue elsewhere that the implications of the of the Massacresde Scio,then reassessthe pressureof unofficialcollecting on the violent grotesque have been overlooked in the of Restoration state the latter until now in a of the as a liberal shape patronage, regarded reading painting plea. manner as to Delacroix's focus on violence effectively simplistic antagonistic innovation. diverted the painting from the strongly It has always seemed strange that Eugene Delacroix's Massacresde Scio overdetermined public opinion of the day, was the Frenchstate at the time of the Salonof 1824-25. the manichean (Fig. 1) purchasedby obfuscating logic structuring The common view of the as a liberal French views of Greeks and Turks during the image advocating call for French War of Independence. Sensual paint mixed with interventionin the Greek War of Independenceagainst the Ottoman Empire violent subject matter made for viewers in 1824 underscoresthe of the Its violation of classical an uncomfortable zone of consciousness of the certainly peculiarity purchase.' its of the Greeks in a of mutable boundaries of violence and pleasure, bodily decorum, depiction state abjectionrather than and of racial stereotypes. See E. Fraser, heroic resistance,again compounds the strangeness.2Certainly the controversy 'InterpretingDelacroix in the 1820s: Readings the at the Salon would seem to make it an in the Art Criticism and Politics of Restoration generated by painting unlikely candidatefor state favour under the BourbonRestoration. France' (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1993), pp. 65-89 and 143-9. Gericault'sRadeau de la Meduse(Raft of the Medusa),a paintingcomparable in 3. There are few substantialpolitical and ambition, scale, and aesthetic and political provocation, was probably too historical studies of the Bourbon Restoration. controversialfor the and his administrators,and was not after its For an see G. de Bertier de king bought overview, Sauvigny, in the Salonof 1819. The Bourbon on the French La Restauration(Flammarion: Paris, 1955). showing monarchy,imposed Stanley Mellon's unsurpassed study of by foreign powers after the defeat of Napoleon, was justifiablysensitive to Restoration historians reveals much about the controversies its rhetoric.3 constitutive concerns of the see affectingpublic opinion, despite legitimist political period: how the of the Massacresde Scio was has never Mellon, The PoliticalUses of History;A Studyof Exactly quizzical purchase Historiansin the FrenchRestoration (Stanford been fully explored, let alone explained. FrancisHaskell has gone the furthest University Press: Stanford, 1958). More in some of the of the itself: he noted the moral historian Alan has how outlining peculiarities painting recently, Spitzer shown in Delacroix's and sensational of traditional Restoration society shaped a generation of ambiguity updated reworking artists, writers, journalists and intellectuals: see battle scenes and images of violence and conflict, and the indecorous, almost Spitzer, The FrenchGeneration of 1820 (Princeton indifferenttreatment of limp and wounded bodies. The painterprovocatively ( OXFORD UNIVERSITYPRESS OXFORD ART JOURNAL 21.1 1998 87-103 ElisabethA. Fraser rr"* :i'iilii; 9'" .?.i OtS*F::t. :.?H'i:iL ?1;1?I,i ??sr:r?s". ?I .1?:91' Fig. 1 EugeneDelacroix: Scnes des massacresde Scio (Scenes of the Massacresof Chlos), 1824, oil, 419 x 354 cm. Musee du Louvre,Paris. (Photo: R6uniondes Musees Nationaux.) 90 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 21.1 1998 Uncivil Alliances reversed conventional heroic symbolism: the Turk on horsebackinevitably refers, of course, to a tradition of equestrian iconography, here however the University Press: Princeton, 1987). See also negating image's political resolution along the lines of French opinion, Sheryl Kroen, 'The Cultural Politics of which vehemently opposed the Ottoman Turks and supported the Greeks. Revolution and Counter-revolution in France, Delacroix's detachedtreatment of the to his 1815-1830' of subject, shocking contemporaries, (Ph.D. dissertation, University seemed to them to reveal rather than California, Berkeley, 1992). professional political ambitions. Haskell that the recent in 1818 of the Musee du 4. Indeed, one possible and unexplored argued opening explanation of the purchase of the painting Luxembourg,dedicated to the exhibitionof works by living artists, created a would be a conscious strategy to subvert the new sense of destinationin the artistic of the Restoration,one of imaginary early controversy Delacroix's work: the purchase to which Delacroix have been the first artist to Delacroix's and display of the painting in the prestigious may fully respond.4 Musee du Luxembourg put the king's stamp of magnificentlyambiguous painting refused easy location in the usual official approval on it, effectively absorbing and the of the administrations,courts, halls, the officialdom renders places: king's palaces, buildings city overriding controversy: churches. Yet, as a sizeable the Massacresde Scio was not the controversy moot. For all the critical debate history painting, during the run of the Salon, no one seems to apparently intended for a private collection. Haskell's interpretation have complained that the painting was bought suits this in which destinationwas not and exhibited in the most compellingly pre-Modernistperiod officially prestigious an extra-artisticconsideration (as in a art but an venue for living artists. capitalist 'open' market), of the formulationof such basic as 5. On see R. The integral part pictorial