Drinking the Color

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the end of 1831, the French artist Eugene Delacroix did something that would change the course of his own art, and to no small degree that of French painting itself. He left Paris and went to Morocco -- an arduous journey in those days, on winter roads to Marseilles and then by naval frigate to Tangier. It was made easier by his connections. The 34-year-old painter was traveling with his friend, a French diplomat named Charles de Mornay, sent to conclude a treaty with Moulay Abd-er-Rahman, the Sultan of Morocco. (France had conquered neighboring Algeria the year before and did not want any Moroccan interventions in its new colony.) The mission, including Delacroix, arrived in Morocco in January 1832 and stayed six months.

Morocco would change Delacroix profoundly. For the next 30 years, the last half of his life, images from "the land of lions and leather," as he called it in a letter from Meknes, would recur in his work, meeting and dictating its needs; the innumerable drawings and watercolors he made there, along with the dense and (to a modern eye) almost cinematic impressions he jotted down in his journal, were a permanent resource he could draw from. Delacroix had already made a brilliant name for himself with "Oriental" subjects, including his Byronic denunciation of Turkish barbarity in Greece, The Massacres at Chios (1824), and that enormous Romantic panorama of sex, death and animal vitality, The Death of Sardanapalus (1827).

But these were fictions. He had never been to Greece, let alone ancient Asia. Morocco was real, and it bowled Delacroix over. There, he wrote to a friend in Paris, he was confronted "at every step" with "ready-made paintings which would make the fame and fortune of 20 generations of painters." And in a sense he was right. From Delacroix on, Oriental exoticism would bulk ever larger in the offerings of the Paris salon: slave markets, dim fretted courtyards, hawk-nosed Arabs and their Barbary mounts, recumbent houris.

More important, Delacroix's journey south to the Near East would become a model for avant-garde painters looking for purer and more intense experiences of light, locale and color than Northern Europe could offer. Van Gogh went south to Arles; Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and above all Henri Matisse would reach North Africa. "I have found landscapes in Morocco," Matisse claimed, "exactly as they are described in Delacroix's paintings." Morocco satisfied something in the early modernist quest for explicit, fresh, formal experience. And it was Delacroix who pointed the artists there.

The results of his own journey are set forth in a compelling show of some 100 paintings and sketches on view through Jan. 15 at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, "Delacroix: The Voyage to Morocco," curated by Brahim Alaoui.

What did he find there? Basically confirmation, in the real world, of the shape of his own temperament. The leader of the Romantic movement in French painting, Delacroix was both fervid and exceptionally contained. He adored energy -- the fury of stallions rearing and biting one another in a stable, ignoring the efforts of their Arab grooms; the flash in a fighter's eye; the tensed muscles of a lion. He drank color: sonorous reds and browns, flashes of green, veils of cold blue -- a palette he had learned from Rubens. But at the same time he knew, as his idols Rubens and Titian had known, that all the passion in the world is aesthetically useless unless it has the container of form: it was his classical heritage that gave measure, shape and intensity to experience.

Morocco meant both these things. "This people is wholly antique," he wrote in Tangier; its Arab men and Jewish women -- Arab women were not paintable, since they would not remove their veils for a Western stranger -- possessed, in his eyes, "the majesty which is lacking among ourselves in the gravest circumstances." Years later he confided in a letter to a friend that "it was among these people that I really discovered for myself the beauty of antiquity." And not only of antiquity, either. De Mornay was amused to see that when Delacroix was finally admitted to a harem, he became so overexcited that he had to be calmed down with sorbets.

For Delacroix, this antiquity involved color, as for Ingres -- his opposite -- it did not. David and Ingres had given France a colorless antiquity, an abstracted classicism of white marble. What Delacroix got from the arts of Morocco -- woven and dyed fabrics, leather, tiles and pots -- was a sense of extraordinarily vibrant and free color, "barbaric" in French eyes but wholly natural (or so he now realized) to him.

You see it announcing itself in his watercolor drawing of a Jewish bride in Tangier, whose costume, in all its fantastic profusion of embroidery, overlays and gold jewelry, is suggested in a few washes of pink, vermilion, blue and yellow. He developed it to full pitch in the oil paintings he did later in his Paris studio. It would lead to the packed density of pattern-on-pattern in Women of Algiers (1834) and receive its homages from both Matisse and Picasso.

| For them, it pointed to abstraction. But in Delacroix's case it was supported by an intimate sense of detail. Nowhere does Delacroix's curiosity about what he saw reveal itself more fully than in the Moroccan drawings. He was determined to get everything right, to bring back exact memory in an age before photography: the weave of a coarse djellaba conveyed in thin licks of wash; the violent white light on a wall; a chaotic still life of saddles, blankets and flintlocks piled in the corner of a guardhouse behind a pair of sleeping soldiers, whose robes give them the monumental air of tomb sculptures. The drawings, individually but even more so as a series, express an immense excitement about the world's variety. They underwrote the authenticity of his later paintings, reinforcing their fictions.

After Morocco, Delacroix lost whatever interest he might once have felt in the mandatory artist's trip to Italy. "Rome is no longer in Rome," he would say. "The Romans and Greeks are here at my door, and I know them face-on; the marbles are truth itself, but you have to know how to read them, and we poor moderns have only seen hieroglyphs in them." Morocco saved him from the abstraction that had weakened French responses to the classic. A painting like his Military Exercises of the Moroccans (1832) shows Delacroix using real life -- the ceremonial charge and fusillade of Arab warriors, rearing on their explosively energetic mounts like showoff bikers doing wheelies -- to recall the truth of energy and immediacy that people must have seen in marble battles 2,000 years before.