Delacroix (1798-1863) CaixaForum, Barcelona

l’Obra Social “la Caixa” in collaboration with Louvre Museum is presenting at CaixaForum Barcelona the exhibition “Delacroix (1798-1863)”, the most important exhibition to be organized in Spain around one of the most prominent figures of Romanticism , the great French painter Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), a journey through the different stages of his production, from the early works to his final years. The exhibition features more than 130 works by the artist covers a broad vision of his artistic life, with special attention to his historic and oriental works, gathered for the first time since 1963, when the French museum organized a retrospective on the centenary of his death.
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (April 1798 to August 1863) is considered the leader of the French Romantic school. Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and the painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement. Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and the painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity that come from a travel to North Africa, in search of the exotic; Delacroix’s use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement.
The exhibition Delacroix (1798-1863) has loans from important public and private collections in Europe and America as the London National Gallery, the New York Metropolitan Museum or the Art Institute of Chicago, and also includes Greece Dying on the Ruins of Missolonghi (Museum of Fine Arts, Bordeaux) as well as a Sketch for The Death of Sardanapalus and Women of Algiers in their Apartment (exceptionally loaned by the Louvre Museum), which Delacroix painted as a result of his journey around North Africa in 1832, that also took him to several cities in Spain.
Eugène Delacroix was also a fine lithographer that illustrated various works from William Shakespeare, Scottish writer Walter Scott and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The large oil paintings presented in the exhibition are accompanied with sketches, drawings, watercolors and etchings.
The exhibition Delacroix (1798-1863) that already visited CaixaForum Madrid will be at CaixaForum Barcelona from February 15 to May 20 2012.