Thursday, 30 April 2009
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
Monday, 27 April 2009
Delacroix's bleak vision
By Bertrand Klax
Down the years Delacroix has often been considered a revolutionary, and in several ways. His subject matter, while often itself considered conventional, has always been couched in revolutionary visual language, often deliberately inciting the threat of bans from public display, chaotic representation and has been given to raucous and wildly differing interpretations by both critics an the general public.
His newest piece, however, represents a departure so wild as to force a unanimous reinterpretation not only of his entire body of work, but of his own position within the artistic canon. Confusingly titling his new piece “Liberty Leading the People”, which shares a title verbatim with his much earlier work made famous by its use on the Coldplay album “Viva la Vida”, Delacroix has created a parallel work in subject matter, and an identical twin art work which will plague cataloguers and slide librarians for years to come.
To begin with the medium itself; sharp eyed viewers will notice that "Liberty 2" (the name Delacroix has given to an entire series of works) is rendered through the medium of digital photography, a move quite radical for a 19th century man of the brush. It is fair to say that Constable, Delacroix’s notable contemporary, would not have seen that coming.
To the subject matter itself. Early test shots for "Liberty 2", now lost in the restroactively anachronistic computer banks of the 18th Century French art scene, featured a woman, ostensibly mimicking the pose of the Statue of Liberty, holding an empty green wine bottle and dressed in a long white t-shirt with an inverted rendering of the McDonalds golden arches where her breasts would be. She stood proudly in a field of bemused cows, leading them to liberty, or, one can only surmise (given the fast food imagery), to the slaughter. These shots were apparently abandoned following pressure from McDonald’s -13th CEO, Louis de Groyer, who presided over the corporation during the worst of its Renaissance days, and had become very intolerant of any negative media representations following the storming of the Bastille, during which Marie Antoinette was heard to mutter “Let them eat Big Macs.”The only incarnations left to the modern scholar are a dead Liberty lying in a field while cows appear to sniff, revere and lick her feet in a brilliant mock-Christian homage to the fact that the essence of following a figure of Liberty is itself an enslaving behaviour.
Another variant of the same series features a woman with nothing but a t shirt, underwear, leading the same cows to some kind of destination, mirroring his earlier painting.