Michel Delacroix at 65: Eternal Paris

Michel Delacroix's quietly timeless paintings of the Paris of his childhood are collected here as both tribute to and portrait of that city, as well as an impressive retrospective of this prolific and popular artist's body of work.

The Paris preserved in Delacroix's paintings dates to the years before World War II. There are few automobiles, mostly horses and carriages and people on the street. The central subject of each painting, whether a street, park, monument, or event, is actually a detail of his great work: rendering his home, one of the most vital cities of the world, in two dimensions. The subject and the artist's approach will appeal to all. The exact period depicted is difficult to place, so the paintings become timeless; the style is naturalistic, so there is no impediment between the viewer and the romance of this city. Likewise, Sam Hunter's text serves its subject. He has arranged the works by themes and subjects (Streets and Shops, Parades and Festivals, Paris by Night, Snow Scenes, Rustic Pleasures, Chateaux, Monuments, Paris Vistas) to best reveal this artist's central passions.

Delacroix is one of those rare artists who is both popular and critically acclaimed. He has had more than 40 one-man shows around the world, primarily in France, the United States, and Japan, and he has received many awards and honors, including the purchase of his work by the French Ministry of Culture's contemporary art fund. His popularity is demostrated in the hundreds of paintings he sells each year, some of which are made in lithographs or silkscreen prints, of which thousands are added to important collections annually. He paints skillfully, and his style is highlyaccessible. The true appeal of Delacroix's work lies in the appeal of a great city, lovingly depicted by one of its devoted residents.

Other Details: 130 full-color illustrations 152 pages 10 1/2 x 10 1/2" Published 1998

simple, common folk throughout the world and, indeed, has done so forever. Thanks to its familiarity, each figure and every gesture is noted rapidly by the artist, almost in passing, and yet each becomes part of a genial, satisfying whole under Delacroix's finely discerning brush. Every piece of the pictorial puzzle, complete in itself, joins the others, finally, to form a picture of a community, natural and unforced, an engaging public space where all parties coexist in harmony.

The neighborhood of "Le Paris que j'aime" thus expands into a universal idea, a place where people known and unknown come and go, watching out for one another as evening falls. Together the neighborhood denizens and the passersby traverse the square, and their presence and participation in the intriguing set-piece form a theatrical moment in the kaleidoscopic city containing many such fine, well-preserved old neighborhoods filled with life and people. All of them are free to do as Delacroix's fascinated viewer does: simply watch and enjoy the endless parade of life. "Le Paris que j'aime" is both unique and a quintessential Paris neighborhood that somehow captures the heart and spirit of the city, thanks to Delacroix's ability to elevate the ordinary into the memorable and extraordinary.

Delacroix attracts us initially with his disarming nostalgia, through an appeal that seems obviously and delightfully naïve, and this apparently simplistic quality has, incidentally, over the years caused him to be classified erroneously as a "Naïf." His paintings, he recently explained, exist outside of such facile characterizations, and are designed to "give an impression of serenity." "Dans le Jardin des Tuileries" is an exquisitely ephemeral work that glows with young lovers, springtime-green foliage and a slightly hazy but luminous, pastel palette. That lovely and tranquil impression is just that: an impression. At the same time, the disparate elements of his compositions, the almost overwhelming wealth of details, hues, textures and planes, entering and departing the canvas frame at oddly diverting angles, and overlapping, never quite add up to what at first appears to be such an obvious, engaging whole. Instead, they constantly and urgently reform as their segrable parts, and reclaim their place within a reconfigured complexity. Individual incidents, never entirely stable, sort themselves out in a kaleidoscopic action, creating an ongoing series of impressions, all vividly tugging at collective memory.

Those inherent contradictions, coupled with the reassuring appeal of the works themselves, set them apart, lending them rather surprisingly unpredictable dimensions. Yet, some of their sources, at least, are less inaccessible than one might assume: they spring, Delacroix says, directly from his memories of the Paris of his childhood, the Paris he knew in the straitened, desperate years of the Second World War.

Early Years

Born in 1933 on the Left Bank, in the 14th Arrondisement not far from the quarter of Montparnasse that appears again and again in his studies. As a child he wandered the streets of a city interrupted in an unusual way by the war. He suffered heart problems at an early age, a medical issue long since resolved, and began painting when he was seven, just as the German Occupation began. His most vivid recollections of Paris in those war years survive today in almost tribal fashion, as memories of a fabled city where the virtual absence of automobiles and carbon monoxide allowed Notre-Dame and other precious, ancient edifices to be washed sparkling clean, and to remain that way indefinitely for the first time in living memory. On the surface at least, a newly archaic Paris was installed by the war in Delacroix's youth, an isolated and cordoned-off city, existing outside of time and moving at a strangely slow, untroubled pace rather like that of the Paris of his grandparents.

Instead of the horrors of war, he experienced what he came to see as "magical theater," and "the one great adventure of my life." Recalling this alienating yet, for him, exciting formative experience of living in a kind of temporal and historical limbo, he has said: "We suddenly jumped 50 years into the past. No more cars on the streets, very few lights. Paris suddenly became very quiet, very dark, and, though people were afraid, there existed a brotherhood and spirit that were very delightful."

He drank in the scenes and atmosphere of a city that appeared to have regressed a number of decades beset by the deprivations of the war years. Thus, remarkably, just as the center of the art world was shifting from Paris to New York and modernism was about to reach its apex across the seas, the young French artist experienced a Paris in which horses, gaslights, bicycles, carts and pedestrians were daily sights on cobblestone streets. Interestingly, however, the vision that he took away from his boyhood Paris is not of antiquarian novelties or the finicky stuff of vague nostalgic recall.

A New Vision of Paris

Trained as an artist upon the recommendation of a teacher who encouraged his family to choose a dependable career for him, once he had made clear where his interests lay, Delacroix began teaching art after the war to the NATO forces stationed in West Germany. He did his painting then only for pleasure, experimenting with varied styles and devoting himself to his teaching career and a new family. It took years of exploring different styles and techniques, but when he broke through to his characteristic style at age 35, "it was as if there was a door. I opened it and there was a rush—something rushed out," he says, reminiscing in his poetic and allusive way of speaking, and very much echoing his oblique approach in painting.

"I can still hear the noise of horses on the cobblestones," says Delacroix, who gave up teaching only a little over a decade ago but even now enjoys working with young artists. "It's not especially Paris, but at the same time it's totally Paris."

He recaptured and distilled the insistent clopping of hooves on the cobblestones, so near in his memory but given additional veracity through his awareness of books and photographs, his own and those of others. Together these sources and his own original impulses soon developed into a coherent vision and idiom, translated into pigments, which were most often thinly washed onto canvas. Delacroix rarely works "en plein air," in part because he intends to show vistas and actions significantly modified by mood and memory from the contemporary workaday and recreational life at hand. He also contends, quite rightly, that in contemporary Paris, with its recklessly speeding cars and plumes of choking exhaust, the very idea of a tolerable public space is at risk. The busy streets and sidewalks of Paris are hardly amenable to the relaxed, contemplative study art requires. Delacroix observes sadly: "It is difficult to make a sketch in Paris. People are coming and going—it's impossible to go out now with an easel."

World Travels

And, in fact, it is hardly necessary, since his unique vision of Paris was long ago fully assimilated. Delacroix has lived outside Paris in several German cities, in Greenwich, Connecticut, and, now, mainly in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is also the chief talent in Axelle Fine Arts, the Manhattan art-publishing company and gallery headed by his energetic son, Bertrand, a gallery that also features work by his artist daughter, Fabienne.

In the past few years, his paintings and prints have entered collections in the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, including that of the Ministry of Culture in Paris. Since 1977, his work has been shown literally in hundreds of solo exhibitions—more than 275 in America alone—and discussed in two major monographs.

All this attention has been the source of great gratitude, and some bafflement, on the part of the soft-spoken, self-effacing artist, who explained his career modestly during several extended visits to the Paris studio that he shares with Fabienne. But what remains most important to him is his family—his mature, married children and his grandchildren, some of whom live on a small estate outside Paris. But always there is his consuming interest in painting, his other life.

Delacroix has been quite candid and open about what he considers to be his great good fortune in achieving a significant worldly success as a vastly popular artist. Commenting recently on his "fame," he said, with deep satisfaction, that he has "found a public who loves my work. I have a great publisher. I have my lovely property. My wife. My small child. I thank God every day for it all."

And, every day, he expands his visual repertory, around "Paris but not photographic," as he puts it in his allusive and abbreviated discourse. Recently he became a transatlantic celebrity when he was awarded a commission for the major print portfolio offered at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. He also had the good luck, as he modestly describes the occasion, to be selected by Harvard University for an ambitious, four-painting commission commemorating the university's 350th anniversary. Nonetheless, his truest inspiration remains Paris, and he travels long distances only on rare occasions, even though his primary residence recently shifted to Lausanne, Switzerland, after he found the crowding, noise and commercialism of contemporary Paris intolerable even for such a devotee of the surviving picturesque old quarters and the historic past in the city he prizes and knows by heart.

In a recent set of Axelle prints, now in Volume III, he drew his inspiration once again from an imaginary Paris of a more serene, less agitated era, working from the rich mother lode he first developed in his painting "Le Paris que j'aime," and creating a fresh inventory of beguiling images that range from the city in the evening, with streetlights flickering on, to indistinct poetic studies of his "banlieu" at dawn reminiscent of Corot's late, silvery landscape painting. He also elicited a congenial holiday atmosphere in "Noel! Noel!" (page 80), a painting remarkable for its leaden gray-blue skies, heavy with a snow that is just beginning to sift downward. Some of his new works suggest snapshots at first glance, among them "L'aeroplane" (page 26), while others, such as the brooding "La Sainte-Chapelle eclairee" (page 63) proclaim subtly Delacroix's interest in a palette conforming to an inner vision rather than to any objective, observable reality.

Whatever the subject, whether scenes of daily life, the shops, streets or the skies of Paris, or "les monuments historiques" in and around the French capital, even a cursory study of Delacroix's oeuvre shows his affinity for his roots. The figures seated in the sidewalk cafe of "Voulez-vous des fleurs?" (page 13) are diminutive mannequins, with no pretension to the particularities of portraiture, just as the small brown-and-white dog gazing at the flower vendor on the cobbled street is more a rapid notation of dog than a full-bodied domestic pet. In much the same way, every element of the paintings, while couched in an idiosyncratic shorthand, not only enchants the eye but retains the authenticity of an observed moment.

Deceptively simple, pleasing on the most superficial levels, works like "Voulez-vous des fleurs?" are also satisfying for other reasons. As with many "postmodernist" works today, they appropriate anything that advances their effectiveness, hinting at the influence of the masters who came before them. "Voulez-vous des fleurs?" with its chatty and unassuming mood, seeks a fresh visual vernacular that invites the viewer to enter its apparently deep space. At its cafe tables, a warm glow envelops all: the waiters hovering nearby, the flower seller, the customers, the aproned proprietor in the doorway.

Delacroix invites viewers to participate in his vision, and to complete it with their own personal associations. His faces are made deliberately bland, even blank, as they gaze out at observers from the toy-like bistro tables, as they might in some old family photo albums that once revealed the precisely articulated features of parents and grandparents, frozen for the slow speeds of the bulky cameras of their day. That absence of detail creates a tabula rasa compelling the viewer to fill out imaginatively the merely adumbrated vision at hand. This special conjunction of the viewer's perception and the artist's deliberately incomplete detail makes Delacroix's paintings and prints so engaging and memorable.

On the Streets of Paris

At first "Près du Pont-Neuf" seems all romance and moonshine, as if sprang from a still in a movie by Jean Renoir or Rene Clair. But upon reflection, such specificity fades and a more general and elusive, yet more fascinating, dimension begins to emerge. Like a picture-postcard from fin de siècle Paris that might turn out to be a personal epistle, connecting to one's own existence, "Pres du Pont-Neuf" is at once a moment in moonlight, when two people attired in the clothing of another era embraced and nothing earthshaking occurred, and much more. Delacroix taps into an enduring, ever-endearing mood. He gives his viewer a cliche so familiar that it engages our attention only on a fleeting basis, then allows us to go beyond his lovers and their faithful dog to another level, that of the air of romance itself. In some manner reminiscent of Whistler's fragile "Nocturnes" and "Symphonies," paintings that also elicited moody, inexpressible emotional responses, Delacroix's gray-blue palette at first glance seems naturalistic, but with further exposure it becomes instead deeply evocative and poetic.

It is not Delacroix's intention to create a new sense of fact in his observed landscapes, nor are they vistas peopled with figures who can be identified; and his palette has not been inspired by the colors of nature. The artist recalls the emotion he felt in such a setting, at such a moment, and recreates it from memory, perhaps jogging his recollections with a vintage photograph or an appropriate contemporary image, which he collects in random fashion and keeps at hand. What counts for the artist is the feeling, both his and the one evoked by the work. As the artist fleshes out his vision, he draws upon harmonious tonal combinations to enhance the ambiance he desires.

The sweep of Delacroix's affectionate vision can be all-encompassing, as in "Paris la nuit," a painting of Paris that, as its title so clearly states, is more precisely about the way Paris feels under the stars. Panoramic and breathtaking, it reveals the glittering city spread beneath a cloud-scudded sky in which a full moon floats, perhaps just before dawn as a housewife opens her balcony door to greet the day and a man walks his dog. The light is pale, fresh, luminous, at once burdened with the previous night's melancholic dreams and radiant with the wonder and potential of the coming day.

The most fragile lavender drifts over the horizon, edging the suburbs and slope of Montmartre, pierced by the beams flashing from the needlelike Eiffel Tower. Indeed, the light in this painting is more its subject than the city. Yet, paradoxically, without Paris it is clear that to Delacroix, a true son of the city he grew to love in a most unusual moment in its history, there could be no such vibrant, trembling efflorescence that he depicts so delicately in "Paris la nuit." This then is a Paris compounded over a collective lifetime from diverse sources and reconstituted endlessly to illustrate Delacroix's mood, and his formal requirements.

Its apartments and hotels, its quai-side streets and trees, like its lacy, ornamental Notre-Dame, conform to his imagination—and then, in their simplicity and innocence, invite the viewer to become part of a lovely fantasy. One soars above Paris in the night study, glimpsing a mother and infant in one window, the geraniums of a solitary woman in another. Like the children in "Peter Pan," caught up in a fairy tale or dream, one slips free of gravity, able to play with one's own ideas of a city at night, magically twinkling and inviting far below.

That sense of flight, and of an incandescent "lightness of being," also inhabits "Le chardonneret," an oil painting that shows Paris under a blanket of snow. A man with a briefcase walks down a side street, his dog at his side and an umbrella held aloft. Children make snow angels, toss snowballs, roll larger balls for a snowman or, in the case of one bundled-up child, stand obediently beside a mother or nanny. Countless tiny dots of white fill the leaden-gray skies, sifting down past a row of townhouses and the Gothic church just barely visible down a side street. The white flakes cling to proper little city trees, turning their branches into tactile webs of crisp, bleached, starched lace.

All of those details, rich and poetic, allow the viewer's eye to wander at leisure through the enchanted vista, taking in signs that range from those for wine, tobacco, a dentist—and, in a wry touch, candies, in the next building. The mood is powerful here, nearly as evocative as the late landscapes of Corot a century and a half earlier, and visceral in a manner at least reminiscent of Van Gogh's interiors, though without their more disturbing overtones. Delacroix very successfully captures the appearance of a snowy day in the city, and at the same time achieves the greater success of imparting the texture and sensuousness of that specific weather and even time of day.

A Paris Window on a Snowy Day

But then Delacroix holds back coyly, reluctant to impart in full measure the bite of the cold, the snap of the air, the wet heaviness of that snowfall. He paints its every detail, but at the last moment he keeps his viewers at a sobering remove from his vivid world. In "Le chardonneret" he installs the viewer indoors and keeps the outdoors at bay, that is to say, almost everything we respond to in the outdoors. Just beyond our touch are the children playing; the father shuffling home through the thickening snow; the smoking chimneys; the church towers; and, finally, his best, most wrenching detail of the frigid little bird huddled on the outdoor windowsill of the charming casement window that shuts us in, and locks the fragile creature out.

This historically sanctified type of composition was popular in German Romantic painting of the nineteenth century, rendering an interior with an open, or closed, glazed casement window, and revealing an external vista. It is a cunning device that brings home one of the most crucial elements in Delacroix's magical works: the fact that his memorable realism is both strikingly vivid and wonderfully artificial. Just as we know that the children in the pre-war film, "Zero de Conduite," could never in fact prance across those vertiginous rooftops, we also realize, at quite another artistic level, that Henri Rousseau's seductive nude, in his magnificent painting "The Dream," is not actually lounging on a genteel, proper sofa in the mist of some improbable, exotic jungle. Delacroix comments on his winter scene, perceived through a window: "The viewers realize that they are not really in that Paris room, with the power to step a few inches forward, fling open the window and warm the bird."

And yet, we do feel we are there, in a sense, bound by the entrancing plausibility of a reinvented artistic reality. Delacroix does not develop the room's appearance beyond a single detail, but that detail is so striking, so immediate that it erases the reserve we may have held onto, to remind us that we are looking at an illusion, a "trompe l'oeil Paris" in the snow, at "Le chardonneret." The lacy curtains swaying at either side of the casements, their sheer stuff sparked with tiny starry shapes that echo and enlarge on the theme of snowflakes, at the last moment these details convince the viewer to willingly suspend disbelief and enter the enchanted world of Delacroix's beloved Paris.

Painting Notre-Dame, the Revered Cathedral of Paris

In the rendering of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the contrasts in technique are marked, and even startling at first glance. Yet they achieve unity, as the church is rendered in a graphic, linear manner, for the most part, and the clouds in the sky are set down as pure, free brushstrokes that are equally effective on both counts, as expressive paint and depicted clouds.

Delacroix's achievement, while it resonates on occasion with the work and achievement of the historical and modernist masters that preceded him, is not one that belongs totally in the realm of the visual arts. He taps into rich, unpredictable associations, disarming us with the charm and simplicity of his images, and makes an arresting, subliminal connection to the Zeitgeist. He has an unusual style in its simplicity, but it is a unique style, one that owes something to the skills of the dollmaker, the miniature-maker, the limner and other self-taught hobbyists through the centuries. Deliberately direct, unabashedly delighting in his ability to revive and recreate the wonderful memories of his childhood in an artificially primitive Paris, Delacroix is nonetheless a figure inescapably attached to postmodernism, owing to his passionate interest in recovering, or "appropriating" the past.

Perhaps subliminally, our millennial unease is also expressed in the popular interest in Delacroix's work, suggesting a public taste for art that feels familiar, that is accessible on levels ranging from the visual to the referential to the emotional but that, paradoxically, leads observers to new insights through its reworking, in the most refined manner, of material that can be viewed as deceptively and delightfully rear guard, both in pictorial style and concept.

Retrieving the "Magical Past"

Since the mid-seventies, when Delacroix's transforming epiphany occurred and he experienced the revelatory "opening of the door" into a magical past, he has been working in the "faux-naïf" style he has now assuredly made his own. In doing so, the artist has generously opened innumerable doors for his viewers on a locale and a time warp that never existed, yet seem always to carry the air of authenticity in the simple lives it depicts.

Delacroix commands a notable range of expression and a number of quite different approaches to his surprisingly varied subject matter. In each he tries to remain essentially unprejudiced and open to fresh impressions, whether stimulated by an actual scene, memory or, more rarely, vintage photographs of old Paris and the history of art. All of his subjects, and their treatment, suggest an unspoiled world made visible to eyes still innocent and miraculously clear. He manages quite instinctively, without any elaborate program or aesthetic principles, to combine a regard for medium with his romance of visual reality, in order that the wholeness of his world be sustained and upheld. To these ends, his subjects and pictorial means, while they may on occasion be perceived as formulaic, are truly surprisingly varied.

Delacroix's most ingratiating works are quite modest and purely instinctive, presenting a small slice of life in a carefully delimited expanse of nature, as in the charming private moment captured by "La rêverie d'un promeneur solitaire." Here is an image and symbolic moment of private meditation worthy of Jean Jacques Rousseau (the other, great Romantic Rousseau of French tradition whom Delacroix keeps in his heart).

It should be noted that the artist shows considerable daring in his choices of subjects and compositions, despite the deceptive mask of modesty and self-effacement with which he greets interviewers, art critics and miscellaneous journalists seeking to pry loose his pictorial secrets. "Le peintre" accomplishes the considerable feat of telescoping distance and proximity on a flattened picture plane which encompasses a wide range of activity. An artist stands at his easel, on a canal bank in the foreground, while working boatmen and recreational fishermen test the canal waters against a background of shops, with a few bemused folk idly gazing at the scene from their windows or doorways. Delacroix's gentle, reaffirming vision of daily Paris life, redoubled in the shimmering water reflections, takes on vivid, concrete form across a kind of depthless stage, vibrant with life, but also suggesting a profound sense of peace with oneself and the world. It is both a compositional feat and a refined evocation of mood.

The Simple Virtues

Although he enjoys the spectacle of his paintings, and their worldly success, Delacroix is an admittedly unworldly, even proudly provincial man who rarely pauses to examine his work critically, certainly not in the context of his own time. However tranquil his paintings and compelling the concrete expressions of his imagination, the artist describes himself as basically uncritical of his work. Neither is he interested in appraising other contemporary art developments, apart perhaps from those of his daughter Fabienne. He admits that his self-imposed isolation makes him feel rather lonely at times, despite his close ties with an active and accomplished family. He stands apart from the contemporary art scene, and feels no connection to any current school or movement, or to any particular group of artists in Paris. Yet he himself is admittedly not nearly as calm and collected as the mood his works might suggest; although he has command of "technique and experience, I'm not a master," he says.

He also likes to believe that he is not particularly well organized in representing himself and his creations to the world. On the other hand, he insists that, as a painter, he is fastidious to a fault, and works with an exhausting, compulsive intensity on each canvas. He tends to work continuously without a break for long periods of time, coordinating and painting as he envisions "all the windows, curtains to the floor, all the signs and inscriptions." With a disarming simplicity and evident sincerity, he says: "It takes time, but I am very patient with my paintings; but only with my paintings."

His patience comes from long, affectionate association with his subject matter. Before he starts to paint, he explains: "I just close my eyes for one second and I see all the past looking back." The key, he avers, is "always to be really sincere and make what you feel in your heart. What is important is what is inside."