Journal (review)

It is a rare scholarly event indeed that inspires words such as “revolutionary” and “historic,” but Michèle Hannoosh’s long-awaited edition of Eugène Delacroix’s Journal amply merit them both and many more. Although in tracing the publication history of Delacroix’s intimate writings in her Introduction Hannoosh is gracious to both past and future editors of Delacroix’s Journal, her own edition is clearly a game changer, and this, very likely, for generations. Anything previously published on the Journal and, indeed, on Delacroix’s pictorial oeuvre, must be revisited and almost certainly revised in light of the new information and masterful contextualization that Hannoosh provides. Reference libraries will be deficient without it, as will the personal libraries of any serious student of nineteenth-century French art or of its cultural life in general. The last edition of this work was brought out by the Librairie Plon in 1996. A re-publication of the André Joubin edition that Plon originally published in 1931–32, it is a substantial book of 942 pages. However, with its 2,519 pages the Corti edition more than doubles this. The “Supplément,” which runs 100 pages in the Plon addition, reaches more than 450 pages in the Corti. These statistics provide a graphic – though superficial—image of the ambitious project Hannoosh courageously embraced and successfully brought to fruition.

Of the new material added to the repertory of Delacroix’s writings much comes from private collections, notably that of Achille Piron, the artist’s residuary legatee, and that of the writer, art critic and art historian, Claude Roger-Marx. In the introductions to these materials, Hannoosh describes how she tracked down the textual fragments which she used to reconstitute some of Delacroix’s notes and notebooks. Notable among these is the “Cahier autobiographique,” which covers about seven years beginning in 1853 and which is from the Piron collection, and Delacroix’s “Cahier de lectures” for 1843–44 taken from the collection of Roger-Marx. These introductions sometimes read like detective stories whose action takes place in both public and private collections over two continents. Earlier editions of Delacroix’s Journal revealed an artist with a highly developed intellect who through his intimate writing engaged in constant dialogue with the superior minds in the Western tradition from both the past and present. We might expect Delacroix to show sustained interest in the vision and work of other plastic artists and Michelangelo, Raphaël, Correggio, Titian, Veronese, Rubens, Rembrandt, J.-L. David, Géricault and Ingres all figure prominently in his Journal. However, he was likewise captivated by the æsthetic dimension of musical compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Rossini and Berlioz. The authors in the French literary tradition who are most often cited range from Montaigne, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Pascal and Voltaire from earlier centuries, to his contemporaries, including Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, Gautier, Hugo, Baudelaire, Sand and Alexandre Dumas père. Among the foreign authors whose works captured his imagination we find Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and Byron. The Corti edition publishes for the first time many passages which Delacroix copied from their works, as well his reflections on them, one example being notes the artist took after reading Stendhal’s L’Histoire de la peinture en Italie which were found in the Roger-Marx collection. As an example, it is in part because of these many additions that the conclusions I reached in my 1998 article, “Pratiques de la citation chez Delacroix: les auteurs contemporains” —including which authors and categories of texts the artist quoted and how often, the contents of the quotations, their forms and modes of insertion into the Journal, and their discursive and autobiographical functions—all have to be re-examined. Other supplementary material is not from Delacroix’s pen. For example, the new edition publishes for the first time 1852 journal notes by his student and collaborator, Pierre Andrieu. In them Andrieu traces the progression of a decorative series Delacroix prepared for the H...