Dusty Art

My prior Art posts can be found HERE.

How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it..

Let’s study art history together.

Liberty Leading the People

Artist	Eugène Delacroix
Year	1830
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	260 cm × 325 cm (102.4 in × 128.0 in)
Location	Louvre, Paris

“Alright lads, let’s follow that bayonette carrying lady whose dress is falling off.”

If you judge a work of art by how it influences other works of art, then Delacroix’s work is one of the most important in history. It is regarded as an important influence for Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, an influence on the design and construction of the Statue of Liberty, and most importantly, it was used as part of the cover art for the English rock band Coldplay’s album Viva la Vida.

It is widely regarded as one of, if not the most famous paintings from the French Romantic period.

Personally, I have always found the symbol of “the Goddess Liberty” to be an oddity. By nearly any measure, 19th century France – just like the 19th century U.S. that received the Statue of Liberty – was a Christian nation. Despite nearly two thousand years of struggling against paganism, the Christian people of that time period seem to have adopted a pagan goddess as a symbol. I’m sure there is scholarly work on this subject, but as France had previously used the Virgin Mary, or Christian iconography and personages to play this role, the adoption of the symbol from Delacroix seems to be a key moment in France stepping away from its role as eldest daughter of the Catholic Church.

Of course, as the U.S. was Protestant, the issue was less about removing old symbols / iconography of liberty than creating new ones. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering how odd it is, in hindsight, that the deeply religious Americans picked as their symbol a pagan goddess… even if she was a seemingly positive one.

As far as I can tell, these were not major controversies at the time. Perhaps the choice seemed benign in an era that voraciously studied and consumed Greek philosophy and built governments on a foundation laid by Roman law. Sometimes seemingly small decisions look like larger decisions with a century of hindsight.

Thoughts aside, I like the painting. It’s iconic. It embodies the idea of France that I grew up with. If I were one of the people at the barricade, I’d probably be the guy in the top hat. Fashion even on the front lines is important. The kid packing two pistols looks great, though.

(more from wiki)

Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple [la libɛʁte ɡidɑ̃ lə pœpl]) is a painting of the Romantic era by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830 that toppled King Charles X (r. 1824-1830). A bare-breasted “woman of the people” with a Phrygian cap personifying the concept and Goddess of Liberty, accompanied by a young boy brandishing a pistol in each hand, leads a group of various people forward over a barricade and the bodies of the fallen while holding aloft the flag of the French Revolution — the tricolour, which again became France’s national flag after these events — in one hand, and brandishing a bayonetted musket with the other. The figure of Liberty is also viewed as a symbol of France and the French Republic known as Marianne. The painting is sometimes wrongly thought to depict the French Revolution of 1789.

Liberty Leading the People is exhibited in the Louvre in Paris.

History

By the time Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People, he was already the acknowledged leader of the Romantic school in French painting. Delacroix, who was born as the Age of Enlightenment was giving way to the ideas and style of romanticism, rejected the emphasis on precise drawing that characterised the academic art of his time, and instead gave a new prominence to freely brushed colour.

Delacroix painted his work in the autumn of 1830. In a letter to his brother dated 21 October, he wrote: “My bad mood is vanishing thanks to hard work. I’ve embarked on a modern subject—a barricade. And if I haven’t fought for my country at least I’ll paint for her.” The painting was first exhibited at the official Paris Salon of 1831.

Symbolism

Delacroix depicted Liberty as both an allegorical goddess-figure and a robust woman of the people. The mound of corpses and wreckage acts as a kind of pedestal from which Liberty strides, barefoot and bare-breasted, out of the canvas and into the space of the viewer. The Phrygian cap she wears had come to symbolize liberty during the first French Revolution of 1789. The painting has been seen as a marker to the end of the Age of Enlightenment, as many scholars see the end of the French Revolution as the start of the Romantic era.

The fighters are from a mixture of social classes, ranging from the bourgeoisie represented by the young man in a top hat, a student from the prestigious École Polytechnique wearing the traditional bicorne, to the revolutionary urban worker, as exemplified by the boy holding pistols. What they have in common is the fierceness and determination in their eyes. Aside from the flag held by Liberty, a second, minute tricolore can be discerned in the distance flying from the towers of Notre-Dame.

The identity of the man in the top hat has been widely debated. The suggestion that it was a self-portrait by Delacroix has been discounted by modern art historians. In the late 19th century, it was suggested the model was the theatre director Étienne Arago; others have suggested the future curator of the Louvre, Frédéric Villot; but there is no firm consensus on this point.

Several of the figures are probably borrowed from a print by popular artist Nicolas Charlet, a prolific illustrator who Delacroix believed captured, more than anyone else, the peculiar energy of the Parisians.

Legacy

Although Delacroix was not the first artist to depict Liberty in a Phrygian cap, his painting may be the best known early version of the figure commonly known as Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic and of France in general.

The painting may have influenced Victor Hugo‘s 1862 novel Les Misérables. In particular, the character of Gavroche is widely believed to have been inspired by the figure of the pistols-wielding boy running over the barricade. The novel describes the events of the June Rebellion two years after the revolution celebrated in the painting, the same rebellion that led to its being removed from public view.

The painting inspired Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi‘s Liberty Enlightening the World, known as the Statue of Liberty in New York City, which was given to the United States as a gift from the French a half-century after Liberty Leading the People was painted The statue, which holds a torch in its hand, takes a more stable, immovable stance than that of the woman in the painting. An engraved version of part of the painting, along with a depiction of Delacroix, was featured on the 100 franc note from 1978 to 1995.

The painting has had an influence on classical music. George Antheil titled his Symphony No. 6 After Delacroix, and stated that the work was inspired by Liberty Leading the People. The imagery was adapted by Robert Ballagh to commemorate Ireland’s independence struggle on an Irish postage stamp in 1979, the centenary of the birth of Pádraig Pearse, and the painting was used for the band Coldplay‘s 2008 album cover Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, with the words Viva La Vida written in white. Rigoberta Bandini references the painting in the chorus of her 2021 song Ay mamá. The cover of the 2010 book Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic by Fintan O’Toole references the painting, but with Kathleen Ni Houlihan holding the Irish tricolour in Dublin while the leaders of the three main political parties at the time (Brian Cowen, Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore) lie on the ground.

During the 20 October 2011 episode of the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time, host Melvyn Bragg led a panel discussion of the painting.

Liberty Leading the People made an appearance in the 11th episode (“EDGELORD – Revolution of the 14-Year-Olds”) of the Netflix animation series Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2045.

The painting was featured in Vincenzo, a 2021 South Korean TV series starring Song Joong-ki in episode 7.

A photograph of Aed Abu Amro taken during the 2018–2019 Gaza border protests by Mustafa Hassona on 22 October 2018, was considered by some a personification of the Liberty Leading the People.

The artwork makes a prominent appearance in the 2023 film John Wick: Chapter 4 where the main antagonist is seen standing before the painting inside the Louvre, which was notably closed to the public for the filming of the scenes.

Actors recreated the painting during the Opening Ceremonies of the 2024 Olympics at the Conciergerie. During the recreation, they were accompanied by the French version of “Do You Hear The People Sing?” from Les Misérables.