Displaying items by tag: french painting

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Delacroix’s "Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi," featuring the monumental painting, on view for the first time in Los Angeles. Painted in 1826 by Eugène Delacroix, the leading French Romantic painter of the day, "Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi" is one of the most celebrated French paintings of the 19th century. The work is held in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, France, and has seldom traveled.

“This exhibition is an extremely rare opportunity to showcase a masterwork by one of the 19th century’s most important painters,” said Leah Lehmbeck, curator of European Painting and Sculpture at LACMA. “The picture itself is profoundly rich with political, cultural, and artistic detail, and therefore speaks to a range of issues through its engaging dramatic context.”

It has been several years since I have seen a more beautiful exhibition than “Bouquets: French Still Life From Chardin to Matisse” at the Dallas Museum of Art. Although not as packed with famous masterpieces as the Kimbell Art Museum’s current, exemplary “Faces of Impressionism,” “Bouquets” operates at the same consistently high level of quality, with major and minor artists represented in top form.

Initially, I was afraid that so many paintings of flowers in vases — nearly 70 — would overwhelm a delicate subgenre of French paintings. But the exhibition proves so interesting and the galleries build on one another so confidently that one feels refreshed by each room.

Eugène Delacroix’s (1798-1863) celebrated painting Liberty Leading the People was defaced while on view at the Louvre’s satellite location in Lens, which opened in the former mining town in northern France in December 2012. French police have a detained the woman accused of scrawling a graffiti tag along the bottom of the work.

Delacroix, a leader of the Romantic school in French painting, painted Liberty Leading the People to celebrate the July revolution of 1830, which brought down France’s Charles X. The work was featured on the country’s 100-franc banknote before the Euro was adopted and is rumored to have inspired New York’s Statue of Liberty.

Just before the museum closed for the day on Thursday, February 7, 2013, a 28-year-old woman scribbled in 12 inch writing what officials believe to be a reference to a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Officials believe that the work can be easily cleaned, but a restoration expert from the Louvre was being sent to Lens to perform a thorough examination. Museum officials have not yet decided if the painting will need to be removed.