Perpetual Ripplets: Eugène Delacroix
Yuko Otomo
March 2019
Eugène Delacroix: 6 rue de Fürstenberg
My lodgings are indeed charming…
The view from my small garden and the cheerfulness
of my studio always gives me pleasure.
I like my studio; I work well there.
E. Delacroix
I don’t know exactly when Delacroix seeped into my life. I have no clear memories. My relationship with him started totally non-systematically, more like a fog or a cloud formation, unplanned & organic. I can only guess Cezanne’s early work gave me the initial link to this 19th century artist who was born at the extreme end of the 18th century & lived through the height of Romantic era in Paris. 1798 – 1863.
Whenever we go to Paris, our first day starts with going up to the Butte Montmarte. We stand on the hill where we can see the panoramic view of the city to refresh our spirits to make ourselves ready for the days to come. When we leave there, we also go up to the hill & bid “adieu.” But, before we do that, we often visit Delacroix’s studio/apartment on rue de Fürstenberg to rest ourselves to reflect on the visit. We enjoy this unintentionally formed pattern of the ritual.
Morton Feldman is one of my all time favorite thinkers on art. Although he is not a visual artist himself, his ideas & reflections on visual art are staggeringly accurate & totally fascinating. I learn a lot from him & enjoy reading Give My Regards to Eight Street: Collected Writing of Morton Feldman again & again. The book covers his writings from the 50s to the mid 80s. In it, there is a fascinating transcription of the 1975 conversation he did with John Dwyer titled I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstemberg. In this casual but in-depth conversation, he talks of the genesis of his music life; Lukas Foss; Cage; Pollock & ends with the mystical encounter he had once on rue Fürtemberg in Paris. This intensely magical experience truly taught him that the flow of the history is continuous, constantly connecting the past, the present & the future.
One early morning in Paris I was walking along the small street on the Left Bank where Delacroix’s studio is, just as it was more than a century ago. I’d read his journals, where he tells of Chopin, going for a drive, the poet Heine dropping in, a refugee from Germany.
Nothing had changed in the street. And I saw Heine up at the corner, walking toward me. He almost reached me. I had this intense feeling for him, the Jewish exile. I saw him. Then I went back to my place and wrote my work, I Met Heine on the Rue Fürtenberg.
They are not dead. They are with me.
What I feel the most is not in respect to the public, or even to myself. I have the feeling that I cannot betray this continuity, this thing I carry with me. The burden of history.
(from I Met Heine on the Rue Fürtenberg)
In summer 1990, we wandered into the same rue Fürtenberg with no prefixed idea of where we were. The street was breathing a shadowy silence. Soon, we found ourselves in front of Delacroix’s studio/apartment. It was open & quite with no other people around. Accepting the unexpected invitation, slightly bewildered, we walked into the space as if to be pulled by a gentle stillness of the air. He lived & worked here at the end of his life. He moved here to finish the mural works in the Church of St. Sulpice near by to avoid commuting from his old studio in rue Norte-dame-de-Lorette in December 1857. In this house, he completed his thoughts on the last mural project & died in 1863.
A sense of “void: emptiness” hit us as we walked in. The first impression was the humbleness of the life he led. Although it was designated as a national museum, it did not have any pretence of being a museum. It was rather a house vacant of its occupant. A modest studio space; also modest adjunct 3 rooms: a bedroom, a living room & a library… a small collection of small-scale works of his, including the portrait of his faithful servant Jenny Le Guillou who took care of him till the end of his life, sparsely hung on the walls. Objects he gathered in Morocco; personal items such as letters & his painting table with his palette & a paints-box were also on display. From the studio window, we saw the walled in garden with an old well & trees. We walked down to his garden. There was noone except us. We sat & rested ourselves with no noise, no chatters & no comments. The strange sense of void was so mystical & embracing that we sat on the garden chairs by the table totally blanked out for a while. We breathed the air & contemplated the shadowy quietness all around us. This unexpected experience gave us an invitation for a quiet reverie of the time passed.
Soon, we found out about the absurd fate this last studio/apartment of one of the most important French artists of all time had to bear, reading the brochure. It is surprisingly similar to the one of Cezanne’s studio/house. In 1932, 70 years after the artist passing, at the behest of Maurice Denis & Paul Signac, a Society of Friends of Eugène Delacroix was formed in order to prevent its destruction. The society was able to rent the studio, then the apartments to provide for & maintain the premise & promote Delacroix’s work for a while. Then, again, the house was put up for sale. The society was unable to acquire it & gave its collection to the French State to secure in & create a museum that became, in 1971, the Eugene Delacroix National Museum where we walked in, unplanned, 20 years later.
When Delacroix, an open-minded progressive romatic classist with a pre-modern vision, died in this rue Fürtenberg studio/apartment in 1863, Pissaro was 33; Cezanne 24; Gauguin 15; Van Gogh 10… In 6 years, Matisse was born, then, Picasso to follow as if to keep paving the way further into the future. Yes. Feldman is right. He saw Heine in the street where Delacroix, the closest friend of Chopin, lived. We rested ourselves in his quiet garden one summer afternoon. The past lives in us all as the future does. We are all part of the flow of the history. We carry the torch together surpassing the time/space.
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Yuko Otomo is a visual artist & a bilingual poet/writer of Japanese origin. Her publications include Garden: Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), Genesis (Sisyphus Press), Small Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Hand of The Poet (UDP), STUDY & Other Poems on Art (UDP), Elements (Feral Press), KOAN (New Feral Press) & FROZEN HEATWAVE: a poetry collaboration project with Steve Dalachinksy (Luna Bison Prods).
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