Liverpool stakes its claim on the pre-Raphaelite beat, there’s history, too, in selfies, and Hieronymus Bosch stages a dramatic 500th-anniversary homecoming – all in your weekly art dispatch
Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art
For that drug-addicted bohemian art critic and poet Baudelaire, the definitive modern artist was Eugène Delacroix. Picasso agreed when he painted his own version of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, which recently sold for an eye-watering price. Delacroix is the last of the romantics and the first of the moderns: a sensual, even depraved connoisseur of sex and violence as aesthetic themes whose visions of harems, mass suicides, massacres and struggles with angels are painted with infinite sensitivity to colour. Matisse was as much in his debt as Picasso, while Van Gogh admired him deeply. This ought to be great.
• National Gallery, London, 17 February-22 May
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Published on February 12, 2016 08:09