Christopher Riopelle

The argument of the exhibition, if you will, is that you see here in those years 1906, 1907, 1910 the modern adulation and emulation of Delacroix now 50 years after his death, and the way artist had used him kept changing over those 50 years. And now with the Frenchman Matisse and then Russian Kandinksy, both of them huge admirers of Delocroix, moving beyond him into a new world. Of Matisse in the direction of color, broad patterning of forms in a way that owes a debt to Delacroix’s brilliant use of color but now in a fully modern way.