SOUS LES PAVES, L'IMAGE

LA LIBERTÉ GUIDANT LE PEUPLE, EUGÈNE DELACROIX - COLLECTION PALETTES

of JAUBERT Alain

FRANCE, 1989, 00:28:00

Production : DELTA IMAGES, PAINI Dominique, MUSEE DU LOUVRE, FR3, LA SEPT, REUNION DES MUSEES NATIONAUX, MUSEE D'ORSAY
Collection : Musée du Louvre
Genre : Documentary
Keyword : Art, Painting, Louvre Museum, History of art, Allegory, History

Summary :
Choosing key-works in the imaginary of the Western culture, the series called “Palettes” tells in each episode the story of a different painting. In a word, it tells the genealogy of the painting. For a painting has its ancestors and its descendants. A double technical and philosophical knowledge, fed on by a long tradition, gave birth to the painting. And the painting itself gave birth, year after year, to a multitude of other images…
Assuming the idea that the deep meaning of a painting is conveyed by the choice of colours and themes, we dissect the canvas from its most visible composition to its deepest significance.

The painting inspired to Delacroix by Les trois Glorieuses, raised up many polemics during its exhibition in the Salon in 1831. This woman above a mass grave, denuded and armed, a flag in one hand and a bayonet in the other shocks. Is it the nudity of the Liberty? Or the realistic staging of the triumphant people?
The canvas of Delacroix of which teh radiography reveals several repentances, releases passionatereactions which are not necessarily shared by the right and the left of that time.
After lots of years of peregrinations, the painting will only find its place again at the Louvre in 1874, eleven years after the death of the painter. But since, the allegorical figure of the Liberty has spread: stamps, banknotes, posters, caricatures.

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