Line and Color in European Painting

The newest installation of the Museum's collection of 19th through early 20th-century European art explores the two predominant approaches to pictorial representation that guided, and often divided, artists throughout the century: one that focused on color and another that relied upon line.

These two main currents, which dominated French painting during the first half of the 19th century, are best seen in the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and his contemporary Eugène Delacroix. Ingres, the draftsman, with his coolly idealized models, lush contours, and restrained color and action, was seen as the inheritor of Classicism; Delacroix, the colorist, with his bright colors and bravura brushwork, embodied Romanticism and was considered a modernist.

By the mid-19th century, an increasing number of painters—those more closely aligned with Delacroix's strong color and energetic brushwork—deeply challenged the artistic establishment, introducing new subject matter and innovative technique. Monet, for example, eventually claimed to have broken with the past as represented by the art of Ingres.

The idea of the primacy of color and its expressive possibilities subsequently spread across Europe with particular potency among the Post-Impressionists at the turn of the century and the German Expressionists in the early 20th century. Line re-emerged in the avant-garde arena in the early years of the 20th century with the strong geometry and suppressed palette of the Cubists.

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