Delacroix and the Matter of Finish

Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2013. Hardcover. As New. Dark, color-illus. boards with white lettering. 165 pp. with 45 color plates. Very nice, thick paper. Catalogue which accompanied the exhibitions of the same title in Santa Barbara, California and Birmingham, Alabama, between October 2013 and May 2014. A complex catalogue/exhibition with two purposes: first, the discovery and viewing of a major painting by Delacroix, an easel-size variation of The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius, of which Dr. Kahng was both authenticator and curator. Second, the matter of the finishing of Delacroix's paintings. Critics maintained that he was "incapable of bringing his canvases to a sufficient state of finish. His ideas, while often engaging and original, were therefore just that - ideas that he was technically incapable of realizing through the painter's usual illusionistic meanns...But how are we to to classify smaller-scale versions of known, monumental canvases? How are we to determine if they are preparatory, and, therefore, predate their monumental, finished counterparts? Or are such smaller versions aide-memoires, done, perhaps, to record beloved subjects once they departed the studio. Does the degree of finish enable us to make this determination for an artist who famously eluded normative notions of finish?" A compelling catalogue, beautifully illustrated.