Maurice Denis et Eugène Delacroix, de l'atelier au musée

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Maurice Denis’s esteem for Eugène Delacroix is well known and has often been discussed: Denis celebrated his predecessor for both his painting and his writing. He also admired Delacroix’s stance as an artist dedicated to a personal ideal, and in the early 1920s he set off to North Africa, in Delacroix’s footsteps.Denis played a crucial role in saving Delacroix’s last studio and creating the Musée Delacroix. He was president of the first Société des Amis d’Eugène Delacroix (Friends of Eugène Delacroix association) and succeeded in rallying to the cause the greatest painters of the 1920s, among them Henri Matisse, Edouard Vuillard, and Paul Signac. The significance of his commitment to Delacroix’s oeuvre has never been gone into, except tangentially.Drawing on the connections between the Musée Delacroix and the Maurice Denis archives, this project will help foreground the painters’ respective oeuvres and underscore the influence, in the early 20th century, of the Delacroix corpus on artists born after his death. It will also offer, after the renovation of Delacroix’s apartment and a fresh interpretative approach, a new vision of the museum and its early years.Based on close study and analysis of the Musée Delacroix archives, the exhibition will also present major works by Denis in interaction with those of Delacroix.