Cataracts

About a month ago, and then again two weeks after that, I had surgery at the NHS to remove cataracts – those are clouded or yellowed lenses behind the iris and pupil. I’m a bit young for this common procedure, but sun exposure hastens cataract formation, and I lived for fifteen years in Southern California and five more in Florida. I didn’t know I had them until my optician told me, but I should have known – I hadn’t needed sunglasses in years and my night vision had gotten bad.

Cataract removal is simple. The surgeon starts by anaesthetizing the eye with drops and propping open the lid, like with young Alex in A Clockwork Orange. A scalpel slices and dices the cataract, and then a sort of vacuum cleaner sucks it away. After that, the doctor inserts a new lens. It sounds grim but wasn’t. In fact, it was like an acid trip. Lying back in the chair, I saw at first a fuzzy quatrefoil of lights, then tides of water, followed by a squeegee wiping my eyeball clean, and then the insertion and unfolding of a lens that was initially a kaleidoscope, and then a spyglass revealing the crisp contours of the lights and surgical equipment above me. It’s been 50 years since I last took LSD; I made a mental note to try it again sometime.

After each operation, I was a bit wobbly, but my wife Harriet steadied me, and we easily walked the mile or so back to our hillside flat in Norwich. That night and for the next two days I experienced what doctors euphemistically call “discomfort” as well as fuzzy vision. After a few more days, and with the help of eye drops, the symptoms passed.

In the two-week interval between my first and second surgeries I experienced an optical revelation. What was dull in my left, untreated eye, was blazingly bright in my right! What was grey in one was white in the other. It wasn’t just light and tone; colors changed too. A yellow that appeared dun-colored in my left eye, was lemony in the other. A green that was bronze in my left was grassy in the right. Navy blue became azure; Earth-red, fire engine red, and so on. After the second surgery, the contrast between the two eyes disappeared. But I knew I was seeing different than before.

Everybody who has cataract surgery notices the change – that’s the whole point. But because I’m an art historian, and a significant part of my work consists of observing subtle distinctions of color in works of art, the change in my vision felt especially dramatic. I have in my 45-year career written at length and taught about Delacroix, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat. All were great colorists. Had I for the last decade or so – when my cataracts were worsening – misunderstood their works, and seen them mostly as drawn rather than painted and colored? Had I been blind to them? Was that why I’ve been writing so much about politics lately, instead of art? I resolved to go to Paris–Delacroix is badly represented in British museums – to begin to find out.

Visiting the Louvre

I first went to the Louvre in 1974 when I was 18. I took the night plane from JFK to Reykjavik via Icelandic Air — the Hippie express — then changed planes for the flight to Luxembourg, followed by a train to Pairs. The round-trip fare was $250; the train about $20. I stayed at the Hotel des Grandes Ecole on the Rue Cardinal Lemoine, near the Pantheon. It cost 35 francs a night (seven dollars), croissant breakfast included, with an extra franc for a hot water shower in a closet off the stairwell. The place was a picturesque fleabag – today it’s picturesque and luxurious. The Louvre, in my recollection, was half empty in those days. You could enter the museum at any number of places – this was pre-I.M. Pei’s Pyramid — and wander for hours undisturbed by guides and tour groups. Some galleries were dimly lit, many of the pictures were dirty or poorly conserved — it was glorious.

In the subsequent five decades, I probably visited Paris and the Louvre about 15 times, though with decreasing frequency in recent years. The crowds and queues, especially in warm weather months, are daunting. But the trip from Norwich to Paris via the Eurostar is cheap and fast, and I was determined last week, to perform my eye test.

Michelangelo’s marble Slaves (or Captives) were no different than I remembered them; the marble was whiter, but the pathos the same. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Titian’s Le Concert Champêtre were also familiar – they are afflicted with their own, internal cataract. The yellowed varnish of the latter makes it appear as if the orgy was taking place on a smoggy day in San Bernardino. Veronese’s Wedding at Cana was just as grand and arresting as I remembered. Jacques Louis David called it “the greatest picture in the world” and Delacroix said he never missed a chance to see it when he was in the Louvre. They rhapsodized most of all about Veronese’s colors, which included ultramarine made from semi-precious lapis lazuli, red from cochineal, and green made by layering copper resinate on verdigris on lead white. Delacroix likely had the Wedding in mind (among other works) when he created The Death of Sardanapalus in 1827. The latter was my chief destination, where I would test what I remembered against what I now saw.

A word of caution: Perception of color is notably inconstant. Light, distance, and color adjacencies impact recognition of hue. So does biology. Dogs, bumblebees, and owls perceive colors differently than people. My Harriet is slightly colorblind – she calls a pistachio colored, plastic chair in our house white, and a plastic blue bench purple. (She’d say it was me that was colorblind.) In addition, colors are notoriously hard to remember, as you’ll know from the many movies where police detectives are frustrated by witnesses asked to name the color of a perp’s getaway car. Could I even remember how paintings by Delacroix looked before my recent surgeries?

There are in fact three, very large (in subject and scale) works by Delacroix in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre: Scenes of a Massacre at Chios (1824), The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), and Liberty Leading the People in 1830 (1831). All are history paintings, but with each, subject recedes before style, especially Sardanapalus; that painting announces the possibility – sometime in the future — of a fully abstract art based solely upon line, color, gesture and expression. When the arch classicist, Étienne-Jean Delécluze saw the picture at the Salon exhibition of 1827, he said

One tried in vain to get at the thoughts entertained by the painter in composing his work; the intelligence of the viewer could not penetrate the subject, the elements of which are isolated, where the eye cannot find its way within the confusion of lines and colors, where the first rules of art seem to have been deliberately violated.

Another critic at the time saw the picture as a product of “delirium.” In fact, the color in all three paintings by Delacroix appeared more delirious than I remembered. The Chios was dominated by the discordant, but patriotic trio of blue, white and red; Sardanapalus by yellow, orange, and red; and Liberty (recently cleaned) by the tricoleur once again, made more vivid by the greys and browns below and in the distance. Several questions crowded my mind: Had I underestimated the formal radicalism of the paintings, and only now, as the result of two cataract surgeries, seen them correctly? Did Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat learn more from Delacroix’s color than I realized? Was Matisse’s vibrant orientalism less a response to his trip to Tangier and more his visits to the Louvre?

Before I could engage these questions at length, however, the paintings before me dramatically changed. Their light and color dimmed and muted, painterly exuberance diminished, and exoticism receded. In place of Chios, I saw Gaza; Sardanapalus on his bed became Trump in the Oval Office; and Liberty was a Los Angeles Chicana carrying a Mexican flag, confronting armed, and masked thugs from ICE and Homeland Security. Was it now politics, not cataracts, that occluded my vision? Was I once more blind to art?

Delacroix’s three big pictures

The Massacre at Chios was inspired by reports of the indiscriminate killing of civilians by Ottoman Turks in the Greek war of independence. Like many French and European liberals, including the English poet Lord Byron, Delacroix supported the Greek cause, believing it to be an expression of the emancipatory ideals of the French Revolution of 1789, and a resurgence of ancient Greek democracy. (Byron died at Missolonghi, while planning an assault upon Turkish troops at Lepanto.) Delacroix’s painting is a vast (more than 13 feet tall) and ambitious tableaux composed of multiple scenes that, however, fail to add up to a single coherent vision of either imperial violence or guerilla resistance.

Critics at the time admired the exotic costumes, daring horsemanship of the Turk, and affecting expressions of the suffering Greeks, but little else. Today, the picture recalls the long history of Orientalism – an ideology that underlay the European expropriation of land and exploitation of people in Southern Europe and the Middle East. It also conjures the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, residents there have suffered more bombings than the population of Dresden during the “carpet bombing” of World War II. They have witnessed destruction that’s the equivalent of six Hiroshimas. At least 55,000 people in Gaza have been killed, two-thirds of them women or children. That number excludes tens of thousands of people still buried in rubble and many more that that died or will die from illness, disease and starvation.

It should go without saying that such killing of non-combatants is illegal as well as immoral, but most Israelis and some Americans appear to think retribution on that scale is justified by Hamas’s original act of killing or kidnapping about 1100 Israeli civilians and soldiers. Polls indicate that about as many Americans approve (27%) as disapprove Israel’s actions (29%). Nearly half have no opinion. The killings and deaths in Gaza, may now exceed those committed by the Ottomans on the island of Chios. In 1822, Greek resistance to the Turks was limited to a few hundred troops, but reprisal against the 100,000 or so Greek residents on the island was merciless. At least half were killed, another third enslaved, and the rest forced off the island. Victor Hugo wrote a poem in 1828, “L’Enfant” dedicated to the child victims on Chios. Here’s a snippet of it:

Oh poor child, barefoot on these sharp-edged rocks!
Oh to stop the crying of your blue eyes,

blue like the sky and like the sea,

so that in their shine the light of laughter
and joy might evaporate this storm of tears…

(Hugo’s emphasis on the child’s “blue eyes” may have been the expression of an emergent racism. The Greek were supposed more European and thus racially superior to the Asiatic, Ottoman Turks.)

In 2014, during an earlier period of Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the Palestinian poet Khaled Juma wrote “Oh Rascal Children of Gaza”. Here’s an abbreviated passage from it:

Oh rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos….
Come back,
Just come back.

Delacroix’s two-hundred-year-old rendering of genocide in Chios, unlike photos and videos of death in Gaza, is remote enough that we can see it without flinching. Its violence is filtered through a lens of stylization and metaphor that is unavailable to today’s photographers and videographers: A horseman rears at right, while a nude woman strains against her binds; a sprawling infant seeks his dying mother’s breast; and a languid couple in the left foreground peacefully expire. Figures in the canvas are grouped into stable pyramids, in good, academic style. Yet for all its artifice, the work is still affecting. Chios should be exhibited during the war crimes trial of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant at the International Criminal Court of Justice in The Hague – not as proof of guilt, but as evidence that such outrages have been condemned for generations and that no sophistry about Israel’s “right to exist” can change what is plain for all to see.

The origin of Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus is Byron’s verse-tragedy, Sardanapalus (1821) about an ancient, luxury-loving Assyrian king who fails to recognize the treachery of his retinue. By the time the perfidy is exposed, it’s too late, and he resolves to destroy himself and his lover in a great pyre. “Kiss me,” the king says: “Now let them take my realm and life!/They shall have both, but never thee!” Delacroix however, reached beyond Byron to ancient sources that depicted Sardanapalus as a brutal tyrant who preferred to destroy everything and everyone around him rather than surrender his crown. The artist shows him reclining on his massive bed, propped up on his elbow, watching with dispassion – perhaps even pleasure — the destruction of his slaves, concubines, horses and palace.

The painting’s glut of props – jewels, weapons and armor, glass, golden metalwork – and general air of topsy-turvy, combined with the riot of colors, suggest the governance of a greedy and misogynist narcissist. While decorating the White House with gilded kitsch, Trump has set fire to the fundamental bulwarks of capitalist democracy: due process, habeas corpus, an independent judiciary, a disinterested civil service, and self-governing institutions of science, medicine and higher education. He has demanded the fealty of top law firms, and undermined environmental protection and consumer safety. Though the U.S. political system has long been corrupt – corporations write their own laws and legislators select their own voters – Trump has openly traded his name and position for vast wealth. Since the election, his net worth has increased by billions.

Like Sardanapalus, Trump is a sexual predator. He boasts about it and was convicted of sexual abuse. He was then found liable for defaming his accuser. Trump openly calls for violence against his rivals, while pardoning hundreds of his followers convicted of storming of the U.S. capitol to overturn the presidential election. Where Sardanapalus destroyed his kingdom with spoken words, Trump is doing it with executive orders and the blind fealty of congressional Republicans. It’s unclear if the nation – of indeed the planet – can survive the onslaught.

Liberty Leading the People in 1830 arose from exceptional circumstances. On July 28, 1830, a cross section of Parisians rose up in rebellion, angry at King Charles X for his corruption, curtailment of press freedoms, and failure to extend voting rights. The revolt ended after just a few days when the former King’s cousin, Louis-Philippe, took control of what was quickly named the July Monarchy. Little changed, however. Within months, press and expressive freedoms were once again curtailed, and police were authorized to crush Republican and socialist clubs.

There’s little in Delacroix’s background or education that should have led him to produce the single, paradigmatic picture of modern, revolutionary struggle. Nor is there much evidence that he was a committed democrat in 1830. Instead, it was the wider, cultural dynamic of artistic dissent and critical resistance that created the conditions for an art of political opposition to the established political and cultural authorities. Though ostensibly affirming the legitimacy of the new regime of the “bourgeois king” Louis-Philippe, Liberty, exposed its shaky popular basis. The crowning personification of Liberty holding the tricoleur, is a figure of revolutionary virtue and militant resolve. She has bared breasts like allegorical figures of Marianne (France), and wears the Phrygian cap of freed Roman slaves and the radical sans- culottes of 1793. She recalls the mythic figure of Athena as well, in the cella of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, or the Winged Victory of Samothrace, signifying the idea that warfare and revolution are legitimate tools of national politics. Finally, her soiled and worn dress suggests she is a proletaire (the word itself was first used in the modern sense in 1832 by the French socialist August Blanqui). She spoke to French audiences about the power of a new and dangerous class, and of revolutionary purpose unfulfilled and untamed.

Though purchased by the state, the picture proved too incendiary for extended exhibition. By 1832, it was shunted to the storerooms of the Louvre and not seen again until 1849 (and then only briefly) during another period of revolution. It was finally put on permanent display in the Louvre in 1874. There is no comparable single image from the Los Angeles protests or the nationwide (indeed global) “No Kings Day” protests, but widely distributed photos of men and women waving Mexican flags beside burning Waymo taxis follows Delacroix’s template. Like the figure of Liberty, anti-ICE protesters carried flags, generally Mexican ones. These represent solidarity and collectivity more than nationalism, and function apotropaicly, warding off the evil-eye of an oppressive state. Waymo taxis – driverless vehicles produced by a subsidiary of Alphabet (parent company of Google) – are cameras on wheels, sometimes deployed by police and perhaps ICE to identify criminal suspects, undocumented workers or protest leaders. That’s why they were seized and burned by protesters holding flags.

Thirty-five percent of the 9 million residents of Los Angeles County are immigrants. About 800,000 are undocumented. They are everywhere. Rich or poor, you either are, know, work with, are related to, or employ an immigrant. If you are rich enough to hire a gardener, babysitter, home health care worker, or day laborer, you have employed an undocumented person. And because non-citizen immigrant wages are low, many working-class people are rich enough to hire them themselves. If you eat in a restaurant, you are eating off plates they’ve bussed and cleaned. If you enjoy take-out, they have delivered your food. If you are a meat eater, they have slaughtered the animal on your plate. If you are a vegan, they have picked your fruit and vegetables. If you are resident of a nursing home, they have cared for you. During Covid, they worked so others could stay home. After the fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, they helped clean up the debris, some of it toxic. They also lost their homes in the fires.

That’s what I saw in the Louvre Museum, last week, looking through my new, cataract-free lenses at Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People in 1830 and his other big pictures. I feel no embarrassment or sense of loss about what I saw and didn’t see. But was I really seeing the paintings, or was I blinded by politics?

I’ll reconsider the question in Part 2.

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