At the Met Museum, the Grand Enigmas of Delacroix

THE TIMES YORK TIMES
By Roberta Smith
Christ in the Garden of Olives (The Agony in the Garden) Eugène Delacroix (French, Charenton-Saint-Maurice 1798–1863 Paris)
NEW YORK---The achievement of the French painter Eugène Delacroix — the Romantic paragon of 19th-century French art — is like a huge puzzle whose pieces don’t easily fit together. But at least we finally have a chance to try to make them cohere. The first full-dress retrospective in North America devoted to this complex, enigmatic, foundational figure, titled simply “Delacroix,” opens on Monday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized with the Louvre Museum in Paris, where it appeared in fuller form this year, the Met show presents nearly 150 paintings, prints and drawings in a dozen large galleries whose arrangements sometimes have the clarity of individual exhibitions. [More]
Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Delacroix" (Through Jan. 6, 2019); 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York; (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org