Poussin's Humour

Nicolas Poussin, Shugborough & The Holy Grail

Eileen Harris in Apollo Magazine advances a detailed historical interpretation of the Et in Arcadia Ego monument at Shugborough - with - good news! - a nice denial of the fanciful relationship between Nicolas Poussin's painting of The shepherds in Arcadia in the Louvre, and The Holy Grail. http://www.apollo-magazine.com/may-2006/73766/cracking-the-poussin-code.thtml

Nicolas Poussin: The measure of Poussin's painting

This is the text of an essay written in early 2006 for a volume edited by David Packwood & Phillippa Plock that, after several attempts to get past the publishing blockade I wrote about earlier today, has finally had to be abandoned.

The argument is in 6,000 words similar to the argument of my much longer book Poussin's Humour written in 2008. I have very lightly emended it today.

The opening section appears below.

The Measure of Poussin’s Painting.

Tony Green

 

On a toujours essayé d’élucider le problème de Poussin à partir d’un examen de ses idées, de ses sources et de ses thèmes, parfois aussi à partir du matériel d’objets dont il s’est inspiré – objets matériels ou objets figuratifs. Or, le problème de Poussin n’est pas un problème des sources, mais un problème de création.

Pierre Francastel, 1958. Colloque Poussin, 1960, I, 202

 

I. The Legacy of Twentieth-Century Poussin Scholarship

Forty years on, there has still been no serious attempt to confront Francastel’s “problème de création”, to solve which he had placed himself “résolument au point de vue plastique.” Instead, the corpus of Nicolas Poussin’s history paintings has attracted a largely hermeneutic, exegetical and philological corpus of writing. Poussin as a painter, brush in hand, barely figures in this commentary. Instead his paintings have been regarded as if they were secondary texts to the primary texts of history, philosophy and literature that he had read. In order to determine his ideas, it has been supposed that what was required was to locate those texts and see through the density of their medium to the statements, propositions and arguments that constitute ideas. To be sure, it was qualified that these ideas were always somewhat modified by Poussin.

Exemplary of this corpus of writing (in English) is Anthony Blunt’s 1967 monograph on Poussin as “peintre-philosophe.”[i] Blunt explicitly rejected “modern” understanding of Poussin as “one of the great masters of formal design.” He set himself to explain, on the “exact contrary”, Poussin’s “thought”, how Poussin “gives visible expression to certain ideas.”[ii] These, he made clear, are ethical and metaphysical ideas, sufficient representations of Poussin’s philosophical world-view. By rejecting Roger Fry’s “extreme” formalist disregard of content, Blunt takes license for an equally extreme disqualification of form. He treats “style” as no more than an adjunct, regarding Poussin’s classicism as a reflection of stoicism. The medium, the means, is squeezed out of consideration, as no more than instrumental. Consequently, everything that Blunt calls ideas is derived from whatever he can isolate in the pictures as narrative and symbol.

The hermeneutic process of interpretation when applied to paintings makes them into pseudo-writing. Though writing is difficult enough as a medium for ideas, painting offers difference. Propositions and arguments are beyond its powers; whilst its expression of narrative is also strictly limited by its medium. The current common opinion is that Poussin’s paintings are merely a specialized topic of philological erudition. Unless and until Francastel’s project is renewed, modified by subsequent theory, it will not be possible to take the measure of Poussin as a painter.[iii]

We might begin with Poussin’s own fundamental definition of painting: “an imitation made with lines and colors on a surface of all that can be seen under the Sun: its purpose is delight.”[iv] Torquato Tasso may be the source for Poussin’s definition of painting: this is a modification of Artistotle’s discussion of drama in the Poetics.[v]

Alain Rey has argued that Aristotle’s term mimesis was restricted in meaning in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, because of the then insistent use for the imitation of an object and its fixation on beauty.[vi] But, as Rey shows, Artistotelian mimesis extended to the arts of dance and flute-playing, which often do not have an object to imitate. Mimesis included both what was represented, the mimemata, and how it was represented, the means or medium, the semeia: rhythmos, logos, and armonia. In painting, Rey notes, these semeia can only be the colors and figures. Omission of the semeia has continually privileged content. This has its roots in the doctrine of the Académie Royale in the 1660s, based on literary and rhetorical theory. The semeia were regarded as elementary craft, an address to the senses, which every guild- member could produce, whereas the Academy’s art addressed the mind, with a rational deployment of rhetorical content.

The modernist alternative of a return to a privileging of form has had little credit in art history, seen as aesthetic - subjective and sensual style-preferences. But Rey’s re-reading of Aristotle, points to a sense of form that has been mistakenly rejected along with formalism. When form is understood as a verb instead of as a noun, artworks can be seen as having been formed in their media, semeia, towards their overall effect of figuration, mimemata. The resultant overall pictorial effect, the look of the picture, sets the terms for the process of seeing in all its inferential complexity.

Form, in this sense, is the necessary fundamental focus of attention of any painter, the trans-formation of colors into figures. The continual assessment of this in a work in progress cannot be based entirely on a lucid theoretical statement formulated in advance. Poussin included a remark to this effect in his observations on painting, on the practice of painting: “OF THE EXAMPLE OF GOOD MASTERS. Even though instruction concerning practice follows the study of theory, unless theoretical precepts are confirmed by evidence they do not impress on the mind the working habits that are the result of practical experience” or scienza fattiva [vii] This scienza fattiva, as painters know, is accumulated by looking at paintings and refining workshop practice. In this regard, painters may be said to think with their painting, as directors of movies think with moving images; as poets think with their poems; or as choreographers, “create their images not in words, but in plastic positions and rhythmic movements.”[viii] The privileging of content misses the crucial engagement of the arts with their media. It hastens to analyze paraphrases of plot, character and symbol; treats media as transparent to what they represent; and ignores the thought that takes place in medium and process.

Few accounts of Poussin’s paintings recognize how the effects of figures are produced. But they rarely begin at the level of the scienza fattiva that has produced the visible. The production by painting of the visible is, in ancient theory, considered as the result of an effort, wonderful in itself, developed from generation to generation. The painting of the invisible, dependent on the painting of the visible, is perhaps the most important measure of history painting in those writings of antiquity respected by Poussin and his contemporaries, in Xenophon, in Pliny the Elder, and in Philostratus.[ix] It is also critically important in our time. W. T. Mitchell writes: “We can never understand a picture unless we grasp the ways in which it shows what cannot be seen. One thing that cannot be seen in an illusionistic picture, or which tends to conceal itself is precisely its own artificiality.”[x]

 

---

[i] Anthony F. Blunt, Nicolas Poussin: The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1958 (London: Phaidon Press, and New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1967).

[ii] See for example, Hubert Damisch., “Huit Thèses pour (ou contre?) une Sémiologie de la Peinture,” Macula, 2 (1977): 17-23.

[iii] Aristotle, “On the Art of Poetry,” in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. and trans. T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin Books, 1965), 32-33.

[iv] Alain Rey, “Mimesis, Poétique et Iconisme: pour une Relecture d’Aristote,” in Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture, eds. Paul Bouissac, Michael Heizfeld and Roland Posner (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1986), 19.

[v] Floyd Merrell, Pierce, Signs and Meaning (Toronto, Buffalo, London: Toronto University Press, 1997), especially Chapter 15, 315-342

[vi] Alain Rey, “Mimesis, Poétique et Iconisme”

[vii] Printed in Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 361: “Dell’esempio de’ buoni maestri. Quantunque dopò la dottrina, si agghiungino gl’inseganamenti, che riguardono la pratica, con tutto ciò fino e tanto che li precetti non si veggono autenticati, non lasciano nell’animo quel’habito dell’operare che deue essere l’effetto dell scienza fattiua”

[viii] Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: L’Image-Mouvement (Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1983), 7; The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), 390; Bronislava Nijinska, Early Memoirs, ed. and trans. Irina Nijinska and Jean Rawlinson (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1982), 466

[ix] Xenophon, Memorabilia, III, X, 1; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXV, 79-90; and Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, VoI, 19, ed. and trans. by J. J. Pollitt, in The Art of Greece (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall), 160-1, 168, 222.

[x] W. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 39. See also T. J. Clark. The Sight of Death: an Experiment in Art Writing. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

Because of the length of the whole essay I have uploaded it as a .pdf file Download 12. Green-1 A

Poussin, Solomon drawings, Raphael, Bellori

The file is no longer available. It will be included, revised, in the book Poussin's Humour.

Anthony Blunt on NP's drawings

The file is no longer available. It will be included, revised, in the book Poussin's Humour.

Adoration of Shepherds NGL

The file is no longer available. It will be included, revised, in the book Poussin's Humour.

Solomon

after my Italian trip - see today's post on http://Tony_Green.typepad.com - & a nearly complete break from 'art' - I'm back at work on an essay on Poussin's Judgment of Solomon.

Purpose: to show why the 'bad' mother has been wrongly identified first by Bellori, & more recently by Anthony Blunt and most subsequent writers, to argue for the correct identification & to show how the wrong identification occurs as a result of Poussin's highly 'philosophical' practice.

I began to suspect in 1992 that there was a problem set by the painting. I finally worked it out while I was in Italy this month.

Crucial moments: I will say now: the 2 women have identical mirroring faces in profile - one in light the other in shadow - & the key to the decision is not an analysis only of the women's attitudes gestures appearance & dress - which has always seemed a likely way of deciding between them - one of the other figures supplies the answer.

I'm hoping to have this and everything else ready for publication within a year. Then the answer will be revealed.

I'm thinking of using as an epigraph Wittgenstein's: "But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bumping off something and carrying on in almost the same direction, e.g. when a snooker-ball glances off another snooker-ball." Philosophical Investigations [P.I.for short. p140]. That is something Poussin might well have thought, minus the snooker-balls.

additional note 15 November '07 I was wrong about 'snooker balls' only to the extent that 15th century people played a kind of billiards http://www.bca-pool.com/aboutus/history/start.shtml

& then there's another possible epigraph, Charles Bernstein's one-liner in Rough Trades: "Poussin never ate baloney".

4 T J Clark covers altered

the variable piece is acrylic on rimu bark - fallen from the very old tree in Kauri Park Birkenhead - rimu bark is not plentiful - 4 variants on "The Sight of Death's" cover - theory shd be able to take care of this array neatly shdnt it?
that's S of D #1, with 3 variants S o D # 2-4 inc
cheers * click on images to see them enlarged *

wildness of galloper TJC

Calm - hooked by sheer wildness of the galloper - TJC in Getty Jan 25 2000 - encapsulated in a framed morceau below text - taken hooked by rider's flashing hair & arm flung forward demanding that this horse anchored to ground by hind-legs go forward anywhere at all impossibly there it stays at edge of Calm as if to race off into some other pictorial space presumably pendant Storm -

then TJC notices peculiar relation to [peculiar] structure of wash-house/stable building - an NP overlap - horse appears to rest belly on a block which by analogy must be assigned to a brick pillar base of the building - behind- it horse seems stuck immobilised to pillar in spite of all urging urgency of posture of rider - as stuck in place as any picture cloud in picture sky - & time of day famously undecidable - Claude Seaport in NGLondon was assigned to morning & to evening until Martin Davies discovered a clock at 2.45 pm. Tempting eh?

Wash-house comes in later in TJC text - & little tower behind - what belongs to what as structure lines and edges of light and dark confuse - orderly Poussin contrives paointing-grammatical disorder here as in Eliezer & Rebecca for Jean Pointel - close/slow reading discovers as NP paintings composed of morceaux zones implied unstated sub-frames

clouds/rocky mountains made of same colours become distinguishable as TJC notes - soft cloudy vapourous clouds also cloud nearest to rock same colours cd be a very large detached pieces of mountain about to fall as if on citadel - same colours different material - cf Echo fading in to rock TJC remarks on later in Louvre Narcissus - there's much there of same kind in that painting he doesnt note - but mountain lump can't be meant to fall on citadel because it is meant for many miles away - surface/space game as with horse/pedestal or in Confirmation I woman points as if poking someone in the eye, but no, becasue there is an implied pictorial space between - interesting to read these NP thoughts coming to light in TJC ?first time he's encountered such in NP? this concealed/unconcealed visible structuring of picture illusions fast-forwards to Rene Magritte 1920s & Marcel Duchamp & his succession in 1960s

good these discoveries alone shd disconcert exclusive attention to what are supposed to be the signifieds of Poussin's graphics - in which supposition graphic 'signifiers' are commonly so taken for granted that they are not looked into go unnoticed - disturbing iconology a la Pan with necessity to regard the intelligencee that informs painting of motifs

cheers T

TJC

sorry for delay I've had messieurs et mesdames hectic week & still slow from oral surgery consequent backache this week settling back to the sight of death always present TJ Clarrk is definitely as MM da Caravaggio would have put it one of da good guys I want to do some more slow readings poet friend calls them deep readings as TJC does for NP meanwhile I'm reading fast noting that I think worse of Louis Marin than he does in mid - book somewhere & fascinated by his Snake anecdote read the snake yes I too cdnt think of a python other than anaconda that wd be so big & ask whose territory is it? don't mess with snakes when they're at home colonist read it that way your hero in the picture is the snake either way fight to the death taking sides or taking bets only winner is painter who has you by the short & curlies delving into your philosophy for answers while he is thinking what is fear as it can be manifested in an effect of paint on canvas a] monstrous crunch b] arrest & a sound c] someone who does not see monstrous crunch looks up disturbed therefore not by sight but sound [see Baptism II 1646 ] fishermen too far to hear because it's a deeply affective literally blood-chilled almost breathless gasp & on CSI vomit follows all this founded on what could be a complicated version of painting by numbers exhibit a] is dark secret requiring agent Grissom to get within close range camera close-up is seriously unpleasant why because you see means you see yourself as the dead person and as the snake even if you are not judgmental what else accounts for the muscular response not as TJC thinks to the throat but as if your arms are round their ribs squashing them till they crack & the breath goes altogether all that from no snake but adroit blacks greys & play with canvas weave bolus ground put it this way if Poussin didn't think snake how cd he paint snake & go beyond imagining snake to know-how of paint & brushes to conjure it such rich manifestation is rich in not narration as in writing but image demands every figure every sub-frame every brush-stroke be accounted for as he works to the central plan of fear death picture a fable nearer to Aesop than to Virgil pastoral or epic maybe closer to Apollonius of T who in Philostratus' fable favoured fables to other kinds of poetry teaching by monstrations so I'm glad TJC got over his desire to destroy Snake in the name of revolution & decided instead distinctly revolutionary read Poussin slow close & deep as a painter requiring thereby complete overhaul revision of icon-study for teachers & students in academy that can restore to Poussin what the academy disallowed in 1660s in the name of Poussin in which Felibien was complicit absurdity of absurdities not dissimilar to finding excuses to destroy remnants of great ancient civilization one root of civilization so-called neither east nor west in the name of protecting civilization's oil the name of Poussin dear snake friends once more unto the breach TJC has made cheers T

tIme 2 b 4

I've settled for independent graphic-look so please click and read Download time_2_b_4.doc