In Poussin’s painting the paint, the brushwork, the execution, produces an array of parts that are legible. That is to say they can be read e.g. a cloud, a wall of a building, an arm, a partly draped torso, and so on, as if they were pictograms. In conventional signs, such as those at airports, a figure is so limited in its postures and representation by elementary figuration that its signification is as simple and clear as possible in its context. Out of context, such signs can sometimes be seen as having a contrary and ludicrous significance. However, in paintings and drawings, figures are usually unique in their articulation and the context of the rest of the image. For instance, a figure of a man could have as many variations as there are conceivable postures and viewpoints. The contours, colour, shading and the angle at which they are seen are specific and particular to them. Comparison between any two of them will not sufficiently determine whether they are identical. It is this specificity that gives rise to the familiar saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Their significance will be often no more than partially determined and always limited by the usual limitations of still pictures.
Imagine the 999 extra words: what are they about? Those words are needed for the explicit specific look of things, the relations of the parts, the positions of the figures, and by no means least, the fine grain of the materials that have been turned into image.
There are other important differences from language. Although it may be possible to distinguish different functions for the various pictograms in a picture, in relation to affect or movement for instance, they do not have the sharply different functions that words have among themselves. For this reason there is nothing that corresponds to grammatical formations such as sentences in painting. Furthermore, the order in which they are to be read cannot be strictly specified, even supposing that the term ‘read’ is even allowable in respect of painting. One could say that there is a syntax in images, only insofar as the regular disposition (and Chambray’s position) of parts is called for.
Determined by the regularities of a practice – what is usually called a painter’s style – in every painting any and all the pictograms must be constructed by execution with the materials at hand. In this respect, a painting usually displays marks, of paint applied by a brush, on some surface, typically, wall, panel or canvas. It is clear that these are not like the tracks left by an animal, paw or hoof prints, or the indentations made by a particular tool. They are not such simple indexical signs. Simply looking will not always determine what instrument and materials had been used, though no doubt forensic examination could, but it is not always easy or even desirable to tell all. The pages on Monet in James Elkins’ What is Painting? (Routledge, New York, 1998) are exemplary analysis in this respect.
Complicated and lengthy to analyse as they may be, the paint-strokes are the workings of a painter, the traces of an execution. They appear to have an order to them, being the traces of a series of manoeuvres or procedures – such procedures as making clear individual parts appear or making them coalesce with their surroundings; for constructing effects of light and shade; or for effects of massing of colour. Many of these are recognisable in pictures. There are also effects that are particular to paintings that do not form definite scenes, so-called abstract paintings. In all cases, however, these applications of execution, of practice, either make things visible, or hide things. These manoeuvres are fundamental to the painter’s way of controlling how a painting will be looked at. In much European painting from, say, Titian, onwards, this may be at least as important to the work of painting as the recognition of symbol, allegorical and narrative constructions. For this reason, it is necessary to give it the attention that is due to intelligence always at work in the actual execution.
Most of the time painting is not automatic, but rather, consciousness is fully engaged, between careful anxious control and bold confident freedom, with continuous action anticipating or failing to anticipate result. The first stroke may be difficult to make, but every stroke is a venture into the unknown. Practice may suggest what will happen, but only the stroke itself will prove it. Attention to all this, insofar as it is visible, is largely missing from art historical discourse. These are not even indexical signs, not simply the traces of an instrument that signifies the instrument’s action, but the signs of the decisions of a painter in the light of the system of painting. A practice within a system of painting may be related to a discourse that could be called technical. At its most elementary, there is a discourse, that would have been picked up in the studio by beginners in the age of tempera, and oil painting, as regards laying out the colours on the palette, the degree of viscosity, the kinds of brushes and their uses, the way to transfer drawing to canvas, how to establish simple perspective structures, how to make outlines and under-paintings, over-painting, drying-times and glazes, and much more and different in other media, such as fresco or watercolour. These can be reduced, more or less, to sets of instructions. A studio-assistant can be told how to carry these out and can become proficient with practice.
But beyond such elementary rules, there is another discourse which the painter engages in throughout the design-and-execution process. This discourse concerns all the decisions, moment to moment, on how to arrange and produce the many different kinds of figures required. The figures required in a particular picture will present problems that are not always readily solved by reference to previous occasions. Instructions on how to paint will often have to be varied, improvised. It is feasible to instruct an assistant on the appropriate painting of large undifferentiated areas, but even if instructions on how to paint a head, or a figure, are moderately effective, the master will often have to retouch them.
While Rembrandt’s, Rubens’s, Velasquez’s, Chardin’s or Manet’s accomplishments as practitioners have been sometimes closely regarded and often admired, Poussin’s accomplishment has been largely ignored. Instead, commentary begins with the clear pictograms he makes,, with almost no consideration of how they are made or arranged. Their legibility, limited though that may be in painting compared with writing, has been pursued, often with great scholarly intelligence. There have been, as Michael Kitson pointed out recently, careful and interesting semiotic interpretations. (In Katie Scott & Genevieve Warwick, eds. Commemorating Poussin. Cambridge
University
Press, Cambridge
,
UK
, 1999). But that intelligence, that version of pictorial semiotics, is limited when the significance of his construction of what is visible in painting, inescapably present as in all painting, is discounted, dismissed or simply ignored.
After 1630, Poussin is no longer in any obvious way a painterly painter. He leaves behind the broadly painted light shade and colour of his paintings of the 1620s for a technique, in which his figures are, according to the conventional Rubéniste criticism, more like sculpture than painting, with no consideration for the overall effect. This underestimates the painterly resources still evident, though they are converted to purposes that a painterly pictorial method could hardly undertake. The method he adopts does not depend on an evident brush marking and colouring of the whole, but in a construction of separable parts that make up figures. This occurs in painting that does not attempt to present actual scenes seen, but rather to construct scenes, in much the manner in which a stage may be dressed with painted scenery and peopled with actors in costume. This is carried out with the same kind of attention to the paint that has to serve this purpose as the attention o the words and their sound that make up tragic or epic or comic poetry and drama. I suggest that if it were not for Poussin’s earlier investment in a bold style of drawing, a vigorous chiaroscuro and colouring, and often boldly improvised brushing of the canvas, Poussin would have fo8und it very difficult to paint the dark interior scenes of the second set of Sacraments, or the luminous vision of the 1650 Ecstasy of St Paul
.
To bring Poussin’s accomplishment as a painter back into view, I am proposing to change the terms, to let the term sign retreat temporarily to the shadowy margin of the text, and instead take the term figure as central. The advantage of this word figure is that its meaning changes with its points of reference, content on the one hand, form on the other, both of which have long been significant issues in painting. Figure is a term with several and varied meanings in various disciplines and contexts. In one of these it means the signifier of a person in a drama, movie or a narrative or historical picture: e.g. the figure of Rebecca. In painting it can be extended to mean the representation of any thing in a picture, a cloud, a tree, a pillar. It can also have an extended meaning, a metonymic figure for a moral function e.g. a figure of fun, a figure of evil, or for a member of the family-group, or as in Christian Biblical typology, where Rebecca is one of the possible figures for the Virgin Mary.
But in the other sense of the word, figure is a term that means number, or, as in geometry, shapes, or forms, as indeed a figure may be an identifiable group of sounds for repetition or variation in music. Because of its two sets of meanings, it is a specially useful term in discussion of painting, because it can relate to the persons in a picture and to the forms from which they are constructed and by which they are made visible. For example, a figure of a woman is made up of a series of components: hand; body, head, hair; drapery. Each of these components consists of a coloured and shaded shape – or form or figure – that is distinguished from its ground. Figure turns both ways: towards the description of forms and towards the description of persons represented. If, in a painting, the feeling or affect or action of a personage is to be accounted for as content, it is always by a closer account of the form, as posture or colour or relation to the rest of the painting, and that always comes down to the specifics of drawing and colouring.
It is specially useful, because figure is the interface between form and content. It is the answer to the complex question regarding the process of a work from production through to its reception: how is this painting formed? With the related question: what is formed by this painting for legibility? The answer is in these terms: it is formed, so that it results in this scene with these personages being made visible. It is impossible in fact to detach the scene made visible from the conditions that determine the matrix of marks and figures that construct its visibility. It is no more possible than to detach thought, sentiment or action described in writing from the conditioning terms and the conditioning forms of the language – as a performance – in which they are made to appear. The discussion of Poussin’s paintings has veered either towards a formalism without any serious reckoning on content, or a content that takes no notice of the forming of the painting. I am here aiming to show the need to take form as a verb, to form, forming, formed, rather than a noun, as the foundation of the process of an artwork. Anthony Blunt told me, long ago, he thought I was a formalist. In retrospect I would have liked to ask him just what meaning he attached to that term. I am only a formalist in the sense that I care for how paintings are formed, but I also care for the intelligence in the forming in Poussin’s paintings, that makes the legible content possible.
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