Poussin: Works on Paper: Drawings from the Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II - Review

Houston: Museum of Fine Arts and London: Merrell Holberton, 1995 208 pp; 110 color ills., 71 b/w $3500

"Perhaps the subtlest art exhibition in of recent origin York City at the moment" for a like reason one could read in the of recent origin York Times on Wednesday, October 22 1997 "is the single painting through Nicolas Poussin hanging, on loan from the Louvre in the Frick Collection."(1) by what mode often are Old Master paintings the make subordinate for newspaper editorials? Poussin, at no time a popular painter - there was no host in front of The Arcadian Shepherds when I visited the Frick - always has been a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of favored by connoisseurs. No other elderly Master has received such sustained shut attention over so long a period from what, in a suitably old-fashioned revolve of phrase, might be called "art lovers" Unlike greatest in quantity of his Roman contemporaries - the Baroque artists who became real unfashionable in the 19th-century - Poussin at no time ceased to fascinate collectors and with equal reason has never needed to be rediscovered. His admirers usually identify him as a true French artist. Perhaps that is on what account in December 1994 the Grand Palais retrospective was filled of visitors every day at all times. I cannot imagine that this exhibition would have been as multitudeed in New York.

Predictably, the first full-scale Poussin exhibition since 1960 provided the occasion to rethink questions about connoisseurship, to not absent new archival evidence, and to debate the older interpretations of his art. It also became the occasion for the appearance of several of recent origin books about him. Since then, a number of additional publications - more than I have the time or capacity to survey completely (and I will not discuss the periodical literature) - have appeared.(2)

What makes Poussin's paintings almost unique is the methodological point in disputes posed by the history of their interpretation. His art is an iconographer's paradise, and a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the literature is devot to debates about the exact significance of paintings like as The Arcadian Shepherds. Rubens was more erudite; other 17th-century painters and printers created obscurer images. on the other hand although only a minority of Poussin's paintings posture obvious puzzles, there is a long-standing drift for most of his champions to treat his art as highly esoteric. a certain quantity of other Old Masters - Piero della Francesca or Caravaggio, for example - have been analyzed not long ago in almost equally complex ways. on the other hand such accounts cannot appeal to biographical information, for relatively little is known about the lives of these artists. With Poussin, through contrast, we have a great deal of biographical evidence from his alphabetic characters and from art writers who knew him - evidence that present-day art historians who analyze his paintings in highly esoteric ways inevitably must override.

real often Poussin scholars seek the greatest in quantity complex possible readings of his words (and art); after all, he was the philosopher-painter. In To pull down Painting, for example, Louis Marin says that "The Arcadian Shepherds enumerates in what is at one time a musical and plastic manner, the twinkling of an eye when the song of the origin is interrupted, the silent point of time when history intrudes upon the scene"(3) This actual elaborate analysis seems to me on the contrary the fanciful play of a great scholar. Marin's work has been much praised, in like manner the problem here must be mine. After proposing a highly cunning relationship between Poussin and Caravaggio, Marin stops to ask if when Andre Felibien said "Poussin could not bear Caravaggio and said that he had approach into the world in order to ruin painting," he did not mean something simple. "It could be argued that my interpretation . . is obviously excessive, the point being that Felibien simply intended to say that Poussin did not like - absolutely did not like - Caravaggio's work" (p 109) Marin is his possess best critic.

on what account should we not give special authority to commentators who knew Poussin or were near contemporaries? What justifies highly compound modern interpretations? One answer to these questions is that 17th-century writers could not speak frankly about the perhaps heretical views of politics and religion in more [i]or[/i] less of Poussin's paintings; another, that the sheer weight of this lengthy tradition of Poussin commentary may influence by what means we now see his art. actual interesting evidence about the interpretative tradition is provided by the agency of an appendix to Richard Beresford's "A Dance to the Music of Time" by dint of Nicolas Poussin, which summarizes the literature from 1672 to 1994 devot to this painting.(4) When Beresford not absents the commentaries of Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Andre Felibien, John Smith, Walter Friedlaender, Erwin Panofsky, Anthony Powell, Denis Mahon, and many other writers, it becomes difficult to disregard in the way that much verbal evidence. "Very hardly any of those who saw the picture," Beresford claims in presenting his possess interpretation, "can have had any true clear notion of its meaning" (p 51) No doubt the details are sombrous in ways that his discussion clarifies usefully, on the contrary the idea that "wealth be delighted withed to excess will ultimately lead to poverty" (p 59) is neither unenlightened nor esoteric.