Poussin's Humour

Poussin’s Humour

by Tony Green

Published as an ebook by Amolibros at Smashwords 2013

Table of Contents

About this Book

About the Author

Other Books by Tony Green

Dedication

Notices

Some Reproductions of Paintings on the Internet

Preface

Part One: Broad Views

1 Studying Poussin

2 Painting as a Practice

3 Antique Theory & Painting

Part Two: Close-ups, or Ekphrases

1 A Preliminary Test

2 The Judgement of Solomon

3 Rebecca at the Well

4 Rape of the Sabine Women

5 Feast of Pan

6 Et in Arcadia Ego

7 Poussin’s Painted Self-portraits

8 Paul Scarron’s Ecstasy of St Paul

9 The Martyrdom of St Erasmus

10 Answers to Test

Part Three

1 Narcissus & Echo

2 The Garden of Flora

3 Fecit or Faciebat

4 Anthony Blunt Writes About Drawings

Bibliography

Index

About this Book

This book hopes it will pose some critical questions of method for the study of the arts. These essays reveal a Nicolas Poussin that has rarely been noticed before. Is that because he has been so honoured as a great classical master – serious painter of serious histories and neo-stoic philosopher – that almost nobody has noticed his humour, or wit. Yet everyone knows his letters to his friend Paul de Chantelou are full of puns. It should not be a surprise that some of his pictures, as this book shows, are endowed with a subtle painterly wit. Both investigations of subject matter and formal analyses have missed it, and art history, has until now been blind to it. What can be done about this?

These essays consist of accumulated observations and thoughts. Many of them will sound familiar to University of Auckland students, because they began as the material of Professor Tony Green’s seminars, from 1969 to 1998. He gratefully acknowledges that without the participation and lively interest of students, this short and not particularly humorous book would not have been written.

Distinctive in its aims, scrupulous in its method, Poussin’s Humour is a highly nuanced account of how Poussin actually painted. Tony Green’s achievement is to locate Poussin’s thought within his painting practice itself, convincingly demonstrating that the medium of art is truly the message, not its poor servant. Full of thought-provoking insights, and shot through with forensic wit, Poussin’s Humour should be read by anybody interested in this most elusive of artists. Dr David Packwood, University of Warwick.

About the Author

Tony Green is Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Auckland, New Zealand. He taught European art history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at the University of Edinburgh from 1960 to 1969. While in Edinburgh he gave numerous extra-mural classes and, encouraged by Anthony Blunt, worked at a thesis on Nicolas Poussin and the Seven Sacraments, which resulted in a PhD in Fine Arts in 1968.

In 1969 he was appointed founding professor of art history in the University of Auckland. He began to pay serious attention to contemporary painting and sculpture and especially to the practices of his New Zealand contemporaries. He wrote many reviews and articles for New Zealand periodicals and exhibition catalogues. He was founder of the Bulletin of New Zealand Art History, which he edited from 1972 to 1985. While in Auckland, he began to accumulate essays on Nicolas Poussin’s paintings and on various theoretical issues in the arts. These were based on his teaching in seminars and they have been extensively re-written for this book. Two of these had ephemeral publication through the Dept of Art History as Rebecca at the Well: Questions of Text & Image and A Shadow in Arcadia. He is also active as a poet.

Other Books by Tony Green

Art History

Nicolas Poussin Paints the Seven Sacraments Twice. Paravail, Lancaster, 2000.

Toss Woollaston: Origins & Influence. Art History, University of Victoria, Wellington, 2004.

Poetry

Londonettes & Underground Reading. Gee, Auckland, 1978.

Doc Oxide & Other Reflections. Gee, Auckland, 1978.

Untold Angels. Gee, Auckland, 1979.

Software. Splash, Auckland, 1986.

No Place to Go. The Pear Tree Press, Auckland, 1997.

Job Number. Paravail, North Shore City, 2006.

Blue-Bottle. Paravail, North Shore City, 2007.

12 MiCRoChips & 2 PIEs. Paravail, North Shore City, 2007.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of both my mother, Frances Tamar Green, and of her brother, Stanley Stecklyn.

Notices

Copyright © Tony Green 2009

First published in 2009 by Paravail | Loundshay Manor Cottage, Preston Bowyer, Nr Milverton, Somerset TA4 1QF

Published electronically by Amolibros 2013

http://www.amolibros.com

The right of Tony Green to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted herein in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data | A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book production has been managed by Amolibros | http://www.amolibros.com

Some Reproductions of Paintings on the Internet

Judgment of Solomon

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=13199

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p =c&a=p&ID=8184

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin72.html

Judgement of Solomon – drawing [Louvre]

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poussin_-_Urteil_des_Salomon_-_Studie.jpg

Rebecca at the Well

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=13198

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:Nicolas_Poussin_073.jpg

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p= c&a=p&ID=8186

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin62.html

Rape of the Sabine Women [Metropolitan Museum]

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=2891

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women.jpg

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p =c&a=p&ID=8205

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p= c&a=p&ID=1147

Feast of Pan

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=2902

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p= c&a=p&ID=8219

http://www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/

Revel before a Herm of Pan

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=2900

http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/pd—13952238/sp—A/igid—2748054/Bacchanalian_Revel.htm?sOrig=CAT&sOrigID=0&ui= 1E0B0BDB824B4E968AE56989309E432F

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin _004.jpg

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p= c&a=p&ID=8221

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin25.html

http://www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/

Victorious David [Prado Museum]

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=2883

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a= p&ID=8230

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin17.html

Et in Arcadia Ego [Louvre]

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=2897

http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/pd—12981597/sp—A/igid—2213628/Arcadian_Shepherds_circa_1650.htm?sOrig= CAT&sOrigID =0&ui=1E0B0BDB824B4E968 AE56989309E432F

http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/poussin/p-poussin8.htm

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_shepherds _of_arcadia.jpg

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin42.html

Et in Arcadia ego [Chatsworth]

http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/pd—12981132/sp—A/igid—2213586/Et_in_Arcadia_Ego_Arcadian_ShepherdsTry_to_Decipher_the_Inscription_on_an_Ancient_ Sarcophagus. htm?sOrig=CAT&sOrigID=0&ui=1E0B0BDB 824B4E968AE56989309E432F

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin_031.jpg

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin4.html

Self-portrait [Berlin]

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=2881

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin _079.jpg

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a= p&ID=8182

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin74.html

Self-portrait [Louvre]

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=19773

http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/pd—11726301/sp—A/igid—1351826/Portrait_of_the_Artist_1650.htm?sOrig=CAT&sOrigID=0&ui=1E0B0BDB824B4E 968AE56989309E432F

http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/poussin/p-poussin7.htm

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p =c&a=p&ID=1142

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin75.html

Ecstasy of St Paul

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=13193

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:L%27Extase_de_ saint_Paul.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin_ 038.jpg

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p= c&a=p&ID=8183

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin77.html

Martyrdom of St Erasmus

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=9168

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin _010.jpg

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p =c&a=p&ID=1143

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin13.html

Narcissus and Echo

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=2888

http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/poussin/p-poussi20.htm

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin _040.jpg

http://www.artyst.net/P/Poussin17/Poussin.htm#1

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p= c&a=p&ID=8227

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin19.html

Garden of Flora

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=13186

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a=p& ID=8192

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin22.html

Adoration of the Shepherds

http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=9182

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a= p&ID=8199

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin24.html

http://www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/

Preface

Les choses esquelles il i a de la perfection ne se doivent pas voir àlla haste mais avec temp jugement et intelligense. il faut user des mesme moiens à les bien juger comme à les bien faire.

Nicolas Poussin, letter to Paul de Chantelou, 20th March 1642.

Only those who exert as much creative energy apprehending the work of art as it took to make it, can break the traps of form that whirl an almost impenetrable cocoon of habit-sense around revelation.

Stan Brakhage. Film Biographies, 1977.

… 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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations, 1953.

Poussin did not eat baloney.

Charles Bernstein. Rough Trades, 1991.

For thirty years the first two epigraphs have been Blu-Tack-ed to my study door. Film-maker Stan Brakhage’s words echo Nicolas Poussin’s across three centuries, almost a translation. But only in the first part of the sentence, the second part, about revelation, belongs more to our time. These two together say what most artists – whatever their medium – expect of their readers. How many of Poussin’s professed admirers live up to that expectation? Thorough, serious but humourless academic rectitude is wide of the mark. Most writers have cocooned his pictures in annotation. Others have struggled to categorise his art, trying to stuff it into some period-style box – French classical, Raphaelesque Florentine-Roman tradition, early neo-classical, or classical-baroque.

I have taken as one of my guides Robert Creeley’s comment, in his introduction to Charles Olson, Selected Writings, 1966: ‘…criticism is not only a system of notation and categorization – it is an active and definitive engagement with what a text proposes’.² Could anyone take Shakespeare, or Cervantes, or Giam Battista Marino, or Michel de Montaigne, or René Descartes seriously, if shorn of their wit, of their play with, and within, their medium? What would they be without their humour, as we call it in our time? Yet Nicolas Poussin’s pictorial wit has been entirely unsought and, therefore, overlooked. I can only put that down to a failure of engagement with what his paintings propose, which is more fundamental than a failure of academic method. Even his puns, in his letters, show no great humour, according to the great Poussinist, Anthony Blunt.

Many writers have taken it for granted that since Nicolas Poussin is the founding father of French academic classicism, his pictures must be mined for a profoundly grave philosophical mind, a mind behind the pictures, in touch with eternally binding rules for art. That has meant concentration on his portrayal of learned allegories, philosophical mythologies and solemn histories. It is usually supposed that repenting, circa 1630, of his youthful sins, he sacrificed the sensual pleasures of colour in painting for austere design and classical style. That is the main reason his art was much admired by the French Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture of the 1660s. Subsequent academies throughout Europe followed suit. His style seemed to resonate perfectly in pictures whose value lay in the significance of their content, the things they represented. The means: coloured and drawn painting, dismissed as in and for itself merely seductive, was always seen as subordinated to an end: superior intellectual and moral content. Style seemed an aberration, a limitation by individual taste, the effect of its time and place, an effect that always prevented the manifestation of eternal truth of, and in, arts of representation. The influence of the academies of art on the methods of academic study of art history should neither be forgotten nor underestimated. Blunt’s own study of sixteenth-century Italian art-theory, and even his study of William Blake, attest to this, favouring the basis of the academies in Florentine-Roman art, in disegno over colore. In English that usually translates loosely as favouring outline drawing over colouring.

I am simply summarising a point of view. Substantiating it would take a thorough critical reading of the contexts in which those historical texts that formed aesthetic theory were conceived. Writers better equipped than I am should undertake that large task. They would do well to begin by following in the footsteps of Julius Schlosser.¹ In this book I do not want to read and comment on texts: my purpose is to write about paintings and painting. For the same reason, I do not want to make detailed analysis of the work of my immediate predecessors and contemporaries.

I have aimed primarily at writing neither about the content of Poussin’s pictures nor about the aesthetics of his style. I am interested in his play within the limits and possibilities of painting. I am interested in his painting as a practice, as a craft, as something that engages the particular attentions of its readers. There is still too much that has gone unseen. I want to get closer to the ‘everything’ that Wittgenstein wanted, the ‘everything’ that is there to be seen, read and understood, slowly and patiently looking at the surface.³ When it comes to sensitivity to readers’ responses at the level of such simple but concentrated attention, Nicolas Poussin is a wonderful master to follow. I have found that out the more I attempt to understand his practice. It is a foundation for thinking about the arts of any place, of any time, as it is with any master. For me, his art has become a constant and rewarding source of reference. I’ll swear that Charles Bernstein is right on the mark: Poussin didn’t eat baloney.

*

This book has been almost fifty years in the writing. When I was a young would-be painter I heard Anthony Blunt repeat his six Mellon Lectures of 1957 on Poussin at the Courtauld Institute of Art History. With each lecture the intricacy of the content he discovered in the pictures increased. Meanwhile, the paintings seemed to be weighed down more and more, decade by decade, not only by complicated iconography, but by drab, dull and sometimes gloomy painting. As my mother-in-law said in dismay when she saw the Seven Sacraments in Edinburgh, ‘My goodness, Tony, he must have bought a job lot of brown paint.’

Having discovered, when I was even younger, that colour was vital to the effect of painting in the art of Henri Matisse, and before him Bellini, Titian, Rubens, Watteau, Delacroix and Manet, I was deeply intolerant of a painter presented as no painter at all, but a contriver of historical dramas. There was, it seemed, no analysis or thought of his remarkable facility as a draughtsman any more than of his painterly and colourist tendencies. At that time I had not thought how the richness and intensity of colouring of Byzantine mosaic, of manuscript illumination or the painting of the early Siennese painters, or the beauty of French stained-glass, were in all probability part of the knowledge of painting implicit in his later paintings. He cannot have got his love of intense colours from either Raphael or the Carracci school. Poussin is never dull, but there are ways of making him seem the dullest of the dull. Blunt, for all his invaluable, intricate and hard-won scholarly knowledge, for which he should be forever honoured, excelled at that.

In my first teaching position, at the University of Edinburgh, I was responsible for lecturing on European art history, 1550-1850. It was now my turn to discover the intricacies of Poussin’s pictures. I had to put on a brave face and lecture on them, not only in the classroom, but also in front of the second set of Sacraments in the National Gallery of Scotland. At that time these paintings were installed on seven walls of an octagonal room, though in higgledy-piggledy, senseless order. I was unable to persuade the then Keeper, Colin Thompson, to consider rehanging them in their correct Council of Trent order, let alone in the right to left sequence, in which alone their interconnections as a sequence would become visible. Poor Poussin, his great masterpiece is doomed to be spoilt in its effect by stubborn refusal of curators to think about the hanging, as if the paintings are eternally to be thought of as separate, never as parts of a series. The first set, on show now in the National Gallery, London, suffered in exactly the same way. Even though Baptism is now in Washington and Penitence was destroyed in a fire, if and when the remaining paintings are set side by side and in Council of Trent order, and right to left, the general arrangement of the scenes, and the effect of the figures that seem to be about to leave the scenes for the adjacent painting, will take their proper effect. How would the world feel about Giotto’s painting in the Arena Chapel if the sequence were variable, and subject to whatever careless disposition a curator wanted to make of them? The fact that Poussin’s paintings are movable oil paintings, and that they are not a series of chronological scenes from a text, is no excuse for wilfully spoiling their probable sequential array by substituting one that is neither probable nor sensible.

My first writing on Poussin was about the arrangement of the figures in the seven paintings. I saw that they would make an effective frieze, when arranged in their correct Council of Trent sequence – Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penitence, Extreme Unction, Ordination and Marriage – but going from right to left, or counter-clockwise. Further, I noticed that the colouring of the draperies of the figures, dominated by reds and yellows, each with its regularly recurring groups of associated nearby colours, ran throughout the series, as a unifying device.

I showed what I had written to Blunt who shook his head and said that I must be a formalist. He suggested that, since I was in Edinburgh, I should write a doctorate thesis on the Sacraments. I kept to my ‘formalist’ proposals for the Sacraments, though a concern for how paintings are painted and their effects is a long way from the ‘Significant Form’ of Roger Fry’s formalism that Blunt opposed. I also studied the development of the arrangement of the figures in the drawings, the sources in Raphael’s paintings and in Counter-Reformation book illustrations, and the relation of the content to Jesuit and Oratorian theological, devotional, and antiquarian writing.

If I had been teaching the specialist students who studied at the Courtauld Institute, I could have used the results of this very detailed erudite work directly and almost unchanged. At that time the Courtauld Institute was the only institution in Britain to teach a complete degree in art history. Courtauld Institute art history was concerned primarily with methodically clarifying the construction of historical stylistic periods and the œuvres of artists. It also maintained a close interest in the kind of meanings that were the overriding interest of the scholars of the survival and modification of the humanist tradition, at the Warburg Institute. That version of art history attempted to maintain aesthetic neutrality. Judgements of value of artists and works were carefully neutralised, by deferring judgement, at least until knowledge and familiarity had been acquired by study, if not, in practice, indefinitely. That neutrality, or indifference, however, was only possible by taking for granted the values by which a canon of great European art and great artists had already been put in place. It was the Academy of the 1660s that put Poussin into the canon, and its assumptions have never been seriously challenged or modified. In the course of the twentieth century, the periods of art for study expanded to include baroque, rococo, and romanticism. In the 1950s mannerism, neo-classicism, pre-Raphaelitism, the impact of photography in the nineteenth century, impressionism, symbolism, and early modernism were still under construction rather than well established.

This process of academic scholarship was richly reflected in the series of books that made up the encyclopaedic Pelican History of Art. It was divided into periods and further subdivided into geographical regions or countries, each with their major and minor artists and artistic tendencies clearly distinguishable by the quantity of text allotted to them. This was intended to constitute a body of authoritative scholarly opinion, based on securely determined factual information. The work of art historians was devoted to discovering and sifting data; to reading documents; to assessing attributions of works to artists’ judgments, to locating artists within style-periods and within the history of ideas; to detecting hidden iconographic meanings, but not to arrive at aesthetic judgments, even though ‘attribution’ and ‘style-history’ seem to require them. Students were expected to follow the logic of the methods, remember the salient facts and adopt the salient judgments, as if they were truths of eternal validity. Eventually they too would be qualified to assist in revision of this encyclopædic knowledge. But this did not include training in self-examination about personal responses to particular works of art, the conscious work on oneself as a subject on which revisions of judgments could be attempted. This system of knowledge was the basis of the implicit contract between students and teachers.

The academic tendency to evade art produced after 1914, especially in art history in Britain in the 1960s, meant that the insistent demand from many students in art colleges to be instructed in modern and contemporary art could not easily be met. It also had its effect on the practice of art history, freezing the evaluative processes that had formed the canon. It was always easy to reject any new positions, based on current artistic preoccupations, as temporary deviations. The assumption was that the existing canon and the existing methods of procedure were ‘natural’, a rational norm of artistic quality. But that failed to realise that the canon, and the methodology that matched it, was founded on earlier issues, opinions, and values in the arts. That was an art history that did not respond easily, if at all, to twentieth-century challenges: to the tradition of figural representation of the nineteenth century by Cubism or Russian Formalism, to the impact on the arts of theories of the unconscious, to the emergence of structural linguistics, or to modern technologies and media. Abstraction in art baffled an iconology founded on the meaning of figural motifs, just as landscape and still-life painting would, because in Erwin Panofsky’s terms, in 1939: ‘the whole sphere of secondary or conventional subject matter is eliminated…exceptional phenomena, which mark the later, over-sophisticated phases of a long development.’ In a revision published in 1955 the last part of the sentence was omitted, wisely in my view. For all its insights into the structures of art, Sir Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion is devoted to a view of art as progressing towards better and better devices for representation.

Art history could not easily encompass irony, contradiction and ambiguity. Has it yet understood how history-painting and its art-historical interpretation are not so much continued but mocked by Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass and Green Box? Has it taken on board Leo Steinberg’s attempts to understand his contemporaries in Other Criteria?⁴

*

In 1960 I was teaching, not at the Courtauld Institute, but at the University of Edinburgh. My students were either studying for general arts degrees or for a combined fine arts degree that included fine arts practice at the Edinburgh College of Art. Few of them had the intention of becoming professional art historians with future careers in teaching in universities or curatorial work in museums, though several of them did find their way to successful careers as curators and teachers. Attitudes to