Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions
The Metropolitan Museum or Art
There has always been a long standing division among painters. Two camps formed and where you stood in that camp said a great deal about your personality and sensibilities to painting and art in general. One was either a Poussinist, or a Rubensist. The first, Nicolas Poussin was the classicist portraying the gods and myths of a time and a place unapproachable but the common man. He painted a dream of Eden and filled it with a fantastic notion that was really quite impossible. Peter Paul Rubens on the other hand loved the flesh of humankind. He was a realist as I would say and painted with a fluid, almost erotic brushstroke exposing the wrinkles and cleavage of every figure. I have always been a Rubensist.
When I first approached Poussin in undergrad I saw him as just too stuffy. His narratives of history and mythology of old moldy Rome bored me. He put the figure in a landscape as one hangs an ornament on a tree; just a touch of the human surrounded by vast, lush greens. Don’t get me wrong, I love the landscape, but searching around for wee robed women on rocks was not how I thought of nature. Then, I saw Rubens. His canvases were orgies of flesh and gesture. In his The Raising of the Cross, (1610) whirling figures gyrate and dance depicting so much more then a “story.” These paintings spoke of life, and death and sex and love and lust…all the things that make us the confused, wonderful human race. S o why go into this whole comparison? What has Rubens’s fleshy paintings have to do with Poussin at the Met?
The present exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Poussin’s landscapes and drawings from nature is so completely sublime that I think I have been converted. I walked through those galleries as if bathed in holy light and denounced my former allegiance to the decadence of Rubens. Perhaps it is because I am older then I was when I first looked at his work. Perhaps Poussin like most great painting takes a certain amount of time to unfold. It demands a certain degree of patience. For Rubens its right out there, teasing and taunting your visual experience. Poussin, well he makes you work for it. The figures in his landscapes don’t reveal (or expose) themselves too easily and you have to search them out. In the searching you realize you are getting lost in this landscape that may very well be idealized and impossible, but perhaps that is precisely why I loved them so much. Poussin’s landscapes could very well be a social critique and I find it not coincidental that the Metropolitan put this show together now.
We live in a very troubled moment ravaged by war and poverty, international turmoil and political unrest. Walking into this show I was suddenly aware that all those feelings, all those anxieties were slowly melting away. What Poussin presents in these paintings is a choice. The choice is that of something other then the present fleshy, self indulgent status quo. He is presenting a situation that allows you to visually shut up, look explore and wander amongst his landscape. He wants us to loose ourselves not in decadence but in something that is truly unorthodox, truly sublime.
The sublime as would be traditionally understood is a dialectic of pleasure and pain, an
unsurpassable fear and exhilaration that occurs when we are so close to the edge of terror, but just out of reach of harm. As humans we thrive on these moments because they offer a certain degree of clarity. The Sublime reminds us how small we really are, and it puts us in a moment where we are snapped out of our everyday understanding of self and surrounding. Poussin reminds us too, he puts the figure in the landscape as a small insignificant note. We exist in his landscapes as children running from a storm or confronting the unwavering power of nature. But there is also play and mirth and moments of quite that allow us to slow down, investigate and remove ourselves from our everyday.
This is not to say that Poussin is only depicting the glory and quite of nature. In some of his canvases he approaches subjects as taboo and shocking as Rubens does. In Venus (or a nymph) spied on by Satyrs, a scene of pure sexual decadence is shown to us. The character of Venus is depicted as a reclining, voluptuous nude. She lies back with one hand delicately placed between her legs, a look of ecstasy or post coital bliss on her face. She is presently masturbating or has possibly just finished as a Satyr pulls away a cloth that is covering her. The other Satyr looks on from behind a tree; his expression is both surprise and delight as his left arm reaches down to possibly pleasure himself. Poussin is taking major risks with a painting like this disguising immoral human tendency through myth and landscape painting.
Poussin and Nature is a gem of a show and I suggest taking an entire day to slowly work through each room. Spend the most of your time on the galleries of drawings which were done on trips into the country side, most of all in brown ink and brush on paper. These little discoveries gave me the most joy. His subtly of mark and ability to capture his soundings forced me to take that extra time to really look at these drawings. Poussin’s message is entirely that; an arena to slow down. This show forces us to take a moment out of the everyday and enter a world where we are small, and the grandeur of nature is encompassing, frightening and sublime.
