The Brooklyn Rail

We have little information on the lives of the great masters . . . We would be interested in learning more about them, about their quirks and their passions. We would at least like to see them as we are, in their everyday life . . . First, their lives were more laborious and more withdrawn than that of artists today; they also had bigger ideas. In this respect, they had to think of satisfying themselves above all else. They would laugh with pity if they came back into the world to see us treat the arts as we do, where success is everything. They were much more concerned with capturing the imagination, and much less with the kind of details that detract, in modern works, from the overall impression.

—ÈUGENE DELACROIX (1830)

Poussin, I think, has a story to tell.

—DAVID CARRIER (2023)

I pursued a degree in philosophy and art history at the Freie Universität Berlin in the late seventies and early eighties. My primary art-history education was under the guidance of the renowned art historian Otto von Simson, who at the time taught about Gothic architecture and Rubens. Thus Poussin was not part of my art history curriculum. I became familiar with Poussin through Markus Lüpertz’s reinterpretations of Poussin’s Arcadian visions using the disjointed languages of Cubism and war, and much later, through T. J Clark’s brilliant book, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, published in 2006. Based on notes Clark had taken taken during daily visits to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in early 2000, when two Poussin paintings were installed in the same room—Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, on loan from the National Gallery in London, and the Getty’s own Landscape with a Calm—the book awakened a profound curiosity in me about Poussin.

Curiosity turned into love after seeing the magnificent exhibition Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008, which swept me off my feet. At the time, I was teaching an art history senior seminar at the School of Visual Arts. I took my students to the Met the next day and used the exhibition to teach them about slow seeing and sustained attention by forcing them to look at Poussin’s paintings for much longer than they were inclined to (by literally blocking the entrance to the next gallery for fifteen minutes with my body). I assigned each student to select one painting that spoke to them and spent at least ten minutes looking at it, not an easy task for anyone, let alone a young person used to swiping quickly through images on a handheld digital device.

The seventeenth-century French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal once remarked that all the miseries of mankind come from only one thing: not knowing how to stand still in a room. Pascal’s observation would become my guiding principle as a curator both in and out of the museum.

After I decided to retire from my position as chief curator of The Phillips Collection in Washington in 2022 after twelve years, I needed another challenge. Having long been an ardent believer in artists’ writings and having previously translated Yves Klein’s writings on art (Overcoming the Problematics of Art, Putnam, Conn., 2007), I began looking for another artist whose writings have not been translated and turned my attention to Poussin, my other favorite French artist.

Art historians and critics were long skeptical about the value of what artists had to say about their own work since they were considered to be too biased. In 1988, I had met two artists, John Zinsser and Philip Pocock, who were then in the process of starting a new magazine, the Journal of Contemporary Art (jca-online.com), to be exclusively dedicated to writings by and interviews with artists. In its first issue, Pocock and Zinsser wrote: “The editorial position of the magazine is historical and documentary. Our intention is to create an accurate source of information about artists in their own words.” From 1988 to 1990 I worked as an editor with Pocock and Zinsser, and from 1991 until its demise in 1995, I became its sole editor and publisher, while retaining the original concept of the Journal. After translating and publishingYves Klein’s writings, I also edited and published the writings of Agnes Denes who since the 1960s has been investigating the physical and social sciences, philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, art history, poetry, and music, and transforming her explorations into some of the earliest groundbreaking works of both land and conceptual art.

Immersing myself into Poussin’s letters meant making deep dives not only into the artist’s life and work—the mundane as well as erudite— but also into the social, political, and intellectual powers and events of his time, both in France and in Italy, where Poussin spent most of his life. In the mid-seventeenth century, Nicolas Poussin—described by Delacroix as the “most classical of painters” and yet “one of most daring innovators in the history of painting”—changed the course of European art, bringing a new intellectual and thoroughly “modern” methodology to painting.

One of the first “conceptual” painters, Poussin rejected the predominant formal academicism of his time, putting thought (la pensée) on equal ranking with the eye, echoing Michelangelo’s notion that the artist’s hand has to obey the concetto and foreshadows Cézanne’s famous statement that “within the painter there are two things: the eye and the brain; they must serve each other.”

Poussin’s correspondence constitutes one of the rarest and most unique documents of Western art history. The majority of the letters that survived (very few of those he received did) were addressed each of two patrons, both major collectors with connections to the cultural, intellectual, and political forces active in the seventeenth century: Cassiano dal Pozzo, arguably the most educated man in Rome who frequented the highest intellectual circles of Europe, and Paul Fréart de Chantelou, who worked at the court of Louis XIII and was one of the most influential collectors and patrons of the arts in Paris. Poussin’s letters are filled with a sense of morality, loyalty, devotion, and even love toward these two men.

Most of Poussin’s letters were never translated; of the few that were, nearly all focus on his paintings or methodology. A number of them, like his paintings, are infused with philosophical, political, and moral ideas informed by his readings of Stoic and neostoic philosophy, and a highly systematic approach to painting guided by principles regarding light, color, distance, etc. and categories such as disposition, grace, vivacity, and judgment. But there are also copious letters that deal with seemingly trivial matters such as running errands for his patrons (like shopping for perfumed gloves or finding the best lute strings), quarreling with collectors and patrons about money, his material needs, and dealing with the challenging logistics of shipping artworks between Rome and Paris in times of war, political unrest, and piracy. But Poussin was never comfortable as a writer, referring to himself in one letter as “a poorly cut quill such as mine” (25 April 1644). Poussin’s successful studio practice required him to be a habitual correspondent, but he preferred to express himself without words (he referred to himself in a letter as “as one who makes a profession of silent things.” Some of Poussin’s more verbose letters were, in fact, almost verbatim copied by him from one of the popular letter-writing manuals of the time, Estienne Du Tronchet’s Finances et thrésor de la plume Françoise (Paris: Nicolas du Chemin, 1572).

Poussin’s words were often crude and vulgar. When he received a book by the satirical writer Paul Scarron, a well-known figure in the literary and fashionable society of Paris, he described him as a madman who performs miracles, “for he has a round arsehole and shits square turds.” When the French court wants to give the house in the Tuileries that had been promised to him by Louis XIII for his lifetime to someone else after he returned somewhat abruptly to Rome, he writes that the man responsible, the treasurer of the King’s Buildings, “deserves to be hanged by his testicles (25 February 1644).

While the letters to his collector and patron Chantelou demonstrate a high degree of deference and the relationship constitute a mostly one-sided contractual bond between Poussin and his patron for rendering services, there is a sense of amicability, even love, between the two men, as well as occasional disagreements: Chantelou complaining about Poussin painting too slowly or serving too many other clients; and attempts by Poussin to chastise Chantelou for not understanding enough about painting. But these almost seem more like quarrels between friends. After Poussin received a scolding letter from Chantelou—who accused him of “not loving him” as much as Jean Pointel (another of his collectors) after seeing a painting he made for Pointel that Chantelou judged superior to the one he had received from him—Poussin felt it necessary to “educate” Chantelou in a long letter—arguably his most famous one— on the ancient Greek theory of modes:

Monsieur,

. . . It is easy to dispel your suspicion that I honor you less and have less love for you than for some others. If this were so, why would I have preferred you, over the past five years, to so many people of merit and quality who ardently desired that I do something for them and who put their purses at my disposal? . . . Why would I have spent so much time running here and there, in hot and cold weather, for your personal errands if not to prove to you how much I honor you. I do not wish to say more because it would require stepping outside the bounds of the servitude to which I have dedicated myself . . . If the fact that you are in love with the painting of Moses found in the waters of the Nile, owned by Monsieur Pointel, is your evidence that I have painted it with more love than yours, are you not seeing that the reason for this effect on you is the nature of its subject, as well as your state of mind, and that the subjects I have painted for you required a different style? This is what the whole of the artifice of painting consists of. Pardon my taking the liberty of saying that you were precipitate in the judgment you made of my work. To judge well is very difficult unless great theoretical and practical understanding are joined together. Our appetites must not be allowed to judge without reason. This is why I want to draw your attention to a matter of importance, which will make you understand better what is to be observed in the representation of subjects that are depicted.

Our brave ancient Greeks, inventors of all things beautiful, devised several modes by means of which they produced marvelous effects. This word, mode, signifies properly the ratio or measure, which we use to make something, which constrains us from going too far, making us operate in all things with a certain mean and moderation; therefore, such mean and moderation are nothing other than a certain style or determined order in the procedure by which a thing is preserved in its being.

From the variety of the modes of the ancients (being a composition of several things put together) certain differences of mode arose by which one could understand that each mode retained in itself a certain variety, mainly when the things that were introduced into a composition were put together proportionally, from which proceeded a power to induce various passions in the soul of the viewer. From this, the ancient sages attributed to each its own property, the effects they saw arising from them.

They called the Doric mode stable, grave, and severe and applied it to matters grave, severe, and full of wisdom.

And passing from there to things pleasant and joyful, they used the Phrygian mode because of its finer modulations and its pitch higher than any other mode. Only these two were praised and approved by Plato and Aristotle, who considered any others useless and the Phrygian mode to be vehement, fierce, very severe, of a kind that leaves people astonished.

I hope to depict a subject in this Phrygian mode before a year is out. The subjects of a dreadful war would suit this style.

They also proposed that the Lydian mode best accommodates lamentable things because it has neither the modesty of the Dorian nor the severity of the Phrygian.

The Hypolydian mode contains a certain suavity and sweetness that fills the soul of the viewer with joy. It is suited to divine matters, Glory, and Paradise.

The ancients invented the Ionic to depict the jocund nature of dances, bacchanals, and feasts.

With diligence and marvelous artifice, good poets adapt words to verses and choose the metric feet according to the speech. Having used all three kinds of speech throughout his poem, Virgil  crafts the actual sound of the verse with such skill that it seems as if with the sound of his words he puts before one’s eyes the things of which he writes. When he speaks of love, he chooses, with great artifice, words that sound sweet, pleasant, and grandiose; when he sings of a feat of arms or describes a naval battle or the perils of the sea, he chooses harsh, bitter, and unpleasant words so that on hearing or pronouncing them they confer to us a feeling of horror. Yet, had I painted a picture for you in that style, you would undoubtedly have imagined that I do not love you.

If I were writing a book rather than a letter, I would add some other important things to be considered in painting so you would have ample knowledge of how much I have acquired to serve you well. For however highly intelligent you may be in all things, I fear that the inadequate artistry of the many foolish and ignorant people with whom you are surrounded may be contaminating your judgment. I remain, forever,

Monsieur,

your very humble and very faithful servant

—LE POUSSIN

(24 November 1647)

Poussin returns to Chantelou’s accusation of favoring another collector more than him in his next letter, writing that “were I not of the opinion that you are more sophisticated than he is with regard to painting, I would have made no effort to satisfy you with what the Italians call leccatura (arse-licking)” (22 December 1647).

After 1642, Poussin received more requests for paintings than he could honor. In addition to the work he was committed to producing for the French court, he worked on paintings for numerous clients in Italy and France. He also seems to have sold some paintings through local dealers. In a letter draft on a sheet with two sketches for a Holy Family, in the British Museum, addressed to Paul Scarron, for whom he had painted a Rapture of St. Paul, revealing not only his disregard of bankers, but his practice of never releasing a painting to a client until it is paid in full:

A box containing your painting of St. Paul will be sent to you by special courier to make up for the time lost since you gave instruction to the Petits [local art merchants] to pay me for it and have it sent to you. I waited for days to hear from you. Last Sunday, I ran by chance into one of the Petit [brothers] who said that seeing me reminded him that he was to give me fifty pistoles for a painting I had done for Monsieur Scarron. Six weeks ago, he was going to send word to me, but as he had been in prison, he had lost all memory of it. Is there ever an honest banker? . . . Now you know the reason for the long delay, which may have caused you concern. At last, I received from the said Sieur Petit fifty Italian pistoles, as you can see from my receipt of the payment for the St. Paul, which I have painted for you and which I consigned to the said Sieur Petit in good condition, enclosed in a tin cylinder inside a box. They assured me that it will be sent to you via a postal courier who is leaving tomorrow. I beg you humbly to write, if you please, your candid thoughts to me once you have seen and considered the painting.

(May or June 1642)

Poussin’s paintings had a significant impact on both the artists of his time and those who followed, among them, Eugène Delacroix (who published a long essay on Poussin), J. M. W. Turner (whose paintings were greatly impacted by Poussin’s late depictions of nature, such as The Deluge, whose colors were praised by Turner as “singularly impressive, awfully appropriate, just fitted to every imaginative conjecture of such an event . . . while the sick and wan sun is not allow’d to shed one ray but tears^”), Paul Cézanne (“the Poussin of Impressionism,” as he was called by the painter Maurice Denis, and who resolved to “remake Poussin after nature,” having modeled his Bathers after Poussin’s Apollo in Love with Daphne), Georges Seurat (whose drawing of Poussin’s hand serves as the cover image for my translation), and, more recently, Cy Twombly (who has said that he would have liked to have been Poussin in another time) and Markus Lüpertz (who has been reinterpreting Poussin’s Arcadian visions using the disjointed languages of Cubism and war).

Poussin is considered an “artist’s artist” and one of the first painter-philosophers—a designation earned less for his writings than for his approach to painting, which could be described as “conceptual” in the sense that he insisted on the primacy of invention, of la pensée (the idea, thought, or concept)—the importance of the artist engaging in intellectual work before making any sketches or compositions. He approached his paintings as objects of thought. As the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini famously told Chantelou, when visiting Paris in 1665: “Signor Poussin is a painter who works from here,” pointing at his forehead.

While Poussin toyed with the idea of writing a book about painting, he got only as far as a rough outline, which he shared with Chantelou’s brother, Roland Fréart de Chambray. Centuries later, much of what his biographers took for Poussin’s original thoughts on painting—and had been published as such—was revealed to be merely quotations jotted down from various texts he had read.

Many of the sources quoted by Poussin are fairly obscure today and not always easy to identify since Poussin was very deliberate in altering the original texts—not unlike Yves Klein, the great visual innovator of the twentieth century, who quoted liberally from every book he ever read without ever giving any attributions.

Few artists working today have been more ardently possessed by the spirit of Poussin than the painter and sculptor Markus Lüpertz. A true titan of contemporary German art, Lüpertz emerged from the darkness of Germany after World War II. Unlike his postwar peers, he did not abandon figuration; and in the early 1970s, he embarked on his most controversial paintings, which prominently feature German military motifs such as the Stahlhelm, the steel helmet worn by the German soldiers since World War I. Tropes of war also appear in later paintings that are inspired by Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia Ego, as well as by Alain Resnais’s 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad (which itself was influenced by Poussin).

Poussin’s painting has a special place in Lüpertz’s oeuvre. It depicts the moment when, according to Pliny the Elder, the art of painting was first discovered, but is also a reminder that death rules even in Arcadia, the idyllic, unspoiled paradise praised by Virgil. Resnais’s enigmatic, highly stylized film set in a fictional hotel and shot in various formal gardens in Germany, depicts actors and classical statues almost indistinguishably. Lüpertz has stated that Poussin has been one of two cornerstones between which he navigates to achieve “a very specific visual language, a language of our time.” Another Arcadian painting by Poussin, The Earthly Paradise (Spring), inspired Lüpertz to execute a series of works that deconstruct and recontextualize Poussin’s Arcadian theme by using his signature “dithyrambic” style. Both abstract and figurative, it draws heavily on the visual language of Cubism and the imagery of war. Lüpertz isolates the arm of the female figure and the leg of the male figure as abstract elements. As Richard Shiff has observed, “in Lüpertz’s art, no matter how evident the representation, gesture becomes an abstraction.”

The motif of Arcadia has long held a special place in Lüpertz’s work:

Arcadia, as commonly understood, embodies a fictional realm of tranquility and utopia. It conjures visions of a dream world, serene and idyllic—an aesthetic ideal. My work on the canvas involves transforming this idyll, and then to see to what extent this should be adopted or turned into war.

Of all living painters, Lüpertz most closely resembles the ideal of the Nietzschean artist-philosopher. Like Nietzsche’s expanded vision of art, Lüpertz’s paintings straddle the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the idealized world of representation through form and beauty on the one hand and the contradictions and pain of human existence on the other:

After the war, artists . . . tried to transgress painting, to destroy, to attack it. Not in the sense of this absurdist avant-gardism, but in terms of experience, the experience of painting. And this battle, has to do with the proposition of painting.

It’s this tension that motivates me, and I paint paintings and try to discover and find paintings where I think they’re hidden. And then suddenly, I start to get interested in Nicolas Poussin and Johann Heinrich Füssli. These are cornerstones between which I navigate in order to arrive  at a very specific visual language, a visual language of our time.

There are also many parallels between the American expatriate artist Cy Twombly and Poussin. Both moved to Rome around the age of thirty, and both spent most of their lives there. As Twombly told Nicholas Serota in 2008: “I would’ve liked to have been Poussin, if I’d had a choice, in another time.” He explained that his engagement with Poussin began with Woodland Glade (To Poussin) (1960; Collection Marion Franchetti, Rome): “I had Poussin in my head.”

Roland Barthes has written about “the Mediterranean Effect” in Twombly’s works:

The Mediterranean is an enormous complex of memories and sensations: two languages, Greek and Latin, to be found in Twombly’s titles, a mythological, historical, poetic culture, a whole life of forms, colors, and light which occurs at the frontier between land and sea.

As Nicholas Cullinan, the curator of the 2011 exhibition Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, writes, “the striking parallels between Twombly and Poussin are numerous; however, they are not straightforward.” Twombly shared Poussin’s devotion to classical antiquity, but shied away from religious scenes, and he never painted any portraits (something Poussin did, but not happily).

Yet, like Lüpertz, Twombly was an Arcadian painter enamored by the themes of death and mourning that haunt many of Poussin’s paintings. Poussin was well aware of the shadowy side of his work, having likened himself to Apelles, the fourth-century   BC Grecian painter who was known for depicting the transition between life and death. Twombly was particularly drawn to the theme of mourning as portrayed by Poussin in The Death of Germanicus (1627; Minneapolis Institute). His Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus (1962; Musée d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou) was directly inspired by Poussin’s painting. Cullinan compares “the chromatic games and slippages” of Twombly’s late works, such as his highly gestural 2010–11 Camino Real series, with the “tremulousness” in Poussin’s last works, caused by the onset of a neurological disorder most noticeable in his late drawings and paintings, such as his unfinished Apollo in Love with Daphne. In fact, Barthes’s description of Twombly’s technique (“scratches, maculae, smears, dearth of color, no academic forms”) can easily be applied to Poussin’s late works, starting with the dark, highly unconventional second series of the Seven Sacraments and ending with Apollo in Love with Daphne.

Other artists working today have focused on specific aspects of Poussin’s work. In 2008, the German artist Julia Oschatz created a series of landscape paintings that she appropriated from the backgrounds of historical paintings such as Poussin’s Deluge (Winter). Each painting features the artist’s signature Wesen, a hapless creature with an animal’s head and human body that wanders through her paintings, drawings, and videos on a metaphysical and ultimately indefinable quest. In Oschatz’s paintings, as in most of Poussin’s late works, the landscape becomes the predominant feature, with the figures being almost swallowed up by it, “as if they have been given back to the elements,” as German art historian Katharina Schmidt has so aptly described Poussin’s late landscapes. Oschatz’s Wesen stands in a large, dark cave almost lost to the power and might of nature.

Jutta Koether’s 2009 sculptural painting Hot Rod (after Poussin) is a reworking of Poussin’s Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe. It centers on the theme of mourning and death—the tragic love story known through Ovid’s Metamorphoses but framed here in the context of the 1980s AIDS crisis. Centering on the bolt of lightning in Poussin’s landscape, Koether, as David Joselite writes, “develops a gesture that is deeply ambivalent: equally composed of self-assertion and interpretation, her strokes are depleted of expressive urgency by marking the elapsed time between Poussin’s 1651 and her 2009.”