The Paradoxes of Poussin
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Nicolas Poussin, The Abduction of the Sabine Women, ca. 1633–34. Oil on canvas, 60 ⅞ × 82 ⅝ inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
My interest in Nicolas Poussin lies in the complexities of his art and his legacy. He impacted many later artists, and most importantly for me, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Like Ingres, Poussin is an artist that traditionalists look up to, but was also beloved by the avant-gardists such as Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne.
Poussin was a contrarian in his own context and time, rejecting Baroque painting and loathing Caravaggio. I call him an anti-institutional artist, as he preferred to work for private clients rather than for the Church and the State, yet paradoxically institutions are built upon him. Poussin is one of the cornerstones of the French Academy. Jacques-Louis David, who was so influenced by him, was the ultimate propagandist, first for the Revolution and then Napoleon.
There is an alternating current in art history between classism and anti-classism: Mannerists/Anti-Mannerists, Poussin/Peter Paul Rubens and Eugène Delacroix/Ingres. Neoclassists (anti-anti-classism as I think of it) return to Raphael and Poussin. Raphael was the hero of all the neoclassists and like him, Poussin was and still is a polarizing figure.
As post-modernists, we have been living in a Mannerist, anti-classicist period, therefore contemporary taste finds Raphael and especially Poussin hard to love. However, he cannot be ignored as there are echoes of him and Neoclassism, in Return to Order and Craft movements, Anti-Expressionism of Neue Sachlichkeit, and finally reemergence of painting, especially figurative painting of our own period.
Poussin’s paintings are paradoxical formally as well. His paintings are not grand in scale, but they feel grand. Although the scale is modest, they are not intimate, but rather public in their ambition.
High Renaissance codified the relationships between the contrast of value (light and dark) and saturation (bright and dull) of color seeking balance. Poussin’s earlier landscape, “Italian” paintings, which were influenced by Giovanni Bellini and Titian follow that prescription. They are balanced and harmonious. The paintings from the 1630s, where figures are foregrounded with architecture serving as backdrop, strike a dissonant note. I am thinking of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially Poussin’s The Abduction of the Sabine Women (ca. 1633-34). The local hues and some of the shadows in the figures are too strong for the overall tonality of the paintings. This disruption of balance and fragmentation produces a cinematic effect that is violent and hallucinatory. They are strikingly original and very different than the art that influenced him and stand apart from the art that emerged as a result of his influence.
Matvey Levenstein’s delicate and exquisitely rendered paintings explore themes of history and representation. His paintings and works on paper are filtered through the most traditional painterly genres—the landscape, the still life, and the portrait—and are imbued with a distinctly literary sensitivity; they are quiet meditations on the relevance of Romanticism in the twenty-first century.