The Brooklyn Rail

“Fear of the stars does not disappear… At the very moment when great thinkers are striving to throw off the humiliating yoke of cosmic bodies as such, they tremble before the mysterious divinities which inhabit them.”

–Jean Seznec, Survivance des dieux antiques.

Why Nicolas Poussin? Or, rather, which Poussins over forty odd years?

First, the Phocion landscapes. I was attracted to the paintings’ pastoral elegiac mode and its relation to early modern burial practices and poetic forms of consolation. At the same time, my twentyish self was trying to reconcile my engagement with Poussin’s paintings and my fascination with aspects of contemporary art (say, Bruce Nauman’s early film works). My interest in an aesthetics of difficulty—the object’s resistance to and deferral of immediate pleasure—emerged as a sustained project.

Second, my book Poussin and France interrogated the artist’s formal turn from emulating early Titian to exploring formal severity through the restriction of painterly capacities. How did I, in turn, resist the subtle tonal gradations of the Louvre’s Inspiration of the Poet (ca. 1629) and make sense of the brittle syncopation of his Moses Trampling on Pharoah’s Crown (1646/47)? My book also asked which archival and discursive practices exercised by a relatively small social group were necessary to transfer a set of cultural competencies related to the traces of ancient material culture to political discourse. Antiquity was an abstract repertoire for transmission and exchange, from personal obligation to social intercourse and, ultimately, political practice. Amateur epigraphers and silk merchants from Lyon who exercised their cultural competencies before a painting had assumed an obligation to rehearse formal values (severity, even “coldness”) in significant opposition to other socially burdened aesthetic priorities (curiosité). My approach ultimately privileged seamless continuity between ancient culture and studio practice. This model of reception risked flirting with a taste for the antique (pace Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny).

Third, over the years I found other Poussins. Rather than securing the orderly survival of a complacent antiquity in the work of a peintre-philosophe, I found room in my writing for Seznec’s reflection on a feral pagan culture held in reserve, closer to Aby Warburg than Erwin Panofsky. The ancient materials in Cardinal Richelieu’s chateau and Poussin’s commissioned paintings were marked by violent appropriation and transport by enslaved galeriens. Violence sublimated in Poussin’s painted bacchanals erupted in his drawings of an imagined Asiatic Dionysian cult. In Poussin’s Francis Xavier resurrecting a woman in Japan, the artist represented a failed colonial encounter and French mercantile aspirations. Resisting my aversion to biography, I described elsewhere the artist’s body imbricated in his practice. The inscriptions by trembling hands in late drawings were one index of a body afflicted by a disease—syphilis—attributed to European contact with an America unknown to the ancient Greco-Roman world.

What do these Poussins have in common? The painter’s so-called Classicism does not reveal a process of ineluctable flow. The artist was driven by discontinuity and its concomitant anxieties. Provenance is broken, despite the artist’s attempts to repair it. The past is always alien. This realization enriches my understanding of the anecdote of Poussin reaching to the ground and holding the pulverized marble survivals of antiquity. As much as we might fantasize totalization we are thwarted. Sometimes, when I enter the galleries of the Louvre, I anxiously wonder whether his paintings will yield themselves to my older self. Poussin’s late unfinished Apollo and Daphne painting (1663/64) hanging in the recent Guillaume Guillon-Lethière exhibition was disarticulated and mute.

In writing this reflection, I have been looking at what appears to be the fragment of an ancient Greek sculpture in my room. The object is a resin copy purchased at a flea market. The same form of a sculpted head can be found in Freud’s London study, part of his collection in exile. According to the curators of the Freud Museum, the marble was part of a tomb relief. But we do not know whether the head was a representation of a mourner or the decedent, grief’s subject or object. As a result of its endless physical peregrinations and material displacements, the ancient artifact and its reproduction give concrete form to the syntactical ambiguity of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego (1637–38). Death. What now? Meaning is insecure in Poussin’s paintings because the artist was never fully in control of his resources. And that is what compels me to return to them.