Word: poussins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Poussin, the real contained the ideal. He did not generalize like an academic classicist. His paintings are full of precisely observed detail -- pebbles and flowers, plants and springs of water. The atmosphere in which forms are bathed is real, whether it's the blue silken light of spring in the Roman campagna or the thick darkness that envelops a landscape when a storm gathers and lightning strikes. (The dramatic mystery of Poussin's foul-weather scenes carries you back to Giorgione's Tempesta.) The architecture of his backgrounds evokes a perfect antiquity, embedded in Nature but not disfigured by Time...
...groundwork for those achievements is recorded in Poussin's drawings. Though only a fraction of these works survives, Poussin the draftsman rewards all the attention you can give him. This is so despite the fact that he never seems to have done a highly finished demonstration drawing, a show of virtuosity for others, such as was common among other 17th century artists. All his drawings were for his own use, memory aids or steps toward a finished composition, and they don't bother with seducing the eye. They are pragmatic expressions of the desire to understand a pose...
...Poussin wanted to reconstitute antiquity in his paintings by grasping its root: energy. Always in his best work there are the signs of overflowing vitality, constrained by form's superego, the mode -- tragic, idyllic, epic, sacred. The Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, 1638, is such a painting. % Poussin based it on a classical source -- Flavius Josephus' account of the sack of Jerusalem by the Emperor Titus and his army. Its obvious formal prototype is the Roman battle sarcophagus, with figures arrayed in a frieze; its pictorial roots, expressed in the nobly articulated figures of enslaved Jews and conquering centurions...
...pressure of both mystery and reality that makes Poussin so unacademic. He was an idealist. The world he painted, in all its mythographic richness, was not fallen. Neither sin nor decay was part of it. The young man in The Inspiration of the Poet, circa 1631, glancing upward while the imperious hand of Apollo redirects his attention to the text in his hand and the muse Calliope gives him a level look of benign assessment, might as well be Poussin himself. The allegory unfolds in a luminous calm but is grounded by discreet observation: the relaxed pose of Apollo...
...Poussin also found a special relationship between architecture and the human body. On his return to France, Poussin visited Nimes (as Thomas Jefferson would, 150 years later) to admire its Roman temple, the so-called Maison Carree. "The beautiful girls you will have seen at Nimes," he wrote to Chantelou, "will not, I am sure, delight your spirits less than the sight of the beautiful columns ... since the latter are only ancient copies of the former." One of his finest late paintings, Eliezer and Rebecca, 1649, was conceived in exactly this spirit. Nowhere, perhaps, in 17th century painting is there...