Word: poussins
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...fall event of the French museums is the retrospective of Nicolas Poussin at the Grand Palais in Paris, marking the 400th anniversary of the painter's birth. The visitor is warned: this is not an easy show, and given the queues outside and the crowds within, it taxes the concentration of even the hardiest gallerygoer. It contains 245 paintings and preparatory drawings -- a fearsome demonstration of the borrowing power of Pierre Rosenberg, the show's chief organizer, who runs the Louvre's department of paintings. One may even wonder whether it is addressed to a general public...
Ordinary mortals may find themselves succumbing to a kind of ennui auguste by the time they come to the end of the exhibition. But this has always been part of the experience of scaling Mount Poussin. "Some people blame him for having gone a little too far in his austere and precise manner," wrote the poet Charles Perrault in 1700, "but others maintain that these defects are nothing other than beauties which are a little too great for unaccustomed eyes." Among those "others" have been most of the best French artists of the past two centuries -- not only the classicists...
There is no point in pretending that Poussin is an easy painter for today's viewers to get at. He has the disadvantage, for a coarsely expressionist culture, of being incapable of vulgarity or cheap sentiment. His pictures don't reach out across 3 1/2 centuries to diddle your heartstrings. His imagery springs from qualities of feeling and modes of thought that are now almost extinct: educated piety, allegory and complete familiarity not only with the Bible and the Greek and Latin classics from Homer to Ovid, Horace and Plutarch, but also with their Renaissance descendants, such as Tasso...
...Poussin's pictorial thought -- for he was, supremely, a thinking painter, to whom ratiocination was the very breath of creativity -- was formed by two powerful influences. One was the ideas of the Counterreformation, spearheaded by the Jesuits, who called for clarity and vividness in sacred images. The other was the legacy of ancient Rome -- the immense residue of form and narrative from the classical past. There seems to be no evidence one way or the other about Poussin's religious life or the strength of his faith. Probably he was neither pious nor a freethinker, but a stoic who could...
Shearman has written major books on Raphael,Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Nicholas Poussin andFra Bartolommeo, as well as having cataloguedQueen Elizabeth II's early Italian paintingcollection...