今天有幸看到法国古典大家普桑的画展,诗意结构,传统、宗教与神
话,罗马背景。可惜晚年的大作少了一些,早先的还是不行。
Paul Cézanne famously sought to "re-do Poussin over again from nature."
Poussin says: I'd like to put reason in the grass and tears in the sky.
Colors, verses in poetry..., I'm decidely not among those who always sing with the same key.
Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion
Phocion是一位将军,含怨处死,其妻仆捧领骨灰。整幅画面高贵,富
有诗意,这古典画家的创造,源于普鲁塔克的文字,共同造的境。
这是积极的营造,不是一味的写实,含怨叫屈,或抢天哭地。
Here we have more:
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/poussin_nature/arcadian_visions_images.asp
This is my favorite Diogene, Metro Museum titled it wrong.
Landscape with Diogenes
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/poussin_nature/view_1.asp?item=10&view=l
我以前还敲过傅雷美术二十讲中的普桑,在这里:
http://www.mayacafe.com/forum/topic1sp.php3?tkey=1159907057
&&&
Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions
In 1800, almost a century and a half after Poussin's death, the leading landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes laid down this remarkable challenge: "If, after this great man [Poussin], no one to equal him can be found, do not believe the thing impossible: the flame of genius has not gone out." Corot answered that challenge when, in 1825, he set off to discover Poussin's Rome for himself, while Cézanne famously sought to "re-do Poussin over again from nature." In the twentieth century, both Matisse and Balthus set up their easels before Poussin's works in the Louvre. Few painters have cast a longer shadow than Nicolas Poussin (1594–1666): not only French but also many British and German artists have measured their own work against his poetic evocations of the Roman countryside—his vision of nature viewed "through the glass of time."
What distinguishes Poussin's landscapes is the emphasis on the artist's intellect and imagination over the mere ability to transcribe visual experience. Poussin's idyllic Arcadian visions are inspired as much by the poetry of Ovid, Horace, and Virgil as they are by his excursions into the Roman countryside to draw from nature (still a novel practice in the early seventeenth century). Poussin's scenes of storms do not merely explore the sublimity of nature; they are meditations on the unpredictability of life itself. In his 1945 study on the artist, the writer André Gide observed, "With [Poussin], thought immediately transformed itself into image … and intention, emotion, form, craft all converged and conspired to be a work of art."
This exhibition is the first one dedicated to Poussin as a student of nature and a painter of landscapes. It traces his transformation of the reigning conventions of landscape painting into a vehicle for his reflections on art and life.
The Early Years: 1624–28
When Poussin arrived in Rome in 1624, he was thirty years old and had a number of commissions to his credit, including an altarpiece for the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. That meant little in Rome, where social connections were as important as talent and talent was readily available. More important was the association he established in Paris with the Italian poet Giambattista Marino, who, back in Rome, recommended Poussin to the papal treasurer, Marcello Sacchetti. Poussin was also introduced to the papal nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, and to his extraordinary secretary, Cassiano dal Pozzo. Cassiano was a fascinating man, as keenly interested in the natural sciences as in classical culture and an avid collector. He became the central figure in Poussin's early career, commissioning a number of landscapes with mythological themes, including several in this exhibition.
Poussin's early works reveal a close study of the great sixteenth-century Venetian Titian, whose pastoral subjects were much admired. In the words of a contemporary, his early pictures are primarily of "bacchanals, satyrs and nymphs taken from [the Metamorphoses of] Ovid and shown amid ruins and landscapes." Sometimes openly erotic, the paintings vary greatly in quality: many were hastily done for sale on the open market. In 1628 Poussin received at last the prestigious commission for an altarpiece in Saint Peter's; henceforth, he cut back on production and worked almost exclusively for an elite clientele. Although written in the first century A.D., Ovid's Metamorphoses was easily one of the most widely read texts in Europe. Its stories concern the loves of the gods and the transformation of their human lovers into plants and animals. Frequently interpreted as allegories of the cycles of nature, these stories provided Poussin with a poetic basis for his art.
Poussin as a Draftsman
From his first years in Rome, Poussin made trips into the Roman countryside to draw from nature, sometimes in the company of his compatriot Claude Lorrain. This practice had become enormously popular, especially among Northern artists. For Poussin, who disliked the competitive Roman art scene and came to value tranquility above all else, nature was also a refuge. As one well-informed contemporary observed, "He avoided company as much as he could and left his friends in order to retire alone to the vineyards and most remote places in Rome. … It was during these retreats and solitary walks that he made slight sketches of things that he came across."
During his four-decade-long career, Poussin's drawing style and attitude toward landscape changed dramatically. If his figural compositional drawings—in pen and ink, over which he sometimes brushed washes to indicate the lights and darks—are fairly easy to identify, such is not the case with his drawings from nature. In this gallery is a selection of drawings by Poussin, including sheets from what must have been a small album.
Also on view is a series of extremely beautiful studies of trees and forests done in ink washes with a brush. Known as "Group G," these drawings once were universally ascribed to Poussin. However, they seem rather to be by one or more of his contemporaries and have sometimes been ascribed to his brother-in-law, the landscape painter Gaspard Dughet (hence the name "Group G"). Extremely fresh and appealing, they nonetheless lack the analytic character we associate with Poussin. He was not a naturally gifted draftsman: drawing was a means of analysis, and his pen work can seem remarkably inelegant for an artist of his stature.
Landscapes in a Noble and Heroic Style
The intellectual ambition and compositional structure of Poussin's landscapes of the 1640s open a new chapter in the history of landscape painting. Poussin studied nature less to imitate its surface effects than to understand its laws. Similarly, he chose his subjects for their moral content or the range of emotions they encompassed rather than for their familiarity. No one explicates the intentions behind his work better than Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses, published in 1797:
A painter of landscapes in this style … sends the imagination back into antiquity; and, like the poet, he makes the elements sympathize with his subject: whether the clouds roll in volumes …; whether the mountains have sudden and bold projections, or are gently sloped; whether the branches of his trees shoot out abruptly in right angles from their trunks, or follow each other with only a gentle inclination. All these circumstances contribute to the general character of the work, whether it be of the elegant, or the more sublime kind. … A landscape thus conducted under the influence of a poetical mind, will have the same superiority over the more ordinary and common views, as Milton's Allegro and Pensoroso have over a cold prosaick narration or description.
It has been persuasively argued that Poussin embraced the tenets of Stoicism, with its emphasis on reason and detachment in the face of the "storms of life." This philosophy deeply informs his work. Between 1640 and 1642 Poussin was in Paris, where he had been summoned by Louis XIII. Unhappy with court life, he took the first opportunity to return to Rome, retaining admiring patrons among his countrymen.
Poussin's Late Drawing Style
The drawings in this gallery date from the last decade and a half of Poussin's activity. They possess that clarity of composition counterbalanced by a profoundly poetic sensibility that characterizes his finest work. The various aspects of nature are explored through myth and legend; the figures are as though embedded in the landscape. The pen work of these drawings gives poignant testimony to the shaking hand that eventually caused Poussin to abandon painting altogether. Paradoxically, this tremulousness confers on them a haunting beauty—the appearance almost of artlessness. One is reminded of Diderot's observation: "All that is true is not naïve, but all that is naïve is true, with an exciting, original and rare truth. Nearly all Poussin's figures are naïve, that is, purely and perfectly what they have to be."
The Poetic Landscapes
The landscapes painted by Poussin in the last decade of his career constitute one of the benchmarks of Western art. In them mythology and the stories of the Bible are transformed into allegories of the regenerative powers of nature. What the essay was for Michel de Montaigne, that great observer of human behavior in sixteenth-century France, landscape became for Poussin: a means for expressing his thoughts on life. Through his mastery of light and formal structure, a mood is created, while to the attentive viewer the story suggests a chain of associations. Poussin expected viewers to "read" a picture much as we would a poem. As with a poem, the meanings we draw from these profound masterpieces will depend very much on what we bring to them and the degree to which we allow ourselves to be seduced by their exalted language. Small wonder that they have had such a profound influence on later artists and poets, including that great poet of nature Wordsworth, who, we are told, admired "the unity of design that pervades them, the superintending mind, the imaginative principle that brings all to bear on the same end" and further remarked that "he would not give a rush for any landscape that did not express the time of day, the climate, the period of the world it was meant to illustrate, or had not this character of wholeness in it."
The Engaged Viewer
In summer 1665 the great Roman sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini was in Paris working for Louis XIV. His companion during his stay was none other than Poussin's friend and patron Paul Fréart de Chantelou. Bernini spent much of his free time visiting the major monuments and outstanding private collections of Paris. Chantelou kept a diary that gives us insight into the kind of engaged viewing that Poussin's paintings inspired. The following quote from the diary describes Bernini's visit to Chantelou's house, where the high point was the examination of a series of pictures depicting the seven sacraments, which Chantelou kept in a separate room, behind curtains, to enhance the viewing experience.
I had uncovered the Marriage, which [Bernini] examined … in silence, drawing aside the curtain which hid part of a figure that is behind a column. They [Bernini and his sons] admired its qualities of grandeur and majesty and studied the whole with the greatest attention. Coming to details, they admired the nobility and the intentness of the girls and women whom he has introduced into the ceremony. … I had the Extreme Unction got down and placed it near the window so that the Cavaliere [Bernini] could see it better. He looked at it standing for a while, and then got onto his knees to see it better, changing his glasses from time to time and showing his amazement without saying anything. At last he got up and said that its effect on him was like that of a great sermon, to which one listens with the deepest attention and goes away in silence while enjoying the inner experience. … On getting up he declared, "Today you have caused me great distress by showing me the talent of a man who makes me realize that I know nothing". … At last he said, "In my opinion these pictures are equal to those of any other painter in the world."
Poussin's landscapes invite and, indeed, require this level of engagement.
- Re: Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visionsposted on 02/18/2008
谢谢分享! - Re: Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visionsposted on 02/18/2008
谢信息。xw 同学真好学,总是把咖啡从吃喝玩乐往高处不胜寒的阳春白雪里拽,用心良苦也。
惭愧,惭愧,得向你学习,努力多看展览,多听音乐,多读书。下周末就去 Met 补课。 - Re: Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visionsposted on 02/18/2008
谢谢象罔,昨天我也去关山月美术馆看了丹麦艺术家麦柯奎恩的油画展了,不知道你是否了解他的作品?对他有何感受?
- Re: Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visionsposted on 02/18/2008
xiaoman wrote:这个不知道啊,麦柯*奎恩罗马字母怎么拼,我网上找不到。
谢谢象罔,昨天我也去关山月美术馆看了丹麦艺术家麦柯奎恩的油画展了,不知道你是否了解他的作品?对他有何感受?
只找到一篇纸上谈兵的,愈读愈不明。
http://www.ccmedu.com/bbs48_30229.html
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