There’s a persistent intuition, one that I share, that works of art carry philosophical implications. The attractiveness of the thought does nothing to alleviate its obscurity. Do all works of art carry such implications, or only a sub-set that are especially serious or profound or that address distinctively philosophical issues? The Getty’s current (April 2022) show of drawings and paintings by Poussin whose subjects are frieze-like lines of dancers offers an opportunity to explore this intuition in the developing work of this great artist whose work has long been considered as exhibiting a philosophical subject-matter, namely the philosophy of Stoicism.
The works in the exhibition are from the late 1620s through the mid-1630’s, that is, from the period after Poussin’s arrival in Rome with a fluctuating style mostly modeled on Titian, to his marked shift in 1633 to Raphael as orienting, and the consequent development and intensification of his Classicism that in turn founded the main line of French academic painting, and which exerted such a pull on artists through Ingres and Cézanne until Picasso and even in recent decades with Leon Kossoff. As Whitlum-Cooper notes in the catalog, the subject of a line of dancers first occurs in a drawing from the late 1620’s, and is then the subject of a number of paintings and drawings through the mid 1630’s. (p. 32) The subject then disappears from Poussin’s work simultaneously with a stylistic shift that Anthony Blunt characterized as “a new and more dramatic style involving strong light effects.” (Blunt, p. 44)
One line of thought that suggests itself is that, while works of art generally express something of the world-view of the artist and/or her society, some works of art address basic features of the world, such as the nature of physical objects, or human sentience, or human societies. In his magisterial book on drawing Philip Rawson claimed that Poussin’s work generally expressed a distinctive ‘visual ontology’, one that was a particularly distinguished version of the ontology embodied in the works of ‘Western draughtsmen’ who attempt “to establish a kind of eternal validity for static shapes marked off by lines, and for the closed static structure established by patterns of lines, related to each other across their directions.” Rawson goes on to assert that this manner of artistic rendering provides an image “of an extended present,” and cautiously suggests that it “may be associated with that type of Platonism which accords prime reality or substance to the abstract concepts represented by nouns and immutable class-relation systems.” (Rawson, p. 93)
One virtue of Rawson’s suggestion is that he links the imputed visual ontology to distinctive manners of artistic rendering and composition, that is, to the emphasis on enclosed volumes, and to a kind of patterning across the volumes carried by perceived similarities of lines. I cannot see, though, how the evidence he cites supports the assertion that, however loosely construed, there is some distinctively Platonic, as opposed to, say, Aristotelian ontology. One might rather think the opposite: for though a Platonic form exists in something like an extended present, Platonic particulars of this world exhibit the vicissitudes of time and perspective; while the Aristotelian particular, a synthesis of some matter and an intelligibility-giving form, might well be thought to possess a determinate nature and boundedness evoked by a static shape enclosed by lines.
One problem with Rawson’s attempt to derive a visual ontology from a particular style of rendering and composition, then, is the looseness of the connection between a given style and an ascribed ontology. On Rawson’s account the two are ‘associated’, but the mechanisms through which the association is forged are obscure. A recent suggestion by the anthropologist Philippe Descola aims to supply the looked-for mechanisms with an astonishingly ambitious, global account of basic cognitive frameworks. (Descola 2013) Descola argues that human societies embody one of four distinctive ontologies. Having surveyed a great range of human societies of different scales and on all inhabited continents, he claims that in every case a human society embodies a distinctive conception of two core areas of cognition, which he calls ‘interiority’ and ‘physicality’. And these two areas are in every case bound to a ‘mode of identification’ that centrally establishes conceived relations of continuity and/or discontinuity between self and other, and between one’s own embodiment and other bodies and things. Descola finds that, contrary to much anthropological thought, there is no grand division between nature and culture that is differently conceived in different cultures, but rather four great types of ontologies each characterized by one of the four logically possible. So one type of thought, animism, treats interiorities of both humans and other animals as the same, while animals have various kinds of bodies different from those of humans. Naturalism treats humans and animals as having similar bodies in their subjection to physical laws, while insisting on a radical divide between human and animal minds. In totemism humans treat some animals as sharing both their human interiorities and embodiments, while analogism treats both interiorities and bodies as differentiated. Descola has recently linked each of the four ontologies to different styles of art. So analogism, as in Classical Chinese art, seeks to find analogies between the differentiated individual beings along the human-animal-nature spectrum, while the totemic art of the Australian Aboriginals seeks to show each being as ontologically identical as an instance of and actor in the basic reality of Dreamtime. (Descola 2018)
In contrast to Rawson’s account, Descola’s secures the link between style and ontology in conception, although of course the issue of whether and how a particular artistic style is linked to a particular ontology necessarily becomes a matter of interpretation if the society includes marked different or hybrid styles . But prima facie it’s hard to see how such an account could contribute to explaining how the work of one artist within a society, such as Poussin, could embody ‘philosophical implications’ in a way that, say, Raimondi’s doesn’t. Both artists’ works would on Descola’s account be instances of naturalist ontologies. How then might one explicate the suggestion that art works embodying philosophical implications are relatively rare, and perhaps also valued in part for their profundity? One attempt to explicate this point specifically with regard to Poussin was made in the 1980s by the philosopher Richard Wollheim in his book Painting as an Art. Wollheim discusses Poussin in the context of explicating what he views as a range of ways that artistic painters work so as enrich the meanings of their works. The primary routes of artistic meaning are through representation and expression, that is, through representing some subject, and in ways that cause their paintings to express mental states, moods, emotions, and feelings. Wollheim further claims that artists have other, secondary mechanisms of enrichment; prominent among these are ‘the way of textuality’, whereby what some piece of language means to the painter enters the content of the work, and ‘the way of borrowing’, whereby painters draw from some historical stock of imagery and put it to new and further uses in their works. Wollheim considers Poussin to have massively employed both of these ways, and in particular it is through the way of textuality that something of the philosophy of Stoicism becomes part of the content of many of his paintings. Now, the idea that Poussin was ‘influenced’ by Stoicism is standard, but Wollheim insists that Stoicism enters the content of the work, and only enters the content of the work, insofar as the painter has successfully devised a way of making manifest, not Stoicism per se, but some aspect of Stoicism under the painter’s very conception of it. How is this possible?
Wollheim focuses on Poussin’s treatment of background landscapes across his oeuvre. Wollheim takes up and daringly expands two standard points in the interpretation of Poussin: that his landscapes are expressive of a sense of vitality and fecundity; and that a major feature of his artistic development involves his varying conceptions of the relation between the foregrounds of complex interactions of human figures, and the architectural and natural settings and backgrounds of those interactions. Under the model of Titian, Poussin’s first years in Rome treat the figures and backgrounds in the Venetian manner as emanations of a single mood. With Poussin’s shift towards Raphael as model, the figural foreground and the natural or architectural background become as it were ontologically distinct; nature and architecture are, as Wollheim puts it, ‘a contrastive presence’, like theatrical stages, and not themselves part of the depicted action. (Wollheim p. 201) Or so it seems. Wollheim focuses upon paintings whose manifest content seems to be the old Western topos of reason or morality versus desire in paintings of scenes from Tasso and Ovid: resisting the blandishments of Armida and Erminia and Aurora, Rinaldo and Tancred and Cephalus do their duty, or are faithful to their true love. But where do the male heroes gain their energy to resist? Through a series of daring interpretive moves, of a subtlety and complexity that prevents summary, Wollheim argues that in Poussin’s work nature represents first of all instinct, something obscure within a person that is a source of desire and its energies: “there is within human nature an autonomous force of instinct which in its beneficial operation retains its link with birth, with propagation, with self-renewal, a link which, in turn, involves an acceptance of death—an acceptance, I suppose both of the fact of death, and of our deathly or destructive side. And this conception permeates the whole of Poussin’s work, with time acquiring elaboration, subtlety, and the stain of pessimism.” (Wollheim, p. 207)
If one accepts Wollheim’s account, it’s not difficult to see how Poussin’s work has ‘philosophical implications’, in that it embodies a distinctively and unarguably profound conception of human desire, reason, morality, and mortality. But there’s nothing, so it would seem, to encourage the thought that part of the philosophical implications of Poussin’s art involves the presentation of a distinctive visual ontology. Perhaps this is no cause for regret, and Rawson’s claim should be abandoned. And a fortiori there’s no reason to think that the dance theme of the exhibition is of more than an attractive gimmick. Wollheim does note that in Poussin’s first Roman phase he presents figures as “part of a frieze stretched out in front of nature”, (Wollheim p. 201) and this in the service of treating nature as something separate from humanity. But might there be some further philosophical implications carried by the works that present a dance? And might Poussin’s employment of this motif reveal something of a distinctive visual ontology? In part two I’ll address these questions with the aid of Oskar Bätschmann’s analysis of the basic conception embodied in Poussin’s drawing practice.
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References:
Oskar Bätschmann, Poussin: The Dialectics of Painting (1999)
Anthony Blunt, The Drawings of Poussin (1979)
Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)
-----‘The Making of Images’ (2018) in Thomas Fillitz and Paul van der Grijp (eds.), An Anthropology of Contemporary Art: Practices, Markets, and Collectors
Philip Rawson, Drawing (1987)
Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, ‘Animating the Frieze’ in Emily A. Beeny and Whitlum-Cooper (eds.), Poussin and the Dance (2021)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)