In my previous post, as a way of considering in what sense(s) a work of art might have ‘philosophical implications’, I took up Philip Rawson’s suggestion that in his drawings Nicolas Poussin was a kind of ontologist in offering there a distinctive ‘visual ontology’. Two ways of making sense of the claim were briefly discussed: 1. The anthropologist Philippe Descola claims that (i) there are four basic types of ontologies distinctive of human societies (animism; totemism; naturalism; analogism), where an ontology is characterized as a particular way of conceptualizing continuities and discontinuities between humans and non-humans with regard to their interiorities and bodies; and (ii) there are kinds and styles of art distinctive of each of the four ontologies. (Descola 2013 and 2018) 2. The philosopher Richard Wollheim claimed that two of the ways in which artists enrich the meaning of their works are (a) ‘the way of textuality’, whereby some piece of text and the propositions in it enter the content of an art work, but only under the limited conception of what the text means to the artist (and of course only insofar as the artist can make this conception accessible to a suitably attuned viewer); and (b) ‘the way of borrowing’, whereby an artist takes up and re-uses to new purposes some motif from the prior history of visual depiction. (Wollheim 1987) Although to my mind both of these claims are enormously important and valuable in suggesting concepts and frameworks for understanding the arts, for reasons I suggested in the prior post, in neither case do they seem to provide the conceptual resources for making sense of the claim that Poussin in his drawings was an ontologist.
Here I’ll suggest another way of explicating the claim more satisfactorily, drawing from the writings of the philosopher R. G. Collingwood and art historian Oskar Bätschmann. Collingwood opens his book An Essay on Metaphysics with a consideration of the nature of metaphysics. First he discusses the idea that metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that investigates the most general conception of objects. Accordingly this branch is rightly called ‘ontology’, the doctrine of beings qua beings. Collingwood rejects this conception as empty; there’s little significant to be said about such a thin conception of beings. Rather, Collingwood endorses a second way of thinking about metaphysics, as the sustained investigation of the presuppositions of propositions. Collingwood conceives of propositions as in every case the answer to a question. Most simply, if I assert ‘that’s a cup’, the assertion is an answer to the question ‘what is that (thing/artifact)?’ He further asserts that there are two kinds of presuppositions: those that are rightly seen in turn as themselves answers to questions, and those that are not answers to any question. The former he calls ‘relative presuppositions’, the latter ‘absolute presuppositions’. For Collingwood, metaphysics rightly understood is the investigation of absolute presuppositions, including propositions such as ‘all events have a cause’. Although there are difficulties in practice in making out the distinction between relative and absolute presuppositions (on this see Williams 19XX), and although Collingwood rejects the term ‘ontology’, his conception of metaphysics provides a clue as to how to explicate Rawson’s claim of Poussin as ontologist. How so?
We might say that Poussin is an ontologist in offering a distinctive conception of basic features of objects, human beings, and nature, but also and crucially a distinctive conception of the art of drawing and its elements. On the second point, I can do no better than reproduce Bätschmann’s fundamental account at length:
“In his drawings Poussin apportions light and shade to figures on paper, and it is in virtue of this process of division that we perceive them as representing objects. An object is defined by its emergence from division and its connection to light and shade. Every brush-stroke sets down in ink three elements: a dark area, paper as light, and darkness as the shadow of an object. The painted shadow and the paper turned into light counterbalance each other. They make objects appear but continue to manifest themselves as pure contrasts. The things they create—figures, their actions and their space, architecture and the natural world—all remain bound to the surface and to the dialectic of light and shade unfolding through them.” (Bätschmann, p. 3)
I refer the reader to Bätschmann’s own explication of this in his book. Here I’ll consider the first point, the suggestion that Poussin offers a distinctive conception of human beings and nature, in relation to the exhibition’s drawings of dances. Much of the literature on Poussin refers without analysis to the subjects of the drawings, as well as his contemporaneous paintings, as ‘ring dances’. This certainly seems to make sense, at least initially; for example, in the famous painting ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ (included in the exhibition in London, but not in its showing at the Getty Center), at a glance the four figures seem to be holding hands while facing outward and dancing around a circle inscribed in the ground (the circle is more evident in one of Poussin’s related drawings). But a closer look reveals a much more complex, even puzzling, scene of this allegory. Both of the two figures on the left (the woman is Pleasure, and the man Poverty) are plainly moving towards the viewer’s left. Poussin occludes their hands that might be touching, but in any case if they were holding hands and drawing closer, they would quickly collide. The central woman Luxury has released the hand of the woman on the right Time; Luxury is being pulled leftward by Pleasure, and the alternate hand of Time has been grasped by Poverty. If one of the doublets (Pleasure/Luxury and Time/Poverty) continues along the circumference of the inscribed circle, then to respect the boundary of the area for dancing the other must pass nearer the center of the circle. The ‘ring dance’ is not a simple circling, but rather a more contrapuntal weaving.
The earliest of the exhibited dance drawings is ‘Dance Before a Herm of Pan’ (c. 1628-30). Like some others of the drawings and paintings featuring a line of dancing figures, here one dancer on the end pours a libation to the herm, while the dancer on the other end heads between two other dancers and under their clasped hands. The drawing already displays the conception discussed by Bätschman, with the distinctive use of washes for the primary depiction of shadows, with relatively rare pen hatchings for their deepening. The areas untouched by washes indifferently include highlights (Poussin departs from the contemporaneous practice of marking highlights on bodies with an additional deposit of white), ground and background. This, as it were ontologically indifferent, conception of the unworked areas is the counterpart to the compositional practice of linking shadows across bodies (as noted by Rawson with regard to Poussin and a range of European artists including Rembrandt and Goya). The juxtaposition of unworked areas induces the thought of continuities across bodies and from foreground body to atmosphere: note, for example, the adjoining unworked areas in the juxtaposed forearms (and the suppression of the hands) of the libation-pourer and the man whose left hand she clapses; or the communion between the back of the dancer on the left and distant sky. The tendency, though, here and throughout the dance drawings and pictures is for the figures to form a pulsating frieze in the foreground that partially blocks the background, but even more occludes any visual cues that might sustain some sense of graduated recession across a middle-ground. The leading figure who dances under others’ arms sustains these conceptions: the line of dancers does not inhabit and measure a pre-given space, but rather turns in upon itself, a kind of self-churning and –involution.
If something like this sketch of an analysis is right, we can then see how to flesh out the claim that Poussin is an ontologist in his art: the conception of the basic features of wash-and-ink drawing as explicated by Bätschmann fuses with Poussin’s characteristic choice of subject and composition to offer a unique ‘visual ontology’, though one that trades the generality of a philosophical account for realization in a small number of compelling artworks. If one were to attempt to put this ‘visual ontology’ in words, it would be something like ‘a vision of ontologically indifferent spatiality generating itself through movement’.
In the final installment of this reflection on Poussin, I’ll consider one of the later dance drawings, ‘Bacchanal around a Herm’, in relation to a conjectured borrowing from it by Picasso.
References:
Oskar Bätschmann, Poussin: The Dialectics of Painting (1999)
R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (1940)
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)
Bernard Williams, ‘An Essay on Collingwood’, in The Sense of the Past (2007)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)