Poussin as an Ontologist? Part 3: The Dissolution and After-Life of a Conception

     In my previous posts I pursued the suggestion that at least some instances of visual art have philosophical implications. Specifically, I considered a claim from the art historian Philip Rawson, that Poussin’s works exhibited a distinctive ‘visual ontology’, in light of drawings shown at the exhibition ‘Poussin and the Dance’ currently at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. One way of making sense of Rawson’s claim would be, so I have suggested, be taking two steps: first, to adopt something like R. G. Collingwood’s idea that metaphysics comprises the sustained examination of presuppositions. For Collingwood a presupposition is the question to which everyday statements are the answer; and there are again two sorts of presuppositions: relative presuppositions, which are themselves answers to prior questions, and absolute presuppositions, that are basic, albeit historically changing, features of cognition and that are not themselves answers to questions. So in everyday cognition a relative presupposition might be something like ‘What kind of thing is that object?’, while an absolute presupposition might be something like ‘Objects are spatio-temporally determinate entities subject to causality’. Second, one might treat the collection of basic artistic conceptions in an artist as constituting a partial specification of a system of absolute presuppositions. So, following Oskar Bätschmann, one could treat Poussin’s drawings as arising from a limited set of graphic forms and processes—the use of pen for outlining and washes for shadow--, together with a set of basic conceptions of entities—objects as delimited (by pen strokes), articulated by light (unworked areas) and shadows (washed areas), against a positive ground of light (unworked paper), etc. And then one could treat stylistic consistency as a visual analogue of sustained metaphysical thought.

     One might reject this whole enterprise by claiming that one finds incredible the very idea of works of visual art as bearing philosophical implications. I tip my hat to such a person, and wish them a happy life of looking at visual art freed from the burdens of philosophy. I would suggest by contrast that something along the lines suggested above does help us understand why we feel ourselves to be in a distinctive world, and not just in the good hands of a sensibility expressed in a distinctive style, when we consider the works of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Caravaggio, Poussin, Watteau, Cézanne, Picasso, and other European artists, as well as those of other traditions such as Muqi, Shitao, or Hokusai. For these artists offer to the suitably attuned viewer something of the quality of sustained reflection upon basic features of the visual world.

     By way of conclusion I would like to consider briefly two clusters of questions about the distinctive visual ontology embodied in Poussin’s dance drawings from the end of the 1620s through the mid-1630s. First, why did Poussin quit making drawings and paintings of dances in the mid-1630s, though he continued painting and drawing for another quarter of a century? Second, has anything of Poussin’s visual ontology in the dance drawings been taken up, transformed, and put to new uses by later artists? Or is it, however intriguing, simply a thing of its time?

     The first question is not explicitly addressed in any of the literature I’ve read, but on a longer view it’s not difficult to see why he would abandon the ring dance as a subject. As noted in my previous blog post, Poussin arranges the dancers so that they interweave in the foreground. This arrangement (or ‘disposition’ in Poussin’s own terminology) typically has two prominent effects that would tend to work against Poussin’s later stylistic aims. As often noted, the dancing figures are arranged in a frieze-like line. This induces in the viewer a kind of attention that unfolds so to speak in a linear manner, left-to-right or right-to-left. But from the late 1630s through the 1640s Poussin strove for greater centralization of his figures, and aimed to produce foci that would be first noticed by the viewer, whose attention would then spread from the foci to details, admiring along the way the learnedness exhibited therein. (Thomas Puttfarken gives an outstanding discussion of this transition from linearity to centrality in an analysis of Poussin’s two versions of ‘Extreme Unction’ (Puttfarken 2000)). And second, because the figures occupy large parts of the foreground, they tend accordingly to occlude large amounts of the background. But one of the challenges with which Poussin struggles in his later work is how to avoid the conception of the background as an indifferent staging for the foreground actions. Accordingly he attempts different ways of integrating foreground and background. In a few cases, he takes up a Quattrocento-like conception of evident and readily intelligible display of spatial recession. But in many cases, especially in his great body of work of so-called heroic landscapes, he devises novel solutions. In some cases, as Richard Wollheim noted, he treats the forces of wind and light as primarily active in the background, and then displaying their effects more subtly in the foreground. Or he treats foreground, middleground, and background as seemingly separated regions, but then introduces details to suggest that middle- and background details are analogues or resonances of foreground characteristics. So the dance and the manner in which Poussin depicted it had to be abandoned in the service of developing his later and richer conception of composition, integration, and detail.

     On the second question, that of the after-life of the visual ontology employed in Poussin’s dance drawings and paintings, it might seem that there are no such effects, in that it’s very much the later conception very partially described above is a major point of orientation for the succeeding 250 years of European painting. But just perhaps there is a way in which the earlier dance conception lives on. When I tried in the first blog post on Poussin to characterize the earlier visual ontology, I suggested that it involves a conception of space as self-generating. What might that mean? How would the conception become available to a viewer? One way might involve showing an as it were relatively inchoate or primordial area out of which relatively determinate spatial forms emerge. Now recall the overlooked point that Poussin’s ‘ring dances’ do not typically show a ring of dancing; rather they show an instant of dance, a ring-like crystallization, but upon closer inspection the dance itself is revealed as a line of dancers, even, in the case of Dance to the Music of Time, a broken line that seems to form and dissolve and re-form from two linked dancers. Another neglected point is that the dancers usually are not shown consistently linked left hand-to-right hand. Rather, Poussin is careful to include linkage of the same hand, left-to-left or right-to-right. Yet again one only notices this on careful inspection. So it is as if a person’s front and back can be reversed without visual consequence. And accordingly Poussin can arrange any particular figure either frontwards or backwards, regardless of the adjoining figures. And this might carry something of the sense suggested above of the earlier visual ontology, where a kind of inchoate figure is suggested that is neither frontwards or backwards, but neither and both of those.

     Where else do we such a daring visual conception? Consider one of the central works of a great lover of Poussin, namely Pablo Picasso’s The Dance (or Three Dancers) of 1925. The central dancer has her arms outstretched, with her face in particular showing Picasso’s characteristic scrambling of facial features so as to suggest that her face is seem simultaneously upright and marked bent and the neck. A single arrangement conveys two spatial positions. And there in one of the exhibit’s  later dance drawings, Bacchanal around a Herm, we find a dancing figure with outstretched arms and looking to her left at the Herm; yet Poussin has drawn, or really rather washed, the figure in such a way that one is uncertain, at least initially, whether the figure is facing forward or backward. On considered viewing I find that the backward viewing predominates, as it makes better sense to see the two roughly bisecting lines as indicated vertebrae and the cleft of the buttocks; yet the unwashed area on the left side of the torso, if focused upon, perhaps pushes it back towards a frontal view. Picasso cannot have failed to notice the play of orientations in this sort of wash drawing of Poussin.

 

References:

 

Bridget Alsdorf, ‘Pleasure’s Poise: Classicism and Baroque Allegory in Poussin’s ‘Dance to the Music of Time’, in Seventeenth Century 23 (2008)

Oskar Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin: The Dialectic of Painting (1999)

R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (1940)

Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition (2000)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)