Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting - Review

DAVID CARRIER Department of Philosophy Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213-3890

Notes

1. The brochure published by the Frick Collection, with a short essay by the curator Edgar Munhall, tells part of the story of this exhibition.

2. The catalogue, by Pierre Rosenberg with Louis Antoine Prat for the drawings, is Nicolas Poussin: 1594-1665, exh. cat., Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Paris, 1994; it summarizes the literature.

3. Louis Marin, To Destroy., Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 69 (originally published in French in 1977).

4. This catalogue notes one odd detail. In Poussin's A Dance to the Music of Time, a Scotland Yard inspector in 1976 discovered a thumbprint, probably that of the artist. Might it be worthwhile searching for prints in other paintings?

5. Now published as Poussin's Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).

6. John Banville, The Untouchable (London: Picador, 1997). Commentary on Poussin from outside the academic world, not likely to be taken seriously by art historians, includes David R. Wood and Ian Campbell, Poussin's Secret (Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Genesis Trading Co. Ltd., 1995), and Henry Lincoln, The Holy Place (London: Jonathan Cope, 1991). These books nevertheless exhibit an uncanny fascination with Poussin's secretiveness.

7. Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin (London: Pallas Athene, 1995), xiii, ix. This is a reprint of Blunt's 1967 book, with the addition of brief essays by Michael Kitson and Brian Sewell.

8. Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin (London: Phaidon and New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1967), 352.

9. See Mark Roskill, The Interpretation of Pictures (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 19-21.

10. My experience as a working art critic points to the obvious difficulties with her way of thinking. In general, the 1980s artists I met were reading the French writers fashionable in cultural studies. They read Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, but not such American philosophers as Gilbert Harman, Saul Kripke, and Alexander Nehamas.

11. "Que ce soit chez Bernin la presence actuelle de Dieu, ou chez Borromini la recherche vaine de celui-ci, ou chez Poussin le desir de fonder sur l'intemporel de la valeur morale ou de la raison, il y a en eux tous la conviction que le supreme reel n'est nullement dans l'object tangible: lequel n'existe donc a leurs yeux, et dans leur reflexion sur le role de l'apparence, que comme meditation entre l'etre, invisible, et nous."

12. "La couleur du Triomphe de David n'est pad agregee a l'image, mais rapportee a cet objet, le tableau, qu'elle fait exister de par son harmonie propre, comme true composition toute abstraite. Et je peux maintenant suggerer un autre niveau de la speculation poussinienne, un plus secret processus par lequel le futur auteur du Phocion cherche a depasser le conflit, qui se reveille toujours, entre finitude et desir."