We went to the bookstore yesterday, with coupons. For the first time that I can remember, I’m totally crapped out on words. Nothing in religion. Nothing in philosophy. Nothing in poetry. Just before we leave, Jessica goes through the bargain books and I’m mumbling along with her at this point. Up pops a big book on the Louvre, all full-color reproductions, all paintings – about 800, it turns out. In terms of the kind of global topic list of things I’m looking for – a constant presence in my shopper’s head – what this triggers is ‘Poussin’. I keep hearing Cézanne’s thing about ‘redoing Poussin after nature’. Turns out there are 15 or 20 Poussins in the book. But it’s also great. No Musée d’Orsay, so all the Impressionist / post-Impressionist and so forth is absent. Just the history from Middle Ages onward to 1850 in this stunning collection. It may have limitations, but, perhaps as a consequence, a very pure lineal history, which of course is not at all lineal, which is what a collection like this shows.

             So, two things are happening for me.
             The dominating motif, however, is Cézanne, the cryptic author. I finally have enough Poussin to understand what he’s saying. But now I hear him saying, ‘Avoid the literary spirit.’ That is to say, avoid the story-telling spirit. But, between the Bible and neo-classicism, with its borrowed polytheism and allegory, the history of western art is the story-telling spirit, at least up to the 18^thcentury. But, in the Medieval and Renaissance, landscape and architecture are both story-telling and pure visual motif. The abstract ‘surrealist’ rendering of nature in the Medieval – where imaginative forms are subsidiary defining elements in the composition, with some emotional force – become legitimately surreal in the Renaissance – deepened by the tension between real and surreal as the artists master realism – so that the natural and architectural elements begin to resonate with the immediate emotional and visual force that presages the early modern.
            So what I’m starting to grasp is the whole bundle. I suppose I’ve had a fairly thorough education in the history of western art, at least in terms of present teaching. But I’ve never really focused on it with any directness as a complete panorama. Somehow this book gives me that. But simultaneously, I see how my frame is Impressionist / post-Impressionist, with Cézanne as the pedagogical maestro.

             I am more than mildly surprised that I have never before seen a reproduction of Poussin’s self-portrait. The composition itself is simultaneously formal and daring – severe and balanced, but embodying, at the same time, an integral subversive element, a contained expansive force, held in check by the severity, and therefore not so much explosive as embracing, reaching out from the canvas into the ambient space of the viewer. This, of course, points to the basic parallels in the careers of Poussin and Cézanne. Both begin in a florid and dramatic style, obviously evincing an overabundance of the dynamics of ambition and desire, as well as, in retrospect, a very pure vocational intelligence. Ultimately the intelligence wins out, but only after a profound, self-directed discipline.
            In a sense, I suppose we could say that Cézanne sought to find Poussin in nature. But seeking the formalizing elements of Poussin’s composition within the context of nature as it appears directly to the eye is Cézanne’s particular version of the process that seems to have driven the Impressionists, especially in their later work, as well as driving the change into post-Impressionism. To see nature itself as the embodiment of the simultaneity of transience and permanence, which is one of the core moments of art itself, in a sense returns line and form, that is, composition, to its source. The eye begins in nature. Nature is the determinative condition of the visual.
            Jessica has a postcard of a painting by Cézanne affixed to her dresser, the Pont de Maincy, 1879-80, where the stone and wooden bridge, the water, forest trees and hillside, move directly into the sphere of Poussin’s composition – if, in fact, a little more austere than Poussin himself, in many respects. But nature is never abandoned. The realism is ‘larger’, if I may use that word, than anything in the Renaissance. The nature has that force of surrealism in its literal sense – the elements of the real that are in essence the elements of the aesthetic as the real.

             But one of the things I look at in particular in this passage (with its generic orientation, seeing as I will undoubtedly focus in other basic themes as I work with the book) is the presentation of geological formations in the Medieval and Renaissance. Cliffs and plateaus and strange and impossible rocks appear in the Middle Ages as pure abstractions, repeating, bending, twisting and leaning according to pure visual needs, without any regard to ‘the real’. The rendering is flat and purely compositional. With respect to them, we are in the realm of pure imagination, but an imagination of pure shape and color, dictated by the theme of the ‘story’ and not ‘the world’. But by the time we arrive at Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks, the absurd and abstract forms of the rocks take their force in part from their ‘realism’. An arch of rock, rounded on top but broken underneath, hovers over a landscape of upthrust blocks of stone, in the upper third of the painting, above the head of Mary. It creates a narrow, horizontal opening, cave-like, but emerging beyond into an indirect, primeval yellow light. Other elements in the painting suggest an inversion in time. The infants Jesus and John the Baptist seem to sign each other, although the infant Jesus looks out of the frame. We are reminded of the Biblical passage in which John leaps in the womb in the presence of the pregnant Virgin. But rock as timelessness itself, the cave as the felt place of silence and the idealized figures altogether in character in the Renaissance, directly resonate as more or less purely visual elements, outside any formal allegory.

             Or, to take another pivotal moment, which may be legitimately objective, in a more general sense, and not just a function of my present passage. I can finally focus on the painting here called the Concert Champêtre or Pastoral Concert, which I had always seen attributed to Giorgione, but is here assignedto Titian. One of the brief texts in the book compares the work to Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe. But Manet’s work is legitimately radical compared to the Concert, because he places all four figures in the same naturalistic light in a relatively simplistic composition. The fact that the male figures areclothed in dark clothing does not create an equality with the Titian. Just the reverse, the whole force of the Titian is primarily compositional. The diagonals of light and dark, of soft and hard forms, of the disappearance of the two males as persons, while the beautiful reds of the lute player’s clothing form a central pivot, all of these allow for the naturalness of the wholly nude forms of the women. But the true key is the essentially abstract and absolute light, which falls clearly on the women’s bodies and on the lute player’sclothing and the shirtfront of his companion, and only lightly on the grass in the foreground. This is what ultimately isolates the nudity and allows it.
            Perhaps the dark and powerful tree, whose trunk and lowest branches define the upper left-hand corner of the painting, suggests a naturalistic excuse for the play of light and shade. But the light ultimately cannot be justified naturalistically. What makes it work is composition, but a composition subtle enough to make us accept the whole as naturalistic.

             I suppose what I’m saying finally – apart from the thematic grasp of this shift from pure abstraction through the abstractions of ‘realism’ – is that ultimately nature itself is a form of ‘story-telling’. Every now and then, we encounter a Venus, in this panoramic history of art, that needs no stock postures or allegorical trinkets, who, without being obscene, is obviously Venus by nature.

            Composition arises out of nature and returns to nature, but in that transition, it becomes a ‘story’ in itself.