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For artists and art historians and other museumgoers who have been returning to the Poussin show time and again, the wonder of his art has everything to do with a pictorial self-consciousness that always leaves room for the unconscious to emerge. And this view of Poussin has larger implications, for it contradicts the general idea that classicism is, first and last, a style based on control. I am struck by Poussin's unwillingness to allow men and women and the world they have made ever to entirely dominate his landscapes. From time to time he cuts off our view of a figure by setting its lower half behind a rise in the land, or he breaks up the symmetry of a building with an overlay of foliage. The natural world and the human world are always in competition, which serves to remind us that Poussin's classicism involves the discovery, for each painting, of an experimental order, a provisional order. While his classicism sometimes suggests the coolness of a northerner's nostalgic embrace of southern possibilities, it is not for nothing that he lived most of his life in Rome. He knew classical art firsthand--not as a series of engravings in a portfolio, but as the battered fragments of stone and metal and frescoed plaster that had been pulled out of the rich Italian soil. He never forgot that idealism must be wrested from realism, that general principles must be deduced from particularities.
I have to admit that I was unprepared for the urgency that I have experienced every time I return to this exhibition. At a time when the world around us, political or economic or cultural, seems more disheartening than it has been in at least a generation, there is something thrilling about Poussin's conviction that the discipline of painting can make life a little easier to bear. In one of the most enigmatic canvases in the exhibition, the Landscape with Three Men from around 1650, a discussion is in progress. One figure, reclining on the grass, is pointing toward the blue-tinted mountains in the distance, while a man with a staff, probably a traveler, points in another direction, guiding our eyes toward the right margin of the canvas. Surely these two gestures, as clear as the symbols in a geometry book,
