Customer Reviews

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

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Pierre Rosenberg makes the bold claim that Poussin is, together with Cezanne, the greatest of all French painters. Andrew Butterfield in NYRB describes the Metropolitan exhibition as "ravishingly beautiful' and speaks of "magical paintings of unforgettable affective power". Jed Perl in the New Republic asserts that this epochal exhibition "took us deeper into the inexhaustibly complex relationship between nature and culture than any other".

This catalogue will give the reader an idea of what all the fuss is about. The first third of the book consists of erudite essays concerning Poussin's landscapes. The balance is a description and discussion of the 113 paintings and drawings that were on show at the Met. This latter task is left to Pierre Rosenberg, a leading authority on French drawings and paintings.

I strongly recommend this quality publication. The many illustrations are excellently reproduced and the accompanying text is unfailingly interesting. It offers some consolation to those that missed this famous exhibition and a serves as a joyous reminder to those who were lucky to have attended.

Scholarly yet highly readable essays written by a variety of historians accompany a generous amount of high quality color illustrations. The objective of this exhibition catalog seems to be the hope of expanding Poussin's reputation as an erudite history painter to include a real sensitivity to nature and his ability to turn studies from life into highly structured pictorial statements that have as much to say about the narrative as do the figures. Adding to my personal pleasure in this book is the fact that many of the works shown are lesser known, including a number of early works, which encourages a fresh look at Poussin. I recommend this book to anyone who cares about art history, but if you like Poussin, it is a must. The exhibit for which this catalog was written took place in late 2007 into the first half of 2008 and was on view in two venues.

I can't yet comment on the essays in the book, but the illustrations are disappointing. Not for the quality of the printing (which seems excellent, so far as I can judge), but for their size. Poussin's canvases are filled with detail, and seem much bigger than their actual physical dimensions. Production choices by the publisher have turned these virtues into a source of uncomfortable constraint. I compared this with another book from Yale, Michael Levey's monograph on Tiepolo, which feels much more expansive than this one even though Tiepolo's paintings were huge. Had YUP used the same form-factor (just 2 cm wider), and bled more illustrations to the margins as they did in the Tiepolo book, the Poussin illustrations could have been 1.5x-2x the size. (This book does have some fully-bled details, but that's not the same as seeing the whole picture.) Many of Poussin's canvases are like windows onto another world; this illusion would be stronger if the reproductions were to go all the way to the edges of the page. The book is nicely bound, and lies flat, so this wouldn't impair readability. Maybe one could defend leaving white margins around the reproductions, on grounds that they emphasize the small size and finiteness of the original canvases; but then making the book slightly wider would have been the least the publisher should have done. For those who saw the original show, this may be a wonderful souvenir of their lived experience. But since I neither was so fortunate, nor have the eyesight of a teenager, in lieu of nostalgia I feel frustration at missing so much of what's going on in each canvas.

[POSTSCRIPT 2011/11: I received an email asking for more specifics about the size of the reproductions. The canvases that were in the original exhibition are printed with a width of up to 19.7 cm (some slightly less); the height varies with the size of the original canvas, but the larger ones were about 14.5 cm. So the biggest area is not quite double (about 187%) that of a typical picture-postcard, such as one I recently received from overseas. This may sound generous, but if you're past age 45 or so you'll need good eyes to see the details without a magnifying glass: Poussin is not Barnett Newman. As is typical in scholarly art history books, there are some other pictures (other works by Poussin, or by his contemporaries or antecedents) reproduced in the margins of the historical essays, about 8.5 cm wide. While in some books these supporting illustrations would be in black & white, happily they're in color here.]

I would politely disagree with the other reviewer who was not happy with the size of the illustrations. Considering that Poussin's canvases were very large, it was always going to be unrealistic to expect a book anywhere near their size. The publishers have overcome this to a certain extent by providing a generous number of close-ups and details, giving an excellent insight into the master's technique. This is a magnificent volume all in all - the essays are satisfyingly detailed and erudite, but clearly and cogently written, and the quality of illustrations is splendid - the whole volume glows with jewel-like colour. I hesitated for a long while before ordering this - it's not cheap - but am now very glad that I did. I very warmly recommend this to all other lovers of landscape painting and Poussin himself.