Poussin was the towering nerd of french art and here's the show that proves it

Alastair Sooke CHIEF ART CRITIC 05 October 2021 1:14pm BST Has any artist fallen from grace as spectacularly as Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665)? For centuries, the French painter of religious

and mythological scenes was considered a marvel of Western art. Then came the modern era, with its upheavals and mechanised warfare. And the qualities that Poussin once upheld – harmony,

order, reason, beauty – were, for a time, abhorred. Poor old Poussin. So, despite the presence of “A Dance to the Music of Time”, an exceptional loan from the Wallace Collection, the

National Gallery’s new exhibition – the first Poussin show, incidentally, ever staged at Trafalgar Square – has its work cut out to persuade punters through the door. And, boy, do its

curators give us the hard sell. They focus on a specific period of his career – the mid-1620s and ’30s, when, having travelled to Rome, he established himself in the Eternal City by painting

bacchanalian scenes of inebriated, half-naked revellers prancing around in groves. The argument runs something like this. You know how you always thought of Poussin as cerebral and austere,

a purveyor of Biblical subjects that appear cold to the touch? Well, check out these wild and naughty pagan pictures filled with drunkenness and dancing and sex: they demonstrate that

Poussin, as a young man at least, could let his hair down. For all his classical formality, Poussin was also “fun”. I’m not buying it. To use a political analogy, it’s like being told that

Keir Starmer is, beneath his dull exterior, as buccaneering and boisterous as Boris Johnson. Okay, while Poussin was in Rome during his thirties, he contracted syphilis, which suggests he

wasn’t a total recluse. But if this exhibition makes him come off as anything, it is a colossal nerd. Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve encountered an artist geekier than this. It took Poussin,

who was born in Normandy, three attempts to make it to Rome. When he finally got there in 1624, aged 29, he was antiquity’s biggest fan-boy. He even carried around a tape measure so he could

note down the dimensions of ancient statues. As the catalogue reveals, he recorded everything, from the height of an instep to the distance between clavicle and Adam’s apple. If that sounds

obsessive and odd, wait till you hear what he got up to back in the studio. To plan his compositions, he laboriously constructed elaborate tableaux of Morph-like wax figurines (a few modern

mock-ups appear in the show), which he placed in a special box, lit just so, and drew. Supposedly, he felt very attached to his little dolls, which are instantly recognisable in his

sketches, thanks to their blank, oval faces, and jointed, mannequin-like limbs. Strange, no? Moreover, Poussin wasn’t the sort of man who wore his learning lightly. Several drawings in the

first room enumerate the ancient sources for his paintings: sarcophagi, bas-reliefs, cameo gemstones. Elsewhere, we encounter impressive artefacts that specifically fired his imagination,

including a couple of neo-Attic kraters (essentially, massive marble Roman garden ornaments), one, especially, characterised by crisp and supple carving. Poussin’s drawings, which

concentrate on the interplay of light and shadow, are often remarkably vigorous. Yet, his paintings damp this quality down. Don’t get me wrong. His clever, complex constructions of

interlocking merrymakers in perpetual motion are immaculate. But, for all the whirligig uproar of the subject matter, and the curators’ promise of raucous entertainment, they never shake a

certain abstract, algebraic quality. For reasons that now seem culturally remote, Poussin wished to imitate in painting the characteristics of a Roman frieze. He wasn’t interested in

conveying the sensation of being amid the melee, grappling with a lusty faun, losing yourself to the primal drumbeat of some Dionysian rite. Rather, he operated like a choreographer,

orchestrating ensembles that, painstakingly posed and lit, would look good at a distance. So, there’s a lot of symmetry in his pictures, as well as carefully arranged chromatic and tonal

accents to knit everything together. Consequently, the mood is measured, detached, even artificial. Given the stagey flavour, it’s fascinating to learn that several of his patrons loved

opera and ballet. In the end, the disconnect between Poussin’s red-blooded subjects and the studied elegance of his approach feels frustrating. Why pretend he is something that he’s not?

These dances are refined, courtly numbers masquerading as country jigs. Too much decorum, not enough rapture or raunch. If you want to see how it should be done, go upstairs and study

Titian’s matchless “Bacchus and Ariadne”. Poussin’s painting on the same theme appears in the show. Everyone loves the former. The latter elicits only cool respect. _FROM OCT 9 UNTIL JAN 2;

INFORMATION: __NATIONALGALLERY.ORG.UK_