The Lyon Museum of Fine Arts brings Poussin’s work to life
Love, love, love... that we always talk about... sang Mouloudji. Is it because it was absolutely necessary to bring out the heavy artillery to make the general public want to come and visit an exhibition dedicated to Poussin, that the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon has focused on a theme that is all the more attractive as he is surrounded by eroticism? History does not officially say so. But when we know to what extent Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) today carries in his wake a reputation for icy classicism and abstruse intellectualism, we might think that it was indeed time to warm things up!
Which is not as difficult as one might have imagined: this French painter "promoted leader of academicism a few years after his death", as Isabelle Manca-Cunert recalls in her article for the magazine L'Oeil of this month of December, never hesitated to act in the naughty genre when it came to painting pictures to sell to the rich enlightened amateurs of his time. Except that these paintings are not necessarily those which have remained in posterity, due to propriety. Some were even “disattributed by the best Poussin experts, who considered them vulgar and even pornographic,” specifies the journalist.
“This truncated and biased vision of his work, from which we are only just beginning to emerge, goes back very early, because, from the 17th century, licentious paintings were amended, even vandalized. The great art lover Loménie de Brienne describes, without batting an eyelid, having cut out a painting of Venus that contravened good morals. While significant gaps observed on the buttocks of voluptuous beauties still bear witness to the treatment inflicted on these Poussin paintings deemed unworthy. »And Isabelle Manca-Cunert adds, full of hope: “Let’s bet that the time has finally come to admire Poussin without filter or prejudice! »
The exhibition “Poussin et l'amour”, visible until March 5, 2023 at the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon and organized in partnership with the Louvre museum, is therefore a fantastic opportunity to discover a painting that is much more greedy and sensual than we imagined, far from this too cold and too intellectual painting often attributed to Poussin in the collective imagination. Poussin who was even, well after his death, erected as a herald of the color dispute, this famous aesthetic dispute which animated the cultural scene of the last quarter of the Grand Siècle, this time of the reign of Louis XIV. While Poussin represented drawing, Rubens represented color, for painters quick to confront each other in this very lively debate opposing in a very schematic way the proponents of an art "à la Poussin", which would therefore be governed by the rule, technique and the ideal, to followers of spontaneity, nature and freedom.
At the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon, there is no doubt: “The genius of Nicolas Poussin has not yet revealed its secrets. The artist is always considered difficult, severe. He is the master of the French classical school, the archetype of the philosophical painter. Who knows today that he also indulged in the pure pleasure of painting, deploying the most licentious iconography? », Ask the three curators of this exhibition. “It is thanks to the theme of Love, which has rarely been so central in the work of an artist, that we would like to discover this little-known Poussin, sensual, seductive and seductive. »
One only has to look at Venus spied by two satyrs, a painting painted around 1626, exceptionally on loan from the Zurich Museum of Fine Arts, to measure the level of provocation that could be achieved by Chick. A scene of collective masturbation is clearly depicted. And the audacity of this scene places it resolutely in the register of the forbidden in the middle of 17th century Europe. The artist didn't care. Having recently settled in Rome, where no one knew him, he happily produced this type of paintings as so many paintings to sell to make a living from his work, and he was in great demand by fans of his personal art market.
The Death of Chioné, one of the recent acquisitions of the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, is the starting point for this exhibition unfolding the common thread of this theme of love. The painting painted by Nicolas Poussindirectly in Lyon around 1622, to respond to the commission of a silk worker from Lyon, Silvio I Reynon, is a youthful work of the painter, who left two years later to settle in Rome without any protector. The time was not for well-established art galleries, but rather for the private salons of good society. Love and sensuality are already evident in this painting directly inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This body of a naked woman, her tongue pierced by a deadly arrow fired by the goddess Diana as punishment for Chioné having dared to boast of being more beautiful than the Gods, perfectly embodies the theme of love which will be expressed throughout her life by Poussin.
But then what happened so that the one who was qualified as the “god of painting”, the “greatest French painter”, or even the “greatest painter” quite simply, the one who was brought to the naked by his emulators, the one who two centuries after his disappearance still enjoyed an unparalleled reputation... ended up in France by congealing into a reputation for discouraging austerity? “If the artist no longer arouses the same enthusiasm as in the past, it is both a question of fashion, of aesthetic sensitivity, but also because of the loss of intellectual and cultural references which were yesterday the common base of knowledge of art lovers", says Isabelle Manca-Cunert. “It’s difficult to be enthusiastic about a demanding artist, whose work requires a great visual and bookish culture to be appreciated at its true value, when you no longer have the keys to reading. »
The chief curator of heritage at the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon, responsible for ancient paintings and sculptures and curator of the exhibition, Ludmilla Virassamynaïken, recognizes this: “There are art historians, including seventeenthists, who believe that Poussin is neither a good designer nor a good painter. However, these same people recognize that he is a great artist due to his capacities for invention, composition and expression of affetti. His detractors find that his painting does not exert seduction, they do not feel the pleasure of painting; its pictorial treatment appears dry. »
When we think that generations of artists have praised this painter, from Le Brun to Picasso, via David, Delacroix, Corot and Cézanne, that Diderot was full of praise for Poussin, that Rousseau affirmed that only one painting had struck him in his life: The Flood, by Poussin… That the painter also remained a source of inspiration for contemporary artists and writers like Philippe Sollers or Claude Lévi-Strauss …we only want to go to Lyon to form our own opinion.