ART HISTORY: JOHN BANVILLEreviews Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His WorldBy Jed Perl Knopf, 207pp. $25
THE GREATEST paintings seem framed around a mystery; there is something in them that is at once concealed and illuminated. Poussin’s dancers to the music of time, Vermeer’s milk-maid, Bonnard’s unageing baigneuse, Piero della Francesca’s Redeemers and Madonnas, confront us immediately and yet withhold themselves, so deeply absorbed are they in being what they are.
Among these intimate strangers, none is more intimately strange than Jean Antoine Watteau’s life-sized representation of the pantomime character Pierrot, also called Gilles. Presented foursquare for our inspection, Gilles shrinks into himself like a snail into its shell. His silver-white suit is too big for him, which is part of the pathos. Why are his eyes so moist, why are his nostrils inflamed? Has he been weeping? Or maybe he just has a head-cold? Who are those people behind him, who might, jeering, have shoved him into the foreground of the frame before turning back to torment that poor donkey?
Are they merely, like him, players from the commedia dell’arte? And what are we to make of the donkey’s eye, bent on us in melancholy surmise? So many questions, so few answers.
It is easy to mistake Watteau for what he is not. Even his name has a liquid, evanescent quality; it might be the name not of a person but of an essence. At first sight one is liable to lump him in with Fragonard and Boucher and the other enchanting charm merchants of his time, but when one looks for long enough one cannot but recognise his greatness. Samuel Beckett, who in another life could have been a superb art critic, had no doubts. Writing to his aunt, Cissie Sinclair, in 1937, he declared: “I always feel Watteau to be a tragic genius, ie there is pity in him for the world as he sees it.”
What Beckett admired in particular was what he took to be the inorganic element in Watteau’s work: “[He] put in busts and urns, I suppose to suggest the inorganism of the organic – all his people are mineral in the end, without possibility of being added to or taken from, pure inorganic juxtapositions . . .”. Hence the characteristic vagueness of Watteau’s surfaces, in which frequently there is a difficulty in separating off his figures from their settings, and in which the landscapes can often seem more vividly alive than the pensive people inhabiting them. Here, again, is a source of deep pathos.
In Antoine's Alphabet, Jed Perl suggests that Watteau "took as his essential subject the invention of self-consciousness, the struggle to feel fully alive", yet notes too that
Watteau’s work has always appealed to people who are at once in love with the beautiful surfaces of the world and suspicious of the ease with which they’re seduced by a sun-dappled garden, a beautifully cut silk dress, the smiling eyes of a person they barely know.
In Jed Perl – a Watteauesque name in itself – who is art critic of the New Republic in Washington, Watteau has found a stalwart champion. And this painter does need championing, not only against his detractors but also against those of his admirers who take him to be no more – for them, no less – than a celebrant of the chocolate-box picturesque.
He is, Perl writes, “a master of silken surfaces and elusive emotions”, and anyone who is uncomfortable with such “playful visual luxuriance” will not take to his work. “But for those of us who rank him among the greatest painters, the audacity with which he insists on hiding or veiling or theatricalising strong feelings becomes a way of revealing the complexity of those feelings.”
THE ENIGMATIC NATURE OF Watteau’s paintings is echoed in the fact of how little we know for certain of his life. Boucher’s portrait of him shows a strong, fleshy face with a half-averted, calculating and somewhat challenging expression; it is the face of a man who knows his own mind, and who will take none but his own counsel.
He was born in Valenciennes in 1684, the son of a master roofer. Having studied painting under Jacques-Albert Gérin, he fled the provinces in 1702 and embarked on a precarious existence in Paris.
His first employment was as a copyist at a shop that sold religious images, and later he studied under and worked with Claude Gillot and Claude Audran. In 1712, he applied for membership of the Academy. His application piece, Le pelérinage à Lisle de Citere, was not completed until 1717, much to the annoyance of the Academy grandees, who nevertheless accepted him as a member. He had arrived as a painter.
He was never to be a real Academician, however, being too restless and, also, too unclubbably self-contained – his friends and fellow-artists attested to Watteau’s remoteness, his air of disengagement from the world’s worldliness. As Jed Perl writes, “We travel to the isle of Cythera, but we never really feel at home there”.
Watteau’s time on the magic island was to be short, anyway, for he was tubercular, and in 1721 he died at Nogent-sur-Marne, at the age of 36.
It is always tempting to take a tragically early death as a vindication, a verification, of an artist’s achievement. Joyce’s ideal artist is nowhere visible but everywhere present in his work, and certainly this is the case with Watteau. Perl shrewdly observes:
All the artists of any consequence whom I’ve known have been to a certain degree detached from the emotional character of their work, as if this were some difficult feeling, some strange emotional weather that they had made their peace with, that they had allowed to take its place in the autonomous world of form.
Watteau, for all his elusiveness as man and artist, was no blue-flower aesthete, however. Jed Perl, in a consideration of one of Henry James’s characters, writes of the “mingling of the muscular and the musing to suggest the conflict between a life of action and a life of reflection”, and this mingling is one of the essentials of Watteau’s art. The people in these paintings, Perl writes, “seem to want, above all else, to feel at ease, somewhat at ease, in an uneasy world. And the fans, the masks, the turned backs, the shadowy corners, all the props and situations of his art, become challenges, stimulants, provocations”.
WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE, though, these lovers, actors, musicians, clowns, who seem forever on the point of departure – a very large number of his women, in particular, are seen from behind, tall, pyramidal figures in glistening silk, looking away – and are they at the end or the beginning of their pilgrimage? In their fragility and yearning they are wholly human, yet there is something of the divine in them, too.
Although at his death he is said to have been at work on, of all things, a church crucifix, Watteau throughout his short career avoided religious subjects – one rather dubious Holy Family is the extent of his production in the genre – yet it is possible to discern in his pictures a continuing preoccupation with the numinous. Perl quotes the art historian Max Raphael to the effect that in The Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera and Gilles we reach “the conclusion of Christian ideas, the one as comedy, the other as tragedy”. Gilles might, indeed, be a crucifixion, bloodless but anguished all the same. It is the end, and the beginning, of an era.
Jed Perl has written a marvellous little book on one of the greatest of painters. Antoine's Alphabetis a sort of fête galante in which we encounter a motley of characters, from Heinrich von Kleist to Charles Deburau, from Buster Keaton to Sacheverell Sitwell, all disporting in the mysterious, twilit pleasure garden that is Watteau's world.
John Banville's novel The Infinitieswill be published in the autumn