Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World

146 Pages·2008·3.84 MB·English

by  Jed Perl

CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER A
CHAPTER B
CHAPTER C
CHAPTER D
CHAPTER E
CHAPTER F
CHAPTER G
CHAPTER H
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER J
CHAPTER K
CHAPTER L
CHAPTER M
CHAPTER N
CHAPTER O
CHAPTER P
CHAPTER Q
CHAPTER R
CHAPTER S
CHAPTER T
CHAPTER U
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER W
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER Y
CHAPTER Z
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY JED PERL
COPYRIGHT
To Deborah
And to Nathan and Jessie
Chaque coquillage incrusté
Dans la grotte où nous nous aimâmes
A sa particularité.
Paul Verlaine, “Les Coquillages”
Watteau, Mezzetin (oil on canvas)
Prologue
He is a whirligig of a man—this elegant fellow, alone in a garden, dressed in an
absurdly fancy outfit of blue-and-pink striped silk. He is an excitable dreamer,
playing on his guitar and singing, his sleekly athletic presence jangled by a great
restlessness or anxiety. Surely there is a somebody somewhere he adores, a
woman suggested by the shadowy silhouette of a statue glimpsed just beyond his
head. So he flings back that head of his and screws up his eyes, until one dark,
off-center pupil becomes an addled bull’s-eye, a heraldic device suggesting a
lover’s wild abandon in this nearly abandoned garden. Only the strongest of
passions could explain the animation of his limbs, the pinwheel kaleidoscope of
his fast-moving arms and legs, which vibrate with the energy of that strangest
and finest of inventions, the human machine. The fingers of his left hand,
pressing down on the strings of the neck of his guitar, are four essays in
hyperbole, with each joint and muscle and sinew given its own twist, its own
angle, its own corkscrew curve. His fingernails are punctuation marks, sharp and
acute. And his legs, in breeches and white tights, crossed at the knee, explode in
feet shod in slippers with pink rosettes, describing two points in the swing of a
pendulum or two hours on a clock, the left, resting on the ground, marking 6:00,
while the right, floating in the air, is at 4:30. What time of day it actually is is
hard to know, but then there is no time that would not be right for this explosive
celebration of ardor, this apostrophe to the risks of feeling.
The mysterious young man, painted by Jean-Antoine Watteau in the early
years of the eighteenth century, is a splendidly absurd mechanism dedicated to
the idea of human feeling. The touch of Watteau’s brush, the power of his
conception, here and in another three dozen or so masterpieces, are a mingling of
velvetiness and steeliness that constitute one of the miracles of art. I cannot get
enough of the easy yet persuasive power of this work, so much so that whenever
I’m asked to name my favorite painter I reply, without a moment’s hesitation:
“Watteau.” But the reactions to this name, even among good friends, are not
always simple. Some people are uneasy when they hear me mention an early-
eighteenth-century artist whom they associate, if they have any associations at
all, with lightly sentimental studies of lovers in overgrown parks. And indeed
that is how some people would describe the figure in the painting with which
we’ve begun, who is known as Mezzetin. I imagine that my choice of a favorite
painter would be more readily accepted if I were to announce that my preference
were for Rembrandt or Goya, or some other figure whose work has a certain
darkness about it, whose themes are self-evidently large. When I single out
Watteau, I may be perceived as toying with the question by putting this painter
of Harlequins and Pierrots and amorous ambiguities at the top of my list. I may
be perceived as being somewhat sardonic, or ironic, or even impish when I say
that Watteau is my favorite painter, as if I were trying to mock the question, or
were hiding my true feelings behind a dandyish façade.
Watteau is surely a master of silken surfaces and elusive emotions, and if you
are uncomfortable with this sort of playful visual luxuriance, you will not like
Watteau. But for those of us who rank him among the greatest painters, the
audacity with which he insists on hiding or veiling or theatricalizing strong
feelings becomes a way of revealing the complexity of those feelings. Watteau’s
delicious artifice—the flickering brushwork, the evanescent colors, the casual
yet definitive shape of his compositions—is calculated to ease us into the
gathering contradictions of his world. We are never sure if Watteau’s beloved
young people, fine-boned, often a little childlike, are falling in love—or falling
out of love. We aren’t sure if they are actors and musicians, or aristocrats
dabbling in the arts, or wealthy commoners who are playing at being aristocrats.
Watteau’s young people 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. The settings are more often than not versions of the
same garden that we know from the painting of Mezzetin, elegant but somewhat
down-at-the-heels gardens, with the vegetation grown slightly wild and the
statues not in perfect repair, although sometimes we are in the colonnade of a
grand house and sometimes, as in The Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera, the
scenery is less cultivated and more expansive.
The repetition of elements in Watteau’s paintings, each time with a slightly
different emphasis, gives the work a mythical aura. Watteau, who was at once
the most informal and the most insistent of mythologizers, may not have been
especially interested in the old Ovidian stories, in all the tales of this or that
god’s or demigod’s joys and trials and transformations, stories that had been so
dear to the artists of the Renaissance. For Watteau, the mythology that mattered
was infinitely more modern. This artist who said hardly anything about his
paintings and struck most of his friends as something of a mystery man took as
his essential subject the invention of self-consciousness, the struggle to feel fully
alive. He painted women as beautiful as Daphne and men as handsome as
Narcissus, and what they are laboring to become is their truer, unembarrassed
selves. Watteau’s lovers and dreamers are always fighting off the uncertainties of
existence. And their doubts, clothed in the commedia dell’arte lightness of an
improvisation or a folly, clearly touched a nerve in the early eighteenth century,
when the rigidities of the ancien régime were beginning to be questioned.
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. Surely it is something in the sneakiness of Watteau’s
seriousness that endeared him to nineteenth-century aesthetes, who yearned to
escape from the gathering homogenization of the Age of Industrialization. And
no doubt it’s the scintillating poetic ambiguity of Watteau’s art that has made it
feel like an oasis in our ever more technological age.
Watteau’s enigmatic themes, which were being turned into formulas by his
disciples even before his untimely death in 1721, have continually reasserted
their power. It is these themes—and their significance, and what they have meant
to artists and writers, and what they have meant to me—that have shaped the
pages that follow, this gathering of people and ideas and impressions dedicated
to Watteau. The subject is by its very nature capacious, for every sighing lover
on a dime-store teacup and every melancholy Pierrot on a piece of badly done
embroidery is a sort of salute to Watteau, just as the actors Leslie Howard and
Marion Davies were remembering him, whether they knew his name or not,
when they dressed up as Harlequin and Pierrette for a California costume party,
and just as Verlaine’s cycle of poems Fêtes galantes and Cézanne’s and Picasso’s
paintings of Harlequins and Pierrots are meditations on his art. Fashionable
women in the late nineteenth century dressed à la Watteau and had their portraits
painted in Watteau poses, and Jean-Louis Barrault’s performance as Pierrot in
Marcel Carné’s great movie, Children of Paradise, owes its essential spirit to
Watteau’s Gilles. Of course many elements in Watteau’s art predate Watteau. The
Harlequin and Pierrot had been the core of the commedia dell’arte for centuries,
already the subject of one sublime seventeenth-century artist, Callot. And the
lovers in the gardens went back at least to the Gardens of Love in secular