January 2008
Special Exhibition Galleries, 2nd floor
February 12 – May 11, 2008
Press preview: Monday, February 11, 10:00 a.m. – noon
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Best known as the creator of the classical tradition in French painting, Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) was also one of the supreme masters of landscape painting. In his beautiful landscape paintings, nature is viewed "through the glass of time" and is endowed with a poetic quality that has been admired by painters as varied in style as Corot, Constable, Turner, Cézanne, Matisse, and Balthus. This landmark exhibition—the first to examine Poussin’s response to nature and landscape—brings together about 40 paintings, ranging from his early, lyrical, Venetian-inspired pastorals to grandly structured and austere works in which the artist meditated upon Nature, its transformations, and its renewals. Also on view are an equal number of drawings, the most luminous of which were done en plein air.
The exhibition is made possible by The Florence Gould Foundation and The Isaacson-Draper Foundation. It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Exhibition Overview and Highlights
Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions will be a revelation to those who think of Poussin primarily as the master of complex, figurative compositions and the illustrator par excellence of ancient history, mythology, and the Bible. The exhibition will demonstrate that he was also one of the great painters of landscape, and that these paintings have had a profound impact on the course of European art. Nicolas Poussin was born in the market town of Les Andelys, on the Seine, about 25 miles from Rouen, in Normandy. His family – said to have descended from noble stock – was not well off, and little is known of his early years. He seems to have been schooled in Latin and the classics, an experience that left an indelible mark on all his work. As a young man, Poussin made his way to Paris, and then to Rome, eventually establishing himself in both cities as a history painter and setting a new standard for classical painting.
From the outset, Poussin was as concerned with landscape settings as with narrative subjects. An ardent student of nature, he transformed the genre to suit his elevated notion of the Grand Manner. The mere transcription of visual experience – landscape as an imitation of the world around us – did not interest him. He did not paint topographical views, and identifiable sites in his work are rare. In his landscapes we encounter nature reconfigured and ennobled – not as it is in everyday life, but as we might imagine it to be. Examples of this in the exhibition will be Landscape with John of Patmos, Landscape with Ashes of Phocion, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice, Landscape with Three Men, Landscape with a Calm, Landscape with a Storm, Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, and Spring: Adam and Eve and Summer: Ruth and Boaz from the four Seasonsseries in the Louvre. Poussin devoted himself to landscape from his earliest years in Rome, often making excursions together with fellow artist Claude Lorrain to the Roman Campagna to draw from nature. Most of the 40 drawings in the exhibition were created en plein air and are by Poussin and his contemporaries, some anonymous. Drawings such as Poussin’s Landscape with a Burning Fortress will demonstrate how he used the medium in composing his great paintings.
Exhibition Credits and Catalogue
Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions is organized at the Metropolitan Museum by Keith Christiansen, Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings, and
Pierre Rosenberg, Director Emeritus of the Musée du Louvre. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
Education Programs
The Metropolitan Museum will offer an array of education programs in conjunction with the exhibition. A Sunday at the Met lecture program on March 9 will feature lectures by Caroline Elam, Helen Langdon, Olivier Bonfait, and Richard Verdi. A second Sunday at the Met on April 6 will include lectures by David Freedberg, Denise Allen, Peter Miller, and Ann Harris. There will also be a special lecture given by Willibald Sauerländer on April 11. A teacher workshop led by Rika Burnham, “Arcadian Visions,” will be held on Saturday, April 12, and regular gallery talks will accompany both this exhibition and the related drawings and prints installation, In the Light of Poussin: The Classical Landscape Tradition.
January 8 through April 13, 2008.
In the Light of Poussin: The Classical
Landscape Tradition will include works by Poussin’s French, Italian, and Northern contemporaries, as well as by later artists influenced by his conception of landscape. Examples range from plein air studies to poetic evocations of pastoral scenes to highly structured settings for classical subjects. A section of the installation will be devoted to the neoclassical period, which saw a revival of interest in the classical landscapes of Poussin and his contemporaries. In the Light of Poussin: The Classical Landscape Tradition is organized by Perrin Stein, Stijn Alsteens and Linda Wolk-Simon, all of the Metropolian Museum’s Drawings and Prints Department.
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