Yves Bonnefoy: Art Historian

Yves Bonnefoy: Art Historian Adelia V. Williams The first who likened painting and poetry to each other must have been a man of delicate perception, who found that both arts affected him in a similar manner. Both, he realised, present to us appearance as reality, absent things as present.1 G. E. Lessing, Laocoon AMONG RECENT CRITICAL TRENDS is the interartistic approach which has set out to consider relationships among the arts. Within nineteenth- and twentieth-century French studies, this critical stance has been directed toward "poésie critique,"2 a general term for the art writings of modern literary figures. However, even the most cursory review of "poésie critique" reveals a wide variety of endeavors which demonstrates both the richness and the vagueness of the tradition.3 It is clear, however, if only from the sheer number of "poésie critique" volumes, that painting has figured prominently in the minds of modern French poets, novelists and thinkers.4 Literary critics and scholars have endeavored to address the motives that have driven these creative minds to formulate a poetic vision informed by the visual arts. Yet, there is no consensus as to the significance of "poésie critique," whether, for example, it is a literary genre or, in fact, a sound contribution to the discipline of art history. Art historian Norman Bryson's Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France5 raises these very issues. In the collection of eleven essays, major French figures, including Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, Louis Marin, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes, and who represent such diverse fields as linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, science, and literature , apply their expertise to art history. In his introduction, Bryson discusses how French writers and thinkers outside the field of the visual arts perceive and interpret art. He concludes that it is precisely its rich interdisciplinarity that gives contemporary art criticism in France a dynamic and singular status in the world today. Yves Bonnefoy's "Time and the Timeless in Quattrocento Painting ," a translation of "Le temps et l'intemporel" from L'improbable, a 1959 collection of art historical writings, is the volume's second essay.6 Here, Bonnefoy considers Italian Renaissance perspective, the pictorial 34 Fall 1996 Williams depiction of spatial dimension. Because the laws of perspective endeavor to express an anthropomorphic conception of temporality, namely human mortality, Bonnefoy argues that beginning with the Quattrocento , time is rendered visible in painting. By arriving at his conclusion, Bonnefoy implicitly posits his argument against Lessing's Laocoon (1766). In Laocoon, Lessing delineates the boundaries between poetry and painting. Each art form adheres to separate , hence intrinsically incompatible, dimensions. Literary expression belongs to the temporal sphere; plastic expression inheres in the spatial. Bonnefoy, however, points out the limitations of Lessing's distinction between painting and poetry when he writes of the temporal complexity of painting in "Time and the Timeless": Painting contains time in several ways. First, through the process by which a painting . . . recreates itself within us. Our awareness of a work of art evolves in time.. .. Accordingly, in our apprenticeship of the work we go back and forth between separation and union, passivity and attentiveness, or waking and dreaming, until we achieve the improbable total experience. ... A study should be made of this period of time in which we draw nearer to the work, and also of the depth it explores—a depth of reading where one goes from sign to sign. . . . But my concern is not this semantic space. ... I should like to attend to another time. . . . The act of reading the work . . . has led us outside time.7 Bonnefoy's interpretation of the Quattrocento is a first indication that his critical perspective, while rooted in solid art history, ventures into an abstract, indeed literary, domain.8 Bonnefoy's 1972 L'arrière-pays traces the same period of art history as "Time and the Timeless," but reaches beyond the closed world of Florentine Renaissance painting, which seeks to reproduce appearance with static forms, to Bellini's more successful efforts, and finally to the ultimate application of perspective in Poussin's Roman landscapes. A poetic and personal meditation on the history of art, L'arrière-pays discloses the...