Poussin's Humour (review)

This poorly written and constructed book is a sustained attack on the inability of the academy to read Poussin's material craft properly because of a blindness occasioned by too great an emphasis on interpretation of content. This immediately makes for tedious repetition centred on the 'poverty of response to art works in much art history writing' (p. 125) that is to be found in the 'kinds of study [that] still keep many scholars in employment' (p. 7). Green encourages, rather, an approach concentrated on 'the fact that a painted picture is made of paint' (p. 22). The basis for it is what Green variously calls Poussin's 'humour', 'wit', or 'intelligence' in the form of a 'concetto', conceived as artifice rather than execution, and in terms of 'what can and cannot be done in the material medium' (pp. 90-91). A number of problems appear in the way Green goes about ditching the academy (I am unreconstructed here because I have never really grasped what the 'academy' is supposed to be). First, he is ungenerous to 'academicians' since his own scholarship in part relies on them. Green is not just a 'critic', and, let it be said, the academy kept him in employment for a number of years. Second, his definitions are vague and fragmentary in their application, especially in his search for 'a phenomenology of some kind' (p. xxv) and in his eschewal of entering into detailed argument with the scholars whose work he rejects (not even actually the case, because he does enter into such argument). On some occasions, as with aspects of his discussion of Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well and the two versions of Et in Arcadia Ego, his arguments are downright silly. Third, his designation of the onlooker as 'reader', in an argument that so condemns reading Poussin's painting through scholarship, is an extremely lazy compromise. Finally, Green's insistence on looking at the paintings as artifice is belied in some key instances by literal readings or speculation. I thoroughly endorse the need for different sorts of approaches to those we are familiar with, and in any case a number of critics have warned against ignoring Poussin as a colourist (to my mind the most magnificent example is the Dublin Lamentation over the Dead Christ). But the substantiation of large iconoclastic claims needs a rigour of argument signally absent here.