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The scene: a chain of dancers in a glade, Roman tunics fluttering beneath a sky torn between sunlight and fierce darkness. A man leaps, two women twirl, a third opens her arms in elegant arabesque. There is ballet, and there is raucous Scottish reeling. It is almost impossible to see whose hand links to whose, or to whom each of the magnificently painted feet belongs – rising, falling, tiptoeing, pointing, landing hard back on ancient earth.
You follow the hands like signs, from one figure to the next. You count the feet through their rhythmic tattoo. The picture choreographs the eye, burling it round and around and eventually sideways to the crowd of Israelites on the right, faithlessly worshipping a solid gold calf. Except that Poussin paints a full-scale bull, raising a menacing hoof on the plinth. Even the statue takes part in his violent dance.
Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) is not generally known as a painter of movement so much as its opposite: a poised and frozen stasis. His reputation as one of the most disciplined and intellectual of all artists was already fixed by the time he made The Adoration of the Golden Calf for a patron in Rome, around 1634, and it has never since shifted.
Poussin had long ago abandoned his native France, despising French painters as strapazzoni, glib hacks who “make a sport of turning out a picture in 24 hours”, as he wrote. Pictorial truth could only be distilled from intense and protracted cogitation. Compositions had to be tested, rehearsed over and again with wax figures in toy theatres. Even the most headlong action is marked by stillness and meditation, each figure given pristine singularity. His art requires you to stop and think, too: to look, learn and gradually absorb their strange dramas.
So Poussin and the Dance is counterintuitive, at the very least, for the first retrospective here in almost 30 years. Joyous, mischievous and surprisingly fun – that is the National Gallery’s upbeat line. We are to think of Poussin as sultry and sensual, all wine and women and sashaying movement, some kind of seductive precursor to Renoir and his balls at the Moulin de la Galette.
Look at all those tambourines and whirling togas, those shimmying nymphs with their loosening hair, all those off-the-shoulder dresses and naked musicians and tipsy pas de deux. It’s Montmartre in Rome. Monsieur Poussin is a riot.
This is nonsense, of course. Certainly the show focuses upon paintings that involve dancing: classical scenes of gods and their followers, specifically Bacchus and his retinue of hairy centaurs and pig-eared satyrs, naked nymphs and fat old Silenus, one leg slung over a leopard’s neck as fig-leafed musicians play the pan pipes. Given the emphasis, you soon start noticing individual dancers – the girl swaying to trance music, as it seems, arms high above her head; the couple in a Charleston sidestep; the Isadora Duncan lookalike, striking an arms outflung pose. But it would be a stretch to describe any of this as surprisingly fun.
Nobody looks at A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term and thinks what a merry occasion. One cherub is face down in a stone basin, another falling down drunk. The nymph on the right has completely collapsed, succumbing to a rapacious red satyr. The term is a hideous statue: armless, horned and with the kind of gaping mouth you see on a fountain, its grin as knowing as its empty eyes. When the music stops we all fall down.
What is so striking about this picture is not some abandonment to wildness but Poussin’s extraordinarily precise conceptual engineering. The linked figures twist and turn across the composition like elements of some great machine. A machine that connects whatever will become of the fallen nymph all the way back, in time, to her counterpart at the other end, squeezing grapes into a cherub’s bowl. And so it begins…
Poussin – great foot man – establishes the feet with such solidity you feel their weight-bearing force on the ground. Pointed, splayed, lifted, tripping, they are shown from behind and below, beneath the arch and above the toes. Once the curators have dropped the joy pretext, they get deep into Poussin’s imagination and method. His wax dolls – pliable when warmed – have been recreated on a turntable, so that you can see how he could observe feet from every angle, and all day long, as well as torsion, uplift and shadow.
In Rome, Poussin lodged with a stonemason and looked hard at newly discovered classical fragments, specifically a frieze belonging to Cardinal Borghese – from which he extracts a young dancer with a Grace Kelly nose – and a gigantic marble vase of figures in Keatsian pursuit. It is right here, in all its tonnage; you circle around it just as he did.
So these sources are sculptural, just like the wax figures he made. Poussin’s radical solution to painting’s age-old conundrum – how to depict the three-dimensional world in two dimensions – is to introduce an intermediate stage, animating these little models. The figures in his paintings are both technically in motion – the jeté, the arabesque, the whirling circle – and yet spellbindingly still. His frozen ballet is the greatest in art.
And it is put to such poetic purpose. What looks like the classic Bacchic party of cavorting and carousing gathers a darker force when its constituent parts are isolated and immobilised. The dance becomes an orgy, an abduction, a rape. Movement turns to stillness, cacophony to sudden silence. It is the paradox of Poussin’s painting, and his gift.
This slow and deliberate arrangement of anatomies, details, buildings and objects against Poussin’s nearly abstract landscapes is so minutely calculated that you look and look again, waiting for a false step or an extra foot, say, that never appears. The foregrounds hold significant still lifes every time – the empty wine urn featuring Bacchus’s sly features in bas-relief; the salver holding the bloody dregs of red wine; the masks that have slipped to the ground, like lost faces. Everything gathers emotional force. One of Poussin’s gaping mouths was an inspiration for Francis Bacon’s silent screams.
The show itself is beautifully choreographed, from thronged galleries to smaller spaces, and a pause before the final revelation – the masterpiece that hangs alone in the last room.
Out there on a kind of blasted heath, four dancers form a ring with their backs to each other – inside out, as it were. Their dance is unnatural. The motion is not so much graceful as disturbing, like a merry-go-round beginning to slow out of kilter. This is Poussin’s profound lament, A Dance to the Music of Time.
One of the dancers has a beady eye on us, but another is flagging, in distress. Her hand has slipped away from the chain. A sorrowful cherub blows bubbles that keep bursting into nothing. In the sky above is a sudden rushing – the chariot of dawn; but it too is passing.
Time is a winged harpist, his expression sardonic as he watches the dance that must soon come to an end. And on a patch of brown earth beside him, a cherub stares in fascination at the hourglass in his infant hand. For him it is a captivating toy, the sand increasing and dwindling all at once. For us, as for the artist, it is a waiting game. The dance ends and we die.
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