From A to W

Books To Jed Perl, Antoine Watteau is the greatest painter to have ever lived. Peter Terzian reads a genre-defying paean.

Detail from <i>Gersaint's Shopsign</i>. According to Jed Perl, the mirrors, clocks and toiletries that the customers peruse and assess "raise certain questions: Who are we? What can we make of ourselvShow more

To Jed Perl, Antoine Watteau is the greatest painter to have ever lived. Peter Terzian reads a genre-defying paean to the 18th-century artist's singularity and continued relevance.
Antoine's Alphabet - Watteau and His World Jed Perl Knopf Dh92
In the autumn of 1938, as Germany prepared to occupy the Sudetenland and England hovered on the brink of war, Virginia Woolf wrote a letter to her sister Vanessa Bell about a visit to the National Gallery. "A voice again urged me to fit my gas mask at once. The Nat Gallery was fuller than usual; a nice old man was lecturing to an attentive crowd on Watteau. I suppose they were all having a last look."

In the end, war was temporarily averted, and the National Gallery's paintings stayed put for another year; in late 1939, they were shipped off to Wales, where they spent the remainder of the war in the underground warrens of a slate quarry. But what must Woolf's fellow Londoners, believing that bombing was imminent, have made of The Scale of Love, the museum's single Watteau? The painting is set in a lush, idyllic grove, like so many of Antoine Watteau's fêtes galantes. A woman holds a book of sheet music while her male companion strums upon a guitar; the ripples and folds of their silky clothes are painted in soft peach and rose. Clusters of people converse in the background. Many of them have their backs to us; their glances are slightly askew, and no two figures look each other in the eye. The foliage that lines the corners of the painting is dark and shadowy, but pale pink and powder blue clouds can be glimpsed through the trees. This painting about music radiates a deep stillness and a tentative balance of hope and unease.

In Antoine's Alphabet, his slim, gemlike study of Watteau, the great 18th century French painter who helped to usher in the rococo style, Jed Perl recounts a 1956 dialogue between the artist Jean Cocteau and the writer Louis Aragon. Cocteau cites "the amount of suppressed violence in Watteau's hazy atmosphere, the powerful grip underlying that elegance." Aragon concurs: "Watteau's elegant young men and women are always to some degree assaulted by a sense of the uncertainty or aimlessness of life, a sense that is of course overpowering in times of war, but can be strong in peaceful times as well." This is Perl's Watteau, an artist who, like Virgil, expresses "the sense of the pastoral not as a poetry of relaxation but as a poetry of anxiety and disquietude." His "darkening gardens" mirror not only Woolf's wartime but ours.

Perl, who is the art critic for the New Republic, has written a series of essays ranging in length from a few sentences to a few pages, arranging them alphabetically by theme, the better to highlight the disparate aspects of Watteau's work and the influence the artist's painted lovers and Pierrots have had on high and low culture. An abecedarian sequence is supposed to be random, but Perl deftly arranges his subjects within his chosen structure. Reflections on Watteau's themes and motifs - on the human back, on the diamond shape, on the liberal spirit behind the rococo - sit beside references to the artist's work in the letters of Beckett or in a story by Gérard de Nerval; short fictions about Cézanne's painting of his son in harlequin costume or the making of the film Children of Paradise; and Perl's personal observations on the way Watteauesque scenes surface in contemporary life, as in the gossipy, after-work drinking scenes that echo the painter's frolics. The letter "F", for example, encompasses an examination of Watteau's painted fans, including the one at the centre of Balzac's novel Cousin Pons; an anecdote about an encounter between Willa Cather and Flaubert's niece at an Aix hotel, in which they discuss the limitations of the great 19th century French novelists, leading Perl to posit that art is "the transformation of limitations into qualities of form and feeling"; the meaning of flirtation, "passion's calculated postponement", which Perl calls "Watteau's essential subject"; and the "delicious air of possibility" of Watteau's fragmented sketches. Here, Perl is indirectly describing his own book, a collection of written fragments that suggest many avenues of thought, art criticism that reshapes the possibilities of the genre.

Watteau's life was short - he was born in the northern French town of Valenciennes in 1684, and died of tuberculosis in a suburb of Paris at the age of 36 - and the biographical details are relatively scant. Perl isn't interested in giving us a chronological ordering anyway. The glimpses we get of the artist's life are oblique, told second or third hand. Perl glosses Walter Pater's 1885 story A Prince of Court Painters, in which the imagined daughter of a real-life friend of Watteau, in love with him but ignored by him, keeps a journal in which she records his moves between country and city - she thinks Paris unfit for his seriousness. Elsewhere, we learn that Watteau was an intellectual who studied the writings of Leonardo and took inspiration from the work of Rubens. Perl imagines a meeting of Watteau's friends after his death, to celebrate the publication of a book of his drawings; they ask if he had really accomplished enough over his brief life. (This is one of a few scenes that Perl must have imagined wholesale. The author doesn't tell us whether these conversations - or a letter written by Watteau to his friend Jean de Jullienne that sounds a little more like Perl than an 18th century artist - are based upon original source material.)

Perl uses Watteau's greatest paintings not to tell us about the artist's style or context but to investigate the human condition. The Mezzetin, a portrait of an elegantly clad musician who might be singing of or to a lover, is "a splendidly absurd mechanism dedicated to the idea of human feeling." The white of the Pierrot's costume in Gilles is "the archetype of the artist as pure potentiality ... a place where nothing has yet happened but anything and everything can and will happen." The three couples at the centre of the grand pastoral landscape in The Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera raise the question "Are you coming or going?" to the level of metaphysics, writes Perl. They are engaged in "the drama of wondering who they are, what they will do with the person next to them, what they want, what they can get."

Perl's tour de force is an analysis of Gersaint's Shopsign, a panorama of a shop interior that was created to advertise an actual store owned by Watteau's art dealer friend. The painting, carried out a year before Watteau died, might have signalled a shift in direction ? it is an urban scene, "the greatest painting of modern life ever done", according to Perl. Gersaint's Shopsign mixes realism and allegory. The paintings on the walls are "a recapitulation of all the passions, sacred and profane." The mirrors, clocks and toiletries that the customers peruse and assess "raise certain questions: Who are we? What can we make of ourselves? What will we become?"

Watteau rarely painted religious themes, but Perl detects "an afterglow" of religion in his secular subjects. But it's telling that his last major works were a shopsign and a crucifix, the latter now lost. "Could there be a greater loss than this painting?" Perl asks. Movingly, he imagines that Watteau's rendering of Christ's death was infused with his personal knowledge of what it means to die young.

Perl is a master of the grand and bracing gesture - Gersaint's Shopsign is "a poetics of shopping"; the x-shape, the underlying geometry of Watteau's greatest canvasses, is "the first act of rebellion against the decorous verticality and horizontality of the rectangle." These broad strokes are in keeping with his furious dismissals in the pages of the New Republic of much that is fashionable in contemporary art. Perl is a severe critic of contemporary museum design and administration and of the inflated art market. Antoine's Alphabet would seem to flatter the suspicions of his detractors, who find his tastes old-fashioned. But his celebration of Watteau is a testament to the timeless values Perl holds dear: ambiguity, complexity, intensity, freedom as a "compositional principle", "elasticity and playfulness of thought". Perl defines the "truly new" as a "strong emotional inflection, a personality imposing its fresh feelings on everything that appears resolved in the art of the past ... New, in the sense I am thinking of it, is not progressive or evolutionary but a continuous unfolding of images and ideas, so compelling in their individualism that their hold on the eye and the imagination retains its force, even after the artist is long gone." Four centuries after they were painted, the lovers, actors, dancers and clowns that populate Watteau's world are our contemporaries, "labouring to become ... their truer, unembarrassed selves ... always fighting off the uncertainties of existence."
Peter Terzian has written about books for Bookforum, Newsday and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.