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at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, takes us deeper into the inexhaustibly complex relationship between nature and culture than any other exhibition I have ever seen. When Nicolas Poussin sets men and women amid vast landscapes, he is reflecting on our experience of the natural world, and nobody has more beautifully woven together sensation and imagination, instinct and intelligence, freedom and design. There is a curiously pungent juxtaposition of naturalistic immediacy and pictorial artifice in Poussin's landscapes, whether he is representing a darkly luxuriant tree, a placid lake, a cloud-strewn sky, an elegantly designed city, or a handsome Ovidian hero. Somehow, the immediacy and the artifice reinforce each other. The paintings are finally about our struggles to understand what we feel, to objectify the subjectivity of our experience. Poussin's admirers will not be surprised to see this seventeenth-century artist who is often pigeonholed as a chilly classicist re-framed as something of a romantic. What most people are going to be unprepared for is the big-heartedness of his vision as it is revealed in this epochal show.
While it is taken for granted that our understanding of a symphony or an opera is shaped by the skill of the conductor or the director, exhibitions of Old Master paintings are usually discussed as if it hardly mattered who was involved. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the Metropolitan, our heightened sense of Poussin's powers owes a great deal to the brilliance of the two men who together organized the exhibition. They are Pierre Rosenberg, the Honorary PresidentDirector of the Louvre, who originally conceived of the show, and Keith Christiansen, the Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings at the Met. Rosenberg and Christiansen wear their encyclopedic knowledge of the scholarly literature easily, bringing to the consideration of individual paintings and to large questions of interpretation a combination of unflappable common sense and abiding faith in our ability to grasp the spirit of an artist who lived four centuries ago. Taken together, Rosenberg's catalogue entries and Christiansen's essay "The Critical Fortunes of Poussin's Landscapes" blow the dust off these masterpieces. And Christiansen's magnificent installation, with five galleries of paintings and two of drawings, will be remembered for many years to come. (The Metropolitan and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, where the exhibition was seen in the fall, are the only venues.)
