Charles Bouleau - The Painters Secret Geometry: A Study of Composition in Art

A STUDY OF COMPOSITION IN ART

CHARLES BOULEAU

With a Preface by

JACQUES VILLON

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

MINEOLA, NEW YORK

Copyright

Copyright 1963 ditions du Seuil

Copyright 1963 Thames & Hudson and Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2014, is an unabridged republication of the work, translated from the French by Jonathan Griffin, and originally published in the U.S. as A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, in 1963. The work was originally published in France under the title Charpentes, La Gomtrie secrte des peintres.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bouleau, Charles, 1906

[Charpentes, la gomtrie secrte des peintres. English]

The painters secret geometry : a study of composition in art / Charles Bouleau; with a preface by Jacques Villon.

pages cm.

Summary: This richly illustrated examination of visual arts in European tradition shows how the great masters employed the Golden Mean and other geometrical patterns to compose their paintings. Up-to-date examples include works by Klee and Pollack. Highly sought-after cult classic and vade mecum for students of art history and artistic compositionProvided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-79550-8

1. PaintingTechnique. 2. Composition (Art) 3. PaintingHistory. I. Villon, Jacques, 1875-1963, writer of supplementary textual content. II. Title.

ND1475.B6813 2014

750.18dc23

2014002161

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

78040601 2014

www.doverpublications.com

In the artistic chaos of these last years, when the absolute liberation of the individual instinct has brought it to the point of frenzy, an attempt to identify the harmonic disciplines that have secretly, in every period, served as foundations for painting might well seem folly.

But this folly is in fact wisdom. It is the way to a kind of knowledge essential for whoever wants to paint. Essential, too, for whoever wants to look at pictures. The framework of a work of art is also its most secret and its deepest poetry.

But this studyso important that it is strange it should have been left so long unattemptedwas not an easy undertaking. It is a dangerous quest, one in which the seekers mind must be always on guard against itself. Charles Bouleau has had need of a great deal of humility; he has taught himself to abandon many of his initial ideas, to renounce various seductive hypotheses that had given this or that branch of his researches its first direction, in his determination always to be true to the reality of the work of art before him.

The aesthetic theories which he expounds in this book are never arbitrary ones. They are those of the period under discussion: they have always a firm historical basis. Charles Bouleau does not single any of them out for partisanship. Advancing step by step through the vast mass of work produced by the painters, he has had the skill to separate out the new contribution of each period and each artist. He has carried his analysis through with strict method, seeking, in the case of each work studied, to recreate the intellectual atmosphere of its time.

The result of such long and scrupulous reflection is a book that is often highly original. Though, for example, numerous writers before him have discussed the golden number, Charles Bouleaus study of the Renaissance use of musical proportions in the composition of pictures will come as a revelation to many readers.

In a word, this book goes a long way towards recovering the spirit of geometry as Piero della Francesca understood it; it is an attempt to reveal that secret geometry in a painting, which has been for the artists of every period one of the essential components of beauty; and the examples which the author offers from among the works of modern painters, of Mondrian for instance, are a striking proof of his objectivity.

Jacques Villon.

After gazing for a long time at the Death of Sardanapalus in the Louvre and making some notes on its composition, I was rash enough to pursue this line, turning to the Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, the Massacre of Scio, the Women of Algiers. This research and the pleasure it yields had taken hold of me. After Delacroix came Poussin and Czanne; then David and Seurat It was the beginning of five years spent in questioning hundreds of artists through thousands of canvases.

This book is not a treatise on painting. It is a study of the internal construction of works of art, a search for the formulae that have guided, over the centuries, the distribution of the various plastic elements. The framework of a painting or carving, like that of the human body or that of a building, is discreet; sometimes, indeed, it makes one forget its existence; but it cannot be absent, for it is what gives a work of art those principal lines of which Delacroix speaks in his Journal.

Throughout the book I shall always try to look at the paintings in question in my capacity as a painter. I shall be searching for the genesis of the work rather than for the secrets of its formal beauty. I shall try always to resist the temptation to find the criterion of aesthetic value by applying some favoured formula; not being either a mathematician or a philosopher, I shall never attempt to prove that a work of art is a paragon of beauty simply because it may fit some highly exacting and scientific schema.

Nor is this book a history of composition. I shall take certain liberties with the time sequence. Due weight must be given to certain resemblances, resulting from affinities between artists of different periods: as in the case of Czanne, Delacroix and Rubens. Conversely, in order to follow the use of geometrical figures (or of some other compositional device) through the centuries, I shall be obliged to treat certain painters in several chapters, under different headings. In spite of all this, the chronological order will often come to the fore, reflecting as it does the movement of ideas and the fact that every artist is at the start a pupil.

We shall find, as we go along, that there are many valid solutions to the problem of the distribution of forms within a work; we shall recognize, too, that artists like change, follow fashions and are subject to currents of taste.

In the midst of all these fluctuations we shall come across fixed points: the books on painting. The venerable treatises by Cennino Cennini, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Alberti, Drer and Lomazzo, the relevant passages in the writings of Delacroix and others less well known, will guide us in our search and will steady us, forcing us constantly to put the artist back into the atmosphere of his own time.

What is the art of composing a picture, and why, as a student, was one told so little about it? Is it a matter of instinct and flair? Some people assure us, nonetheless, that an extremely subtle and secret mathematical science lurks underneath the apparent spontaneity of the masters. Others, it is true, state that it is only a false science, a few tricks, a kind of savoir-faire which the budding artist must make haste to acquire. I found that these questions, when I tried to answer them, led far afield.

To begin with, the complexity of the subject is great: the organization of plastic ideas is a response to needs that are not confined to the domain of painting. The requirements of monumental art have to be taken into account in any work of large dimensions, in painting and in decorative sculpture as in architecture. Then there is the effect of the picture-frame on its contentsan effect which, though it remains very general, has a determining influence on the way the painted surface is organized, engendering in it geometrical figures that are often highly complex.