Jed Perl - Antoines Alphabet: Watteau and His World

CONTENTS

To Deborah

And to Nathan and Jessie

Chaque coquillage incrust

Dans la grotte o nous nous aimmes

A sa particularit.

Paul Verlaine, Les Coquillages

Watteau, Mezzetin (oil on canvas)

Prologue

He is a whirligig of a manthis elegant fellow, alone in a garden, dressed in an absurdly fancy outfit of blue-and-pink striped silk. He is an excitable dreamer, playing on his guitar and singing, his sleekly athletic presence jangled by a great restlessness or anxiety. Surely there is a somebody somewhere he adores, a woman suggested by the shadowy silhouette of a statue glimpsed just beyond his head. So he flings back that head of his and screws up his eyes, until one dark, off-center pupil becomes an addled bulls-eye, a heraldic device suggesting a lovers wild abandon in this nearly abandoned garden. Only the strongest of passions could explain the animation of his limbs, the pinwheel kaleidoscope of his fast-moving arms and legs, which vibrate with the energy of that strangest and finest of inventions, the human machine. The fingers of his left hand, pressing down on the strings of the neck of his guitar, are four essays in hyperbole, with each joint and muscle and sinew given its own twist, its own angle, its own corkscrew curve. His fingernails are punctuation marks, sharp and acute. And his legs, in breeches and white tights, crossed at the knee, explode in feet shod in slippers with pink rosettes, describing two points in the swing of a pendulum or two hours on a clock, the left, resting on the ground, marking 6:00, while the right, floating in the air, is at 4:30. What time of day it actually is is hard to know, but then there is no time that would not be right for this explosive celebration of ardor, this apostrophe to the risks of feeling.

The mysterious young man, painted by Jean-Antoine Watteau in the early years of the eighteenth century, is a splendidly absurd mechanism dedicated to the idea of human feeling. The touch of Watteaus brush, the power of his conception, here and in another three dozen or so masterpieces, are a mingling of velvetiness and steeliness that constitute one of the miracles of art. I cannot get enough of the easy yet persuasive power of this work, so much so that whenever Im asked to name my favorite painter I reply, without a moments hesitation: Watteau. But the reactions to this name, even among good friends, are not always simple. Some people are uneasy when they hear me mention an early-eighteenth-century artist whom they associate, if they have any associations at all, with lightly sentimental studies of lovers in overgrown parks. And indeed that is how some people would describe the figure in the painting with which weve begun, who is known as Mezzetin. I imagine that my choice of a favorite painter would be more readily accepted if I were to announce that my preference were for Rembrandt or Goya, or some other figure whose work has a certain darkness about it, whose themes are self-evidently large. When I single out Watteau, I may be perceived as toying with the question by putting this painter of Harlequins and Pierrots and amorous ambiguities at the top of my list. I may be perceived as being somewhat sardonic, or ironic, or even impish when I say that Watteau is my favorite painter, as if I were trying to mock the question, or were hiding my true feelings behind a dandyish faade.

Watteau is surely a master of silken surfaces and elusive emotions, and if you are uncomfortable with this sort of playful visual luxuriance, you will not like Watteau. But for those of us who rank him among the greatest painters, the audacity with which he insists on hiding or veiling or theatricalizing strong feelings becomes a way of revealing the complexity of those feelings. Watteaus delicious artificethe flickering brushwork, the evanescent colors, the casual yet definitive shape of his compositionsis calculated to ease us into the gathering contradictions of his world. We are never sure if Watteaus beloved young people, fine-boned, often a little childlike, are falling in loveor falling out of love. We arent sure if they are actors and musicians, or aristocrats dabbling in the arts, or wealthy commoners who are playing at being aristocrats. Watteaus young people seem to want, above all else, to feel at ease, somewhat at ease, in an uneasy world. And the fans, the masks, the turned backs, the shadowy corners, all the props and situations of his art, become challenges, stimulants, provocations. The settings are more often than not versions of the same garden that we know from the painting of Mezzetin, elegant but somewhat down-at-the-heels gardens, with the vegetation grown slightly wild and the statues not in perfect repair, although sometimes we are in the colonnade of a grand house and sometimes, as in The Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera, the scenery is less cultivated and more expansive.

The repetition of elements in Watteaus paintings, each time with a slightly different emphasis, gives the work a mythical aura. Watteau, who was at once the most informal and the most insistent of mythologizers, may not have been especially interested in the old Ovidian stories, in all the tales of this or that gods or demigods joys and trials and transformations, stories that had been so dear to the artists of the Renaissance. For Watteau, the mythology that mattered was infinitely more modern. This artist who said hardly anything about his paintings and struck most of his friends as something of a mystery man took as his essential subject the invention of self-consciousness, the struggle to feel fully alive. He painted women as beautiful as Daphne and men as handsome as Narcissus, and what they are laboring to become is their truer, unembarrassed selves. Watteaus lovers and dreamers are always fighting off the uncertainties of existence. And their doubts, clothed in the commedia dellarte lightness of an improvisation or a folly, clearly touched a nerve in the early eighteenth century, when the rigidities of the ancien rgime were beginning to be questioned. Watteaus work has always appealed to people who are at once in love with the beautiful surfaces of the world and suspicious of the ease with which theyre seduced by a sun-dappled garden, a beautifully cut silk dress, the smiling eyes of a person they barely know. Surely it is something in the sneakiness of Watteaus seriousness that endeared him to nineteenth-century aesthetes, who yearned to escape from the gathering homogenization of the Age of Industrialization. And no doubt its the scintillating poetic ambiguity of Watteaus art that has made it feel like an oasis in our ever more technological age.

Watteaus enigmatic themes, which were being turned into formulas by his disciples even before his untimely death in 1721, have continually reasserted their power. It is these themesand their significance, and what they have meant to artists and writers, and what they have meant to methat have shaped the pages that follow, this gathering of people and ideas and impressions dedicated to Watteau. The subject is by its very nature capacious, for every sighing lover on a dime-store teacup and every melancholy Pierrot on a piece of badly done embroidery is a sort of salute to Watteau, just as the actors Leslie Howard and Marion Davies were remembering him, whether they knew his name or not, when they dressed up as Harlequin and Pierrette for a California costume party, and just as Verlaines cycle of poems