Page 33 - Studio International - January 1967

Staël: the traversing, lateral movement leading from literary and pictorial references which he knew his
figure to figure which descends in the middle of the patrons would be able to read : more important, he had a
picture and is pulled up on either side—like an irregular, cultural framework in which all experience could find its
widened-out U : the play of warm and cold colours used place and fit naturally, without sentimentality or diffi-
against the normal pictorial logic of cold colours receding dence. Notice, for example, the ease of the sexuality of
and warm ones coming forward, i.e. in the Poussin the Poussin's view of the figure of the Muse on the left who,
lower blue robe of the poet which tries to recede right as it were, irradiates the figure of Apollo next to her.
back into the sky but is nevertheless held in place, and in By contrast, de Staël, for all his actual boldness and
the de Staël the golden blocks of the background which originality, looks like a man timidly approaching a state-
struggle to get in front of the musicians, but cannot. ment.
Yet the greater and more complex the similarity of In the comparison of Poussin's Rebecca and Eliezer at the
pictorial means, the more we are finally led to consider Well with de Staël's seascape at Martigues, we can again
the difference of content and meaning. see the same evidence of a similar pictorial intelligence
It is clear that in this respect Poussin's art is infinitely and of the enormous gap in terms of obviously expressible
richer than de Staël's. Poussin was able to use a host of experience. This time I will leave the reader to analyse

Poussin
Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well 1648
Oil on canvas
46 1/2 x 77 5/8 in.
The Louvre, Paris

Right
de Stael
Martigues 1953-4
Oil on canvas
38 1/2 x 57 1/2 in.
Collection: R. Moltzah, Oslo