ART: Decorum and Fury

The big fall event of the French museums is the retrospective of Nicolas Poussin at the Grand Palais in Paris, marking the 400th anniversary of the painter's birth. The visitor is warned: this is not an easy show, and given the queues outside and the crowds within, it taxes the concentration of even the hardiest gallerygoer. It contains 245 paintings and preparatory drawings -- a fearsome demonstration of the borrowing power of Pierre Rosenberg, the show's chief organizer, who runs the Louvre's department of paintings. One may even wonder whether it is addressed to a general public at all. But for specialists it is a gold mine, offering the chance to compare one work with another that only comes, at most, once in a generation. The last big Poussin show in France was in 1960, at the Louvre, and he has never had a full retrospective in America.

Ordinary mortals may find themselves succumbing to a kind of ennui auguste by the time they come to the end of the exhibition. But this has always been part of the experience of scaling Mount Poussin. "Some people blame him for having gone a little too far in his austere and precise manner," wrote the poet Charles Perrault in 1700, "but others maintain that these defects are nothing other than beauties which are a little too great for unaccustomed eyes." Among those "others" have been most of the best French artists of the past two centuries -- not only the classicists like Ingres, for whom Poussin's lucidity and intellectual control were a model, but more romantic ones as well, from Delacroix to Picasso, all of whom sensed the depth of response to the world that lay below the surface of the painter's art. "Each time I go to him," said Cezanne, "I know better who I am."

There is no point in pretending that Poussin is an easy painter for today's viewers to get at. He has the disadvantage, for a coarsely expressionist culture, of being incapable of vulgarity or cheap sentiment. His pictures don't reach out across 3 1/2 centuries to diddle your heartstrings. His imagery springs from qualities of feeling and modes of thought that are now almost extinct: educated piety, allegory and complete familiarity not only with the Bible and the Greek and Latin classics from Homer to Ovid, Horace and Plutarch, but also with their Renaissance descendants, such as Tasso.