Sounding the Unplucked String

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Washington, the glowing, meticulous paintings of Watteau

Some exhibitions seem to be beyond full criticism. They redefine their subject, the image of an artist, for a generation, and do it with the utmost sympathy and scholarly passion. The presentation of paintings and drawings of Antoine Watteau that opened last month at the National Gallery in Washington, and will be seen (with various additions and subtractions) at the Grand Palais in Paris during the winter and in Berlin through the spring of 1985, is such an event. So much of the work is fragile, and loans are so difficult to negotiate, that this is the first major international loan exhibition of Watteau that has ever been held, and it may be the last.

Its curators, Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Pierre Rosenberg, with the help of Nicole Parmantier and other art historians, have condensed the existing scholarship on Watteau, together with a great deal of their own, into a catalogue that now becomes a standard work. It shows no trace of the puffy garnish of superlatives considered obligatory for blockbuster shows in U.S. museums. The authors discriminate severely: "The execution lacks energy and seems pasty," runs the note on one painting from the Hermitage in Leningrad. "The figures are unsteady, the faces have no character or charm."

There are only about 60 Watteau paintings on whose authenticity all experts agree, and his life is obscure. Since the Renaissance there have been few great artists about whom less is known than Watteau. He is almost as much of an enigma as Vermeer. He was born in Valenciennes in 1684, the son of a Flemish roof tiler. Until a few years before, Valenciennes was part of Flanders, not France; and Watteau's Flemish origins may have had more than a casual meaning to him, since the main influence on his work was Rubens. Nothing is known about his political views, family affections or sexual life. He had no fixed address; yet once he reached Paris, he rarely left its gate. His only recorded trip outside France was to England, where he went in the hope of a cure for the tuberculosis that killed him, not yet 37 years old, in 1721.

No scandals attach to Watteau's name, although he was said to have burned a few paintings he considered obscene a few days before he died. If they were as exquisite as The Intimate Toilette, the little panel that is shown for the first time in this exhibition, the loss must be considered heavy. He never married. He kept no journal, and no undisputed letters by him survive. The only writings in his hand are a few banal jottings on the back of drawings. They do not contain a word about the theory of painting; perhaps he had none.

His circle of friends in Paris included some of the most cultivated men of the day, such as the financier Pierre Crozat (whose collection of old-master drawings was said to have completed young Watteau's aesthetic education) and the Flemish artist Nicolas Vleughels. But their memoirs of Watteau tend to be short and sometimes contradictory; they blur when the traits of his possibly rather feckless, prickly character present themselves. He seems to have been solitary and misanthropic, though with flashes of antic gaiety: "A good friend but a difficult one," the dealer Edme-Franc,ois Gersaint unhelpfully put it. Naturally one would like to know more; probably we never shall.

There were, of course, great differences between Rubens and his hierophant Watteau. One painted big, the other small; the tone of Watteau's paintings is always unofficial and intimate, very unlike the grand elocution of Rubens.

Watteau managed to skim off Rubens' lustrous surface and endow it with a still greater sense of nuance, while leaving his master's tyrannous physicality behind. To look at his fetes champetres --those felicitously idealized gatherings of young lovers, planted on the unchanging lawn of a social Eden--is to think of pollen and silk, not flesh. Watteau was a great painter of the naked body, but his nudes tend to privacy and reflection. They are completely unlike Rubens' magniloquent blond wardrobes. He seems, for this reason, the more erotic artist.

Because his scenes were bathed in an aura of privilege, many people still think of him as a court painter. Nothing could be further from the truth. After he died, Watteau's work appealed irresistibly to the high and mighty of Europe: Frederick the Great of Prussia had no fewer than 89 paintings by or in the manner of Watteau in his palaces at Potsdam, Sans Souci and Charlottenburg. Alive, Watteau had no time for courts, and little access to them anyway. He sensibly preferred the theater, whose troupes and characters he painted so often, shifting them from the stage to "real" landscapes (which are themselves stages, only of a subtler kind), that it is still hard to disentangle his allegories from his theater pieces.

His heirs--Boucher, Pater, Lancret--would embody rococo. But Watteau died in 1721, just over a year before Louis XV was crowned. Thus the artist whose feathery trees and pastoral scenes of gallantry seem the very essence of rococo sensibility only reached the edge of the rococo. His time was that of Louis XIV, the Sun King. If the intimacy of his art seems so far from the bemusing pomp of Versailles, it is partly because his imitators lagged; it took time to convert the scenography of Watteau's fugitive, shadowed mind into a system of decor suitable for the Pompadour.

One learns nothing about real history from these paintings. Outside the gilt frames, hysteria and massacre ruled. France was continuously at war for most of Watteau's life. In the winter of 1709, men ate corpses in the streets of Paris; the French economy was wrecked by a wave of delirious speculation whipped up by a Scottish financier, John Law. But on canvas, the Cytherean games never end. Men need paradises, however fictive, in times of trouble, and art is a poor conductor of historical events. One thinks of the impressionists constructing their scenes of pleasure through the days of the commune of 1871 and the Franco-Prussian War.

But there is another reason to connect Watteau with impressionism: the colloquial, almost chatty strand of improvisation that purls along the surface of his art without distracting from its depths. As with Renoir, his models were his friends. He drew them incessantly, in fine-pointed chalks --a red, a white and a black, the famous trois crayons --whose use he had learned from Rubens. Their faces and poses, rendered in that wiry, atmospheric line, became a collection of types, single figures like the Seated Woman that he would combine for his finished compositions.

Thus, even when the subject is purely imaginary, his figures tend to have a high degree of descriptive reality. Their expressions take us away from the explicit theater of Baroque art, where each gesture stands for a set emotion. They are more complex than that. The face is a surface in change: it does not compose itself formally as an index of traits. It suggests that personality is labile, and this insight was part of Watteau's appeal to modern art ists. The supreme example, in his portraiture, was the face of the clown Gilles rising centered and alone in his baggy white costume --the Louvre's male Mona Lisa, the Pierrot adopted as a symbol by Picasso, Stravinsky and Cocteau.

Critics have always spoken of Watteau's "musicality." But what does it mean? His paintings are full of people playing instruments, and Watteau obviously understood their techniques and disciplines. He loved music; sometimes he was comic about it too, as in Mezzetin, whose soft operatic expression is mocked by his sinewy hands and the high twangling of the guitar he plays. But Watteau's musicality is more rarefied than this: it lives in pauses, silences between events. He was a connoisseur of the unplucked string, the immobility before the dance, the moment that falls between departure and nostalgia. In Prelude to a Concert, the central musician is tuning but not playing his theorbo, or chitarrone, a long business that slightly frays the patience of his fellow musicians. A girl riffles through a score, a child plays with a spaniel, nothing happens. But the stance of the player is very commanding; it enjoins attention, and in the eternally protracted pause one perceives the pictorial magic of the painting: its ruffled and sliding light, its sense of intimate structure expressed by the crinklings of taffeta in the dress of the standing woman on the left, her back half-turned to us.

Great artists invent things that sound banal. Watteau invented the draped human back. This sounds simple, a matter of mere observation; it was not. In his hands the human back, preferably of a young woman, became as expressive as a face --a pyramid or wedge of subdued, lustrous substance, played upon by light, divided into delicately articulated folds and crannies that betoken silence and concentration.

Nowhere is it more subtly used than in his largest and perhaps greatest painting, Gersaint's Shopsign, which was actually, though briefly, used as a sign above the dealer's premises on a Paris bridge. We are looking into a gallery that sells paintings and mirrors. The paintings are dimly legible; the mirrors are black, reflecting little. Three backs are turned: a pink cascading dress on the left, a lady and a gentleman scrutinizing a painting on the right. The sense of absorption--of a painter spying on people looking at art --is extreme; and so is the feeling for material substance, quiet, glowing, meticulously wrought. On the far left, a portrait of Louis XIV is being lowered into its crate for shipment. This refers to the name of Gersaint's shop, Au Grand Monarque, but also to the death and burial of the Sun King himself. The shop sign is at once an elegy, a work of art criticism (for no painting on the walls is there by accident) and an inspired essay of social observation. It begins what Watteau would have done with his maturity. But a few months later his lungs were gone, and he was dead. --By Robert Hughes