If I were to see a painting or sketch by Watteau in a museum, I’m not sure if it would catch my eye. I might look at it and think, “people, yawn,” and move on. I tend to like abstract art or minimalist art, art that is about color or shape, or else I like certain landscapes, certain still lifes or interiors: it’s rare for portraits or group scenes to really grab my interest. But this book had me interested. It starts with two things: looking and exuberance, and I am a sucker for that particular combination, for exuberant observation. Of the figure in Watteau’s Mezzetin, Perl writes that “he is a whirligig of a man”; his legs “explode in feet shod in slippers with pink rosettes, describing two points in the swing of a pendulum or two hours on a clock” (p 3). This almost feels a bit much for the first page of words in a narrative, but Perl makes it work, and keeps on making it work.
The structure of this book suits the subject, or perhaps just the author, wonderfully: it’s an alphabet book, with several entries for each letter, each entry ranging in length from a sentence or two to several pages. Some of the entries are explicitly about Watteau or his art, while others are more loosely related. Most of it is really pleasing and satisfying, though sometimes Perl’s tone irks me: he often says things are “surely” or “certainly” happened one way or another, or were one way or another, and sometimes it feels like bluster rather than a fully reasoned argument. When he writes of Nijinsky and Massine (pp 88-89) that “both men were essentially heterosexual,” it annoys me: maybe they were, and maybe they said as much themselves, but I don’t know, and Perl doesn’t elaborate: is he saying they were straight because their diaries or letters said so, or because, as he says, “Nijinsky married Romola and Massine, even in the years when he was living with Diaghilev, was sneaking off to brothels”? Later, in an entry under the heading of “Men,” he writes about an old man in a laundromat “carefully folding his jeans and sheets and towels,” and says that there is “something disturbing about his improvised domesticity, but something cozy as well, a sense of a life with its own curious shape, and who would really care to judge that, who can know how it feels from inside?” (p 115). That “disturbing” and that “improvised” make me raise my eyebrows: why is it unusual for a man to wash and fold his clothes? (Though I do like the idea of “a life with its own curious shape.”)
That said, there is so much in this book that made me grin, so much that is smart and playful and broadly interested in art and life and the world. I like the way Perl explores the idea of the arabesque in Watteau’s art, the idea of circling and meandering to get to the point, and I like the way he talks about Watteau’s paintings as full of possibility and ambiguity. (In the entry on “Cappriccio,” he starts with this: “Not the construction but the unfolding or unfurling of a world, a mysterious movement, delicately meandering, full of S-curves and zigzags, forever decentering, snaking and circling, leaping forward in great arcs and pulling back in tight curls—this is the impulse behind Watteau’s art” (p 31).”) I like how he describes Watteau’s work as having “the quality mingled insouciance and seriousness; the “Oh, it’s nothing” that is another way of saying “Of course, it’s everything” (p 8). The entry on backs and the back view in Watteau’s art is really pleasing, as is the entry on beginnings, and I love the entry on evening, a paragraph about flirtation and dusk and conversation in bars: this is linked to Perl’s idea, as he puts it in the entry on flirtation, that Watteau’s art is “a never-ending plot of come-ons, importunings, seductions, rejections, equivocations, retreats” (p 66). There is just so much that is good in this book: a little bit about Virginia Woolf walking to the National Gallery in London, thoughts about grace and lack of self-consciousness, readings of paintings that are about looking closely but also about thinking and feeling. One of the best bits is on a painting called Gersaint’s Shopsign: you can read that entry in its entirety on the Columbia College Today website.
Leave a Reply