ADMIRABLE TREMBLEMENT DU TEMPS

LES SAISONS (1660 - 1664), NICOLAS POUSSIN- COLLECTION PALETTES

of JAUBERT Alain

FRANCE, 1991, 00:30:00

Production : DELTA IMAGES, PAINI Dominique, MUSEE DU LOUVRE, FR3, LA SEPT, REUNION DES MUSEES NATIONAUX, MUSEE D'ORSAY
Collection : Musée du Louvre
Genre : Documentary
Keyword : Art, Colour, History of art, Louvre Museum

Summary :
By choosing main artworks in the imagination of the western culture, the series “Palettes” tells in each episode the story of a painting. In one word : its genealogy. As a canvas has its ascendants and its descendants. A double knowledge, technical and philosophical, nourished by a long tradition, gave birth to it. And the painting itself has brought about, all through the years, a multitude of other images…
Going from the idea that the deep meaning of a painting is conveyed by the choice of the colours and the themes, we are dissecting the canvas from its more visible composition to its deepest meaning.

At the end of his life, in Rome, Nicolas Poussin carried out four paintings evoking the seasons. Ordered by the Duke of Richelieu, grand-nephew of the Cardinal, they will be lost during a game of “Jeu de Paume” against the young king Louis XIII, before joining the collections of the Louvre in 1793.
Considered as his pictural testament, this sumptuous series of a particular style touches the contemporary people. Faithful to the Venetians color palette, Poussin modulates surprising games of colors, in tight relation to the sense of the painting. Suffering from a nervous disease which causes trembling of his limbs, Poussin is painting his last canvas with tiny moved touches. Outcome of a long research on the landscape, this set sums up all the knowledges of the painter, let a kind of virgilian pantheism burst. If the theme of the seasons evokes the four phases of the redemption, the four parts of a day, the four ages of the history of the human, or more, the four episodes of the Bible, these canvas seem also to sum up the artwork and the life of the painter.

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