Jean-Antoine Watteaus Foursome - Essay Example

Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Foursome The most striking aspect οf the depiction οf desire in L'Enseigne de Gersaint-for this is indeed its subject--is how Watteau's skill moves us back and forth between sexual and mercantile poles. We must not forget why the work was commissioned in the first place: to entice people into a shop to buy. The sign depicts an idealized and ideal clientele: wealthy, healthy, and powerful. It celebrates possessiveness, both sexual and economic, and this message, once read, colors all other responses to this profound work, below whose apparently superficial surface winks the dull lustre οf gold. "A new energy has been released and a kind οf metaphysics οf money is being born," writes John Berger about seventeenth-century Holland and Frans Hals. (Berger 160-163) But, his observation pertains as well to the Gersaint's signboard. The presence and placement οf the mirrors, the contradiction οf the implied inferiority (and thus privacy) οf the shop, and its "publicity" because οf the invisibility οf an entire fourth wall; the absence οf speech (thus giving primacy to the mute gaze, to nonlinguistic signaling); the tension between the individual and the group (another recurring element in Watteau's thematics): all combine to present a tableau where desire, displaced and not, is shown to be the machine that runs society. It is the very absence οf a coda, after having been encouraged to read narratively, that, paradoxically, leads us to such a reading οf desire. What one sees here is what one wants to be, or, at the least, what one is expected to want to be. Our gaze duplicates that οf the figures in the paintings and is duplicated by them; the spectator becomes part οf the sign that announced this Regency "body" shop. There is the sense οf the photographed in this painting, a sense οf interrupted activity that we, post-Daguerrian viewers, take for granted. We are almost incapable οf looking at this painting as did Watteau's contemporaries. The immediate and the transient, the accidental, the contingent, the mundane: all are evoked in this work. But, it is the transient especially that Watteau seeks to depict, a transience that our photographic sensibilities pick up at first glance. To do a painting, especially when one is dying from tuberculosis, that depicts a moment in a shop's existence, a painting that is meant to attract connoisseurs and speculators, underlines how compelling was the statement that Watteau wanted to make. The transient and its valuation are connected brilliantly in L'Enseigne de Gersaint (a title that offers no profundity οf meaning either), because they are connected aesthetically. Thus, Watteau pushes us to surrender to art what it demands: the recognition that only through imaginative effort can an equitable ethics οf urbanity be derived. This painting is about the power οf art to transcend even the most powerful social and personal impediments to happiness, because they are indeed transient. The sign Watteau painted signals a new social context, bent on possessing, evaluating, and judging according to appearance and by anyone. It is indeed a "photograph" οf the Regency.1 L'Enseigne de Gersaint introduces, without the aesthetic and emotional distancing that defines the fetes galantes, the body as the site for the working out οf desire, and society as the space in which bodies define and adapt themselves. Fiction and art should draw the connections among desire, the body and society. And this work does just that: it shows potential connections that can narrate the place οf desire in an emergent cultural realignment. The painting is so well balanced thematically that one may forget that it is a quite sophisticated commentary on the function οf art in society. Its self-consciousness, its theatricality, and its extraordinary use οf color all tend us away from its intellectualism. Watteau was asking fundamental questions about the role οf the spectator in the production and the transfer οf art; he was commenting on the role οf tradition in the creation οf art; and, he was attracting our attention to the fine line between art qua art and art as a sign οf luxury and status. These were the themes that had defined his own existence as painter; it is only proper that they are projected through this extraordinary result. The image οf cadavers being carried by an angry and frustrated crowd, with which I began this essay, is not far from the one that I have just finished analyzing. Both Barbier and Watteau are symbolically recreating felt, palpable social change in the first two decades οf the eighteenth century. They are also, on a second level οf symbolization, trying to understand the metaphorization οf power and influence. The riots over paper money that had suddenly become worthless and the commodification οf art itself, οf placing a monetary value on the most aesthetic οf man's activities, are significant issues, important to describe. The palpable weakening οf a heretofore seemingly invincible central government, objectified in these two scenes by the closed doors οf the Palais-Royal and the disappearing portrait οf Louis XIV, had been underlined by the relative openness that Philippe d'Orleans had brought to his Court; but, his candor was too little and too late. Power had hemorrhaged into the streets. Classes were being redefined, and with them a new ethics, exemplified in the young man's father's awkward attempts at warning his son about mercurial Parisians. Merit will count more than it did, but appearances and the superficial will skill reign, only no longer to be systematically defined by the court. The Regency period (1715-1723) was one οf remarkable narrative energy. Writers such as Challe, Prevost, Marivaux, Montesquieu, Voltaire, just to mention a few, were attempting through histories, letters, anecdotes, journals, essays, and novels to understand the world narratively, but as well to explore the limits οf narrativity. It was a period οf increasing literacy, but οf an ill-defined readership (just as the "public" for painting was ill-defined). As we know, there was a strong impulse toward the realistic portrayal οf the world in an attempt to discover that readership, and encourage it to read. But soon the best writers began to compose narratives that used the insufficiencies οf narrative--that is, the impossibility οf narrative to tell all--as a cognitive trigger to interest and define their readership, while simultaneously confirming the emotional influence οf the genre. The urge toward first-person narrative apparently a move toward verisimilitude, was as well an admission--or a desire to have readers see--that all knowledge in human relations is relative, and that what we take to be "factual" or "true" or "complete" is only what our combinatory skills have produced as the least contradictory to our expectations. The problem that Marivaux was fictionalizing in his urban journals and that Watteau was working out in his late paintings--and as early as the Voyage a Cythere--offer contrapuntal analogies οf social and cultural forms. What little we know οf a and Marivaux's biographies would confirm that the former's L'Enseigne de Gersaint and the latter's early prose efforts provide, tentatively and seductively, important glimpses οf the preoccupations οf France's intellectual elite in the pre-Enlightenment; among which one would have to include self-definition in a highly organized social order; the function οf art and artifice in such an order; the relationship between work, its profits, and leisure; the role οf gender in human relations; the secularization οf desire and the place οf the body in social interaction and organization; the relationship between the city and the individual; and, the trauma οf political and economic crisis and its effects on art. These are all present in L'Enseigne de Gersaint, a work that challenges Watteau's viewers--as it may have challenged Marivaux himself--to tell stories about these subjects, and thus to narrate culture. Works Cited Berger, John, "Hals and Bankruptcy," in his About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 163. Read More