Monday, Jul. 03, 1972

An Analytical Stillness

A candle flame, streaming upward from its stubby pillar of wax, was one of the favorite images in 17th century European art. Vulnerable to a breath, shedding its modest light and resolving the threats of darkness into rational form, it became a metaphor of human consciousness itself. Indeed, a tradition of the "night piece" runs back to the late 15th century, when Leonardo set down his precepts for painting dramatic firelit groups. Rembrandt in Holland and Caravaggio in Rome produced unforgettable examples of the genre. But the artist whose work is most intimately associated with candlelight was Frenchman: Georges de La Tour.

Great painters, one tends to suppose, may go in and out of fashion, but they do not get lost, like suitcases. Yet this was La Tour's fate. His work lay in limbo for nearly 300 years; by 1900 he was a name and three paintings, no more, and the patient labor of art scholars over the past few decades has unearthed only 31 of his pictures, plus various fragments and copies. This must be only a fraction of his output. Throughout this summer, however, the definitive La Tour exhibition is on view at the Orangerie in Paris. Returned to the light, La Tour's work can be seen as one of the marvels of French art.

Odious. About La Tour's life and character, very little is known. The man is faceless--the more so, because he left no known self-portrait; it is just possible that the quick-eyed, copper-haired young cheat at the right in The Cardsharp with the Ace of Diamonds may be La Tour himself. But his life is mostly conjecture, strung between a few documentary signposts. He was born in 1593, at Vic, a town in the duchy of Lorraine. At some time between 1610 and 1616, he is assumed to have gone to Italy and worked in Rome. By 1617 he was back in France, marrying the daughter of a prosperous ducal silversmith, Diane Le Nerf. The marriage paid well in contacts and commissions. In 1620 La Tour moved to Luneville, his wife's town, and begged the Duke of Lorraine for tax exemption--"since nobody of the petitioner's art and profession lives there, or in the region." The duke granted this, from which one may suppose that the 27-year-old artist already had a burgeoning reputation.

La Tour was to spend the rest his life in Luneville, surviving the plague and the Thirty Years' War and growing steadily rich. His tax exemption fattened him, and the poorer citizens of Luneville resented it; in 1646 they besought the duke to tax everyone equally for war, including "the painter M. Georges de La Tour," who "makes himself odious to the people by the number of dogs he keeps ... as though he were lord of the place, coursing his greyhounds through the corn, spoiling and trampling it." Apparently La Tour remained a crusty squire to the end: in 1650, two years before his death at 59, he thrashed a peasant with such spryness that a doctor had to be called.

In one sense, in a French contex, La Tour was a magnificent vindication of provincial art. His style could hardly be further from the grand authoritarian rhetoric of Louis XIV. "No great painter ever refused more than Georges de La Tour," remarks Art Historian Jacques Thuillier. "There was never a great painter who created a narrower universe." He painted no landscapes. no buildings, no ruins, and hardly any animals beyond St. Peter's rooster and a fly perched on a blind beggar's hurdy-gurdy; the sole object of his scrutiny was man and woman and their intimate possessions -- the texture and sheen of velvet, the transparency of a glass, or (as in the Wrightsman Magdalen) the exact difference in the highlights that a tallow flame creates on the bone of a skull and on the grayed sea luster of a pearl. But La Tour was not a painter of still lifes with figures. A phrase like "the human condition," though worn, is not to be avoided: it was his field, and he covered it with an immense and suave precision.

One of La Tour's themes was the vanity and vulnerability of youth; he embodied it in his extraordinary masterpiece The Cardsharp with the Ace of Diamonds. A boy, caparisoned in plumes, brocade and lace, is gambling against a courtesan who is about to get, from the cardsharp's waistband, the crucial ace. It is a familiar genre situation, but La Tour impregnated it with a subtle psychological tension. The shifty ballet of the eyeballs runs its counterpoint to the expressive gestures of the hands -- the soft, uncertain dandyism in the boy, the momentary apprehension of the serving girl, whose glance betrays that she is in on the act, the dealer's foxy speed and the whore's relaxation -- all is present in the fingers and skin. A moment has been caught with implacable grace, fixed, and rendered absolute.

Cubist. There is something quite abstract in La Tour's art, which is as evident in the serene, egglike oval of the courtesan's head, seen in broad day, as it is in the cuirasses and helmets of the gambling soldiers in The Denial of St. Peter, glimpsed by candlelight. A body or a hand is silhouetted against a shielded flame in order to display, with effortless virtuosity, its linear nature as form. Indeed, La Tour's night pieces look like predictions of Cubism; the background is as active as the figure, voids read as strongly as solids. This quality gives his compositions an immense formal authority -- Caravaggio, whose followers La Tour had undoubtedly studied in Rome, never solved problems with La Tour's exactitude.

Some of the greatest art is ineloquent. It does not argue or get into expressive tangles. Most of La Tour's surviving work lies on this latitude of the imagination, sharing it with other purifiers of experience: Piero della Francesca, Poussin, Cezanne. Its fundamental condition, the mood of La Tour's key paintings, is a kind of analytical silence: a stillness that mediates between the logic of Descartes and the mysticism of Pascal, both of whom were La Tour's approximate contemporaries. To see the candle flame play on the faces of La Tour's models, rendering them both explicit and transcendent, is to witness a profound meditation on the limits of man.

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