Poussin, a Baroque choreographer
Nicolas Poussin - Hymen disguised as a woman during an offering to Priapus - 1634-1638
From 15 February to 8 May 2022, the Getty Museum presents ‘Poussin and the Dance’, an exhibition that juxtaposes the works of the great Baroque painter with new dance commission.
Image: Nicolas Poussin, “Hymen disguised as a woman during an offering to Priapus”, 1634-38. Collection Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand.
The art of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), the great figure of the French Baroque, contrasts sharply with that of other great names in Baroque painting. In contrast to the tenebrism of Caravaggio or the almost mystical play of light and shadow of Rembrandt, Poussin represents classicism, order and precision in the face of the rapture of the full Baroque. And despite this taste for order, Poussin was attracted to dance, perhaps the freest and most spontaneous of all the arts, and shortly after his arrival in Rome -where he produced most of his work- depictions of dancers began to appear in his oeuvre. “Orchestrating complex, colliding movements with his wax figurines,” explains the Getty Museum, “ envisioned dramatic—even violent—action with a choreographer’s eye.”
Organised in collaboration with the National Gallery, London, ‘Poussin and the Dance’ includes a selection of Poussin’s paintings, as well as a group of antiquities that may have inspired the artist, juxtaposed with a series of dance videos by three contemporary choreographers: Micaela Taylor, artistic director of The TL Collective; Ana Maria Álvarez, artistic director of CONTRA-TIEMPO; and Chris Emile, co-founder of the project No)one. Art House.
Among the works on display is the monumental Hymen disguised as a woman during an offering to Priapus (1634-38), on loan from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, whose horizontal composition is strikingly similar to that of a Roman relief depicting five dancers before a portico (known as The Borghese Dancers), which is included in the exhibition from the Louvre Museum. The National Gallery in London, co-organiser of the exhibition, has loaned three important paintings by the French artist, including the famous The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1634).
In the words of Sarah Cooper, co-curator at the Getty Museum, “as we looked at Poussin’s works with these three choreographers, they each found eye-opening ways to dig into their worlds, pulling out details, expressions, textures, as well as perspectives about how the visual story was formed in a way that only someone with intimate knowledge of the physical experience of dance and its capacity for expression could uncover.”
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