VoltThree centuries ago, on July 18, 1721, Jean-Antoine Watteau died of complications from persistent tuberculosis. He is not even thirty-seven years old. His short and sad life began in northern France, where he was born in 1684 as the son of a roofer. Little is known about his training, and the handmade works can only be determined after 1702. That year, the painter went to Paris, where there was a short break, and he subletted to live with various acquaintances until his death.
Strangely, Wattau likes to paint soldiers killed in war on the one hand Ludwig XIV. Towards the end of his reign, he moved from one battlefield to another, with actresses and actors from French comedy and Italian comedy art. Actors and soldiers abide by strict regulations and should continue to succeed in new fields. The comparison of these two groups also provides a metaphor for the life of the autocratic monarchy. The vast majority of recipients who obey orders are faced with a small group of privileged elites who treat their lives as a continuous performance.
It’s as if they are trapped in a cage of imagination
Watteau’s genius lies in portraying the world of the drama of the ruler, not the drama itself. This happened when he invented a whole new category of pictures when he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Art, the so-called fêtes galantes. A typical example of this type can be seen under the heading “Assemblée dans un parc” in the Louvre.
In the foreground, we are portrayed as gentlemen from back and ladies in elegant clothes encouraging us to follow them into the picture space. This is particularly suitable for this, because here our sight goes across the pond and the opposite bank, through the gap between the trees, to the horizon, to a sky with a similar outline to the woman in the foreground. This will create a vertical, well-lit column that divides the picture into a square section on the right and a narrow rectangle on the left.
Only a dying tree trunk can be seen on the left, while the painter on the right gathered nine people in a narrow room surrounded by dense foliage. A girl is standing by the pond, and another is back. Two other girls are lying next to a man on the grass. Two women are playing with their love letters. One woman flirtingly protects herself from the gentleman, and then the one on the far right A man is playing his flute. The heads of these four people lined up in a horizontal line, as if they were all trapped in an imaginary cage. The tall trees stand high above them, and the trunks, branches and branches are not clearly visible. They are reminiscent of marshmallow balls or similar substances, which can collapse at any time without internal structure.
There are always some ghosts and unreal things
In the darkness of the woods, people’s holiday robes are illuminated by a dazzling, flickering light, which may come from torches or lightning. Then, if you look for the source of this light, the result is both clear and amazing: it falls into the picture from the outside—that is, from us. Most of the time, you can only see the bright reflections of the clothes, but not the textile materials. As a result, the depicted person loses the stability of the material, they are like soap bubbles with only a shiny skin.
This can be seen as a sign of the fact that in a bold world, real people are irrelevant anyway. What matters is her role, and this role is determined by highly differentiated drama. As Niklas Luhmann pointed out, the days of dreamy ladies and their melancholy lovers passed by “sighing and kneeling from time to time.” The entire social interaction is based on a series of gestures and pantomime performances, which today seem extremely influential, decorative and artificial.
Watteau may think so too. This is why his characters always have a ghostly unreal feeling, like there is no flesh and blood under the glittering robe and makeup face. His colors are mostly thin and rough, everything is made up of transparent brushstrokes, and there is no doubt behind him. This is not just because he is a high-speed painter. Obviously, he deliberately portrayed the characters as fragile appearances, without any inner substance, only considering outer influences. Opposing this concealment of appearances, the rising bourgeoisie spread other ideals: justice, rationality, and firmness of people who don’t pretend. But there is not much left today. On the so-called social media, on TikTok and Instagram, the masses are now able to practice this bold game with a coquettish appearance, and Watteau was able to reproduce it so well in his time because he did not participate in it. he himself.
