Antoine’s Alphabet

When our best critics write about art, they reveal not just history and technique but the significance of being human. Jed Perl, art critic for The New Republic, has done just this in his book on Jean-Antoine Watteau, which is suffused with stunning meditations on masquerade and what it says about the people who employ it. French painter Watteau (1684–1721) is famous for depicting the characters of the commedia dell’arte, Italian street comedy with antecedents in the antique rituals of Rome. Those figures include Harlequin, the happy clown; Punch, he of the pitifully oversize proboscis; and the sad clown, Pierrot. Perl tells us, however, that Watteau’s figures are not simply archetypes, but individuals—his clowns are specific people, whose clothing, makeup and personae make them actors in their own lives.

Watteau’s sensitivity to this seems landmark; according to Perl, it is the birth of “self-consciousness” in art, the first time in painting’s history that subjects were rendered as fully aware of having chosen their own roles. Watteau was also a master at depicting parties that were always a touch neurotic, wistful, sad. Watteau’s young revelers mingle desperately, trying each other’s personalities on for size. Their whirlwind sociability mirrors the tumult of a soon-democratizing world.

Antoine’s Alphabet is chaptered as an abecedarium: Entries under “A” include “Art-for-Art’s-Sake,” while “Z” stands for “Zeuxis,” a lost painter of Ancient Greece. In between, miniature essays flit by on Kleist, Nerval and the anatomy of the female back. Toward the book’s end, Perl drops his own mask and writes about what originally drew him to painting—a bad pastoral decorating the wall of his grandparents’ Brooklyn house. The swift grace of this book makes you wish the English alphabet had more letters.—Joshua Cohen

Perl reads Tue 16.

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