Once or twice in a lifetime, if you are lucky, the whole madness of painting seems to pass in front of your eyes. It felt that way to me in New York this spring, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where two great exhibitions - one exploring Nicolas Poussin's role in the invention of the genre we call 'landscape', the other an endless, stupendous retrospective of Gustave Courbet - are happening a few corridors apart.[*] I stumbled to and fro between them day after day, elated and disoriented. They sum up so much - too much - of what painting in Europe was capable of, and they embed that achievement so palpably in a certain history. Behind the glistening meadows and the huntsmen in the snow one catches the smell of autocracy and public burnings, of permanent warfare and bankers with impeccable taste.

LRB 24 April 2008 | PDF Download