Détruire la peinture

by Louis Marin

Poussin, à Rome, dit du Caravage qu'il était venu au monde pour détruire la peinture et cependant il est dit aussi qu'il possédait l'art de peindre tout entier. Ce livre cherche non point à résoudre une contradiction mais plutôt à développer une inconsistance du système représentatif dans le procès de peindre de Poussin au Caravage et vice versa. Il y sera donc question de mimésis et de fantaisie, d'histoire et d'action, de perspective et de ténèbres, de mort et de décapitation...

222 pages, Pocket Book

First published March 1, 1994

About the author

Louis Marin was Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Reviews

[Ignacio Rial-Schies · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title promised a lot, but I somehow did not get really into it until the second half. While proving that it is not possible to talk about painting without a certain frame of reference, which in this case is built mostly out of bits and pieces of structural linguistics, Marin's analysis of Caravaggio and Poussin's work (and some others along the way) makes a clear case for an art history that delves deeper into the ways artistic production and aesthetic perception structured and influenced each other at the time frame those works were created, and also beyond.
I'm currently following a self-drafted reading programme on aesthetics, with a focus on painting, trying to put this book in relation to Deleuze's Logic of Sensation, his course on paiting, and, more recently, Ranciere's work. I'm looking forward to rereading this particular book looking for more connections.