There
are two manners to introduce Jacques Stella (1596-1657), Lyons painter
who was one of Poussin's friends: one is historical and sure, the other
subjective one and more intrigante. 196 paintings, drawings and
engravings joined together for the first retrospective which is finally
devoted to him, leave a feeling of uncertainty indeed, as if the artist
did not cease concealing himself. The history is however simple: wire
of a painter, born and undoubtedly formed in Lyon, Jacques Stella
leaves his city for Italy about 1619 and remains there until 1634.
After four years with Florence, it is established in Rome and made
there a speciality of the religious subjects painted on stone: slates,
marbles, onyx. They are images of devotion, invaluable by material and
the technical difficulty, but with the not very original composition
and the agreed expressions. The great families buy them for their
private cabinets and the diplomatic gifts. In 1634, Stella leaves Rome
for Spain, where finally it will never go. After a family stay in Lyon,
it is destined for Paris to put itself at the service of Louis XIII and
Richelieu. It starts to carry out orders for Parisian and Lyons
churches, for the royal castle of Saint-Germain-in-Bush hammer, the
oratory of Anne of Austria to the Palais Royal. To the appearances,
biblical assumptions and baptisms are added some ancient and
mythological scenes, occasions for Stella to represent architectures in
prospect thoroughly. All that is painted carefully, in average formats,
with the concern of being complete in the exhibition of the subject and
respectful of the traditions. Each figure is characterized by an
attitude, an expression and the color of draped which wraps it. The
inevitable comparison with Poussin, met in Rome in 1624 and with which
Stella exchanges a considerable correspondence, is disastrous. With the
inventiveness of Poussin constructions, with their chromatic
orchestrations rougeoyantes, with their cold violence, Stella does not
have anything to oppose. He seeks remainder only seldom to compete with
his friend, as if he knew the vanity of such a fight. One cannot indeed
prevent oneself from seeing in him disillusioned, a melancholic person
who, often, painted without really believing in it, by practice and
trade more than by pleasure. When it draws, it is anything else: its
naked female deadened, its card players, its carriers raising a block
of stone, his old woman reading are very beautiful drawings, right in
the observation, elliptic in the feature, splendid of clearness. The
feather and the washing are employed with a fast and effective
lightness. These qualities are found in its series of pastoral intended
to be engraved, but they are already weakened there by the will to be
correct and clear. In the series devoted to the lives of the Virgin and
Christ, they disappeared and Stella becomes again what it is publicly:
scrupulous and tedious imagier. From time to time, one would even
suspect it of ignoring his work. It produces what one awaits from him,
it is all. How to understand if not that the ironic inventor of the
Skeleton astrologer - a drawing - could be also the author of fabrics
as disastrous as the Death of Joseph saint or the Embalming of Christ?
Wouldn't the main thing in the work of Stella be precisely this
discordance?
Until 19 february 2007