Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Georges de la Tour
French; 17th-century
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
93%
The Penitent Magdalen. c1640. Oil on canvas
De la Tour's power is in the tension between the hardness of his geometry and the intangibility of his light. Here, Mary is a triangle stacked on a trapezoid and darkling, her head turned deep into the scene towards a flame and its reflection in a mirror. (The mirror, a black square holding a bit of saving light, is a metonym for the painting as an object and an experience.) Every one of her aspects, from the teacup-handle fingers to the parallelogram of a forearm to her helmet of hard hair, is solid and sharply, strangely limned. But the candle flickers doubt onto the thingness of all of these things. What's that finger with a gleam across it, that wrist with a bright spot of white? By way of the light even Mary's room is an involution, indiscernibly inside of itself. The things in this painting both are and aren't in equal measure. (TFS, 2023)
Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art
80%
Saint Peter Repentant. 1645. Oil on canvas
La Tour's value is all in how he's painted Peter's right calf: full and contoured and present to the world with light gleaming off and around it, but discomfitingly dead and disconnected, too, as if it doesn't belong to the Saint but to itself, to its own space and time. One gets the sense from La Tour at his best that light carries things out of darkness only to wrest them from whatever wholeness they enjoyed in obscurity — that there is a reducing violence to vision. Compositionally, this can mean a sort of uncombinable geometry; La Tour arranges his scenes out of parts that don't know they're working towards a whole. You get quite a bit of this in the way the sitter's lap slopes downwards at the same angle as the bench beside it, and in the way his arm seems to emerge from somewhere just outside of his body even though it's tucked in so tightly with his torso. But my feeling that La Tour is not quite at his best is traceable, I think, to the Saint's visage, which tells too much. (The right calf tells nothing.) (TFS, 2025)