NONFICTION

Jean-Antoine Watteau, the 18th-century French rococo artist, doesn't make many art critics' Top 10 lists of great painters. His predilection for frivolous garden scenes with idle lovers makes him suspect. Greatness demands dark insights into the human condition. Think Rembrandt, with those melancholic figures set against a black-hole backdrop.

Jed Perl thinks his fellow art critics' dismissal of Watteau is wrong. As far he's concerned, the Frenchman is wonderful. And he has written an alphabet book -- "Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World" -- to prove it.

Yes, an alphabet book. You know, one of those books whose text is structured around the alphabet, with an entry for each letter.

It's a superb choice of narrative structure because it allows Perl to follow a dizzying array of disparate thoughts without having to worry about tying them together as closely as a conventional narrative would require. Freed from conventional constraints, Perl drills down into a labyrinth of Watteau-driven free association.

Among the disparate figures making appearances in Perl's dream parade are the painter Paul Cezanne (who drew on characters from commedia dell'arte for subjects, as Watteau did) and the actress Katharine Hepburn (whose performance in the screwball comedy "Bringing Up Baby" Perl describes as "the most recent incarnation of the Watteau woman, a woman who is gorgeous and funny and sexy and independent").

In the course of Perl's musings, we learn that Samuel Beckett, author of "Waiting for Godot" and patron saint of the forlorn, loved Watteau. Perl has a good explanation why: Watteau wasn't as frivolous as he might seem at first glance.

Beckett's "interest in Watteau, expressed in a number of letters, will challenge students of Beckett's ascetic and tragic art, at least until they recognize that Watteau's work is saturated with those qualities, with a gravitas that lurks amid the featheriness," Perl writes.

Those lush if slightly disheveled gardens with their idle lovers also hold ambiguity and nerve-jangling uncertainties, it seems.

"[I]n a sense passion's calculated postponement is Watteau's essential subject, so that his paintings become a meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of love, a meditation on the chance that two people might come together, might for at least a time be turned into one."

On Watteau's canvases, though, they merely wait eternally, like the characters in "Waiting for Godot." (And you thought Rembrandt was dark.)

"Antoine's Alphabet" is fascinating, and repeated readings reveal how subtly Perl's ideas advance across the seemingly isolated entries. As Perl writes, "[L]ike a children's alphabet, this one is meant to be read from end to end, as an unfolding panorama, a screen with twenty-six panels."

My one quibble: It would have been nice to see more of Watteau's art, particularly his paintings. "Antoine's Alphabet" has a handful of Watteau's drawings and paintings reproduced in black and white, along with several reproductions of period prints based on Watteau's works. Perhaps a selection of color plates would have made the book prohibitively expensive.

It's not a serious setback. Among other accomplishments, Perl has written a perfect companion for an idle afternoon of Googling for Watteau masterpieces. From literary free association to digital leaps, in a few easy clicks.
Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.