Five thoughts on art
1. The work of art must impress you without touching you.
2. If the classics are cold, it is because their flame is eternal.
3. The eclat of the romantics is that of a fire in a strawpile.
4. If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.
5. Painting, as Leonardo da Vinci proved, is superior to all the other arts, because it is directed to the most noble and divine of all the organs, the eye. To compare the ear to the eye would be as absurd ae to compare the nose to the ear.
"Post-Cézannism” has erected into a system every one of the clumsinesses and the deficiencies of Cézanne and painted square mile after square mile of canvases with these defects. The defects of Cézanne, in his fundamentally honest character, were often consequences of his very virtues; but defects are never virtues! I can imagine the profound melancholy of the master of Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne, when after having struggled so long to build a well-constructed apple on his canvas, possessed like a demon by the problem of relief, he had succeeded on the contrary only in painting it concave! Andinstead of keeping, as was his ambition, the “intact continuity” of the surface of his canvas, without making any concession to the illusory frivolities of verisimilitude, he finds himself in the end with a canvas frightfully lacking in consistency and filled with holes! With each new apple there is a new hole! Which, as the immortal Michel de Montaigne said in another connection, is “chier dans le panier et se le mettre sur la tête.”
If I say that this book is actually to be the book of justice, I must add that the eternity of this book will be that of its inexorable truth; for I shall be faithful to truth to the very marrow of the bones of aesthetics, and let the reader not be frightened at hearing them often cracking between the vigorous hands of my brain. Thus, let this be said: Modern painters having almost totally lost the technical tradition of the ancients, we can no longer do what we want to do. We only do “whatever comes out of us.” There is a Spanish proverb which defines the common people's reaction to a bad painter: “If it comes out with a beard, it will be Saint Anthony, and if it comes out without a beard it will be the Immaculate Conception.” Picasso, whose case is even more dramatic than Cézanne's (more gifted to begin with, destructive and anarchistic rather than constructive and patriarchal), has often quoted this proverb to me, taking it for his own and applying it as a devise to his own manner of painting. In other words, he does this on purpose: he knows perfectly well that white “enamel” for painting doors, which you buy at the corner store and with which he covers his canvas, will turn yellow within a year, like thenewspaper in his collages. Just as the anarchist who sets fire to a church is quite well aware that the effect of his act will be, not to preserve it, but rather to make it go up in flames.
The Catalonian sculptor Manolo, looking with bitterness at a statuette which he had just completed and which his friends—“modern art critics"—were praising to the skies, exclaimed philosophically, “You like only the things of mine which turn out badly, for what I wanted to do was a Venus, and all that came out was a toad!” Today the love of the defective is such that genius is recognized only in defects, and especially in ugliness. The moment a Venus resembles a toad, the contemporary pseudo-aesthetes exclaim, “It's powerful, it's human!” Certain it is that Raphaelesque perfections would pass totally unperceived before their eyes. Ingres yearned to paint like Raphael and only painted like Ingres; Raphael yearned to paint like the Ancients and exceeded them. There have been times when I silently admitted to myself, “I want to paint like Ingres,” and it turned out to be like Bouguereau. Nevertheless I irresistibly paint like Dali, which is already enormous, for of all contemporary painters I am the one who is most able to do what he wants —and who knows if some day I shall not without intending it be considered the Raphael of my period? But what needs to be said, and what I wish to say here, and what people will soon tire of hearing repeated, is that the moment has finally come for calling bread bread and wine wine; the beautiful beautiful, and the ugly ugly; defects defects and virtues virtues; and that the so-called modern painting, if it remains in history, will remain as an iconographic document, or be incorporated in a degenerate branch of decorative art, but never, whatever anyone may wish, as “Pictorial Art."
In 1936, in Paris, I visited an exhibition of so-called abstract painting in the company of the late Maurice Heine, the erudite specialist on the Marquis de Sade, and he noticed that during the whole visit my eyes kept coming back to a corner of the exposition room in which no work was being exhibited. “You seem to be systematically avoiding looking at the paintings,” Heine said to me, “It's as though you were obsessed by something invisible!” “It's nothing invisible,” I replied to reassurehim, “I just can't help looking at that door—it is so well painted. It is by far the best painted thing in the whole exposition."
This was rigorously true. None of the painters who had hung their canvases in this room would have been capable of painting that door. And on the other hand, the house painter who had painted the latter would have been able very creditably to copy any one of the paintings exhibited! I myself was quite overcome by that door, and I wondered, with genuine curiosity, how many layers of paint there were, what proportion of oil and turpentine, to have produced a surface so homogeneous, smooth and even, so noble in its material solidity, which had demanded a minimum of honest workmanship which none of the exhibiting artists came anywhere near possessing. Let us beware, then, of that kind of would-be painting, whether abstract or non-abstract, surrealist or existentialist, whatever may be the pseudo-philosophic label it bears, but which a painter of doors would be capable of reproducing and copying satisfactorily in less than a half hour. And the perspicacious reader cannot but be very grateful to me for confirming him in the suspicion which his wise prudence, as I assume, had already aroused in his ever-alert mind, namely, that the value of paintings that can be so easily imitated runs the risk of dropping below that of the very doors in question, even though these were not painted at all.
On the other hand, quite the contrary holds true for pictures painted according to the tradition of the ancients. I venture to affirm that such works become each day not only more precious because of the fact that they cannot be imitated, but also more living, more existing—if to exist is to act; for in contrast to the modern works which barely last a season, leaving a more imperceptible spiritual trace even than the collections of dressmakers, the works of the ancient masters are even now giving life to the painting of the near future, for it is they and only they who possess all the arts and all the prescience of magic. And while around us modern painting ages spiritually and materially, becoming so quickly outmoded, turning yellow, darkening, breaking out in cracks and all the stigmata of decrepitude, a painting of Raphael, for example the Saint George slaying the dragon, grows younger day by day, not only spiritually, to the point of appearing today as philosophically the most up-to-date, but also materially: for a well painted picture is the very contrary of the most beautiful ruins—each passing year, instead of impairing a little of its beauty, only adds to it; instead of tarnishing it time seems to give it a new and more subtle light. Every true connaisseur possesses the precise, intellectual appreciation of that “visual savor” which is added to every beautiful painting by the phenomenon, imponderable among imponderables, which is called “patina,” a phenomenon which I do not hesitate, this time, to call divine, since it is in the power of no man to reproduce it, being as it is the exclusive privilege of the god of time himself.
Where are the famous futurist paintings? It is curious to know that they died of old age twenty years ago. Raphael: there is a futurist painter, if by this one means that he will continue more and more to exert an active influence on the future! Yet history is tireless. Empires crumble. Extravagant changes of power and of will shake the world, accompanied by calm atomic explosions resembling idyllic mossy and mushroomy trees of a terrestrial paradise after all the hells of the heaven of the war just ended. All this is nothing compared to the patina of a beautiful painting! That is strength: a painting by Raphael or Vermeer remains immutable in the midst of the most totalitarian Capharnaums. Whatever the state, whether communist, monarchist or parachutist, all are alike in safeguarding the famous paintings as their most precious and their proudest heritage. What strength!
