498 Freedom Responsibility and Power

nd got no further than inviting new artists to perform in old forms tmiddot 1 But s()~neror later they will end up on that path Once people come to urtde tand tha art is non-objective they will he able to present new anu interestin eatre But middot t the moment in this phase of builuing socialism in WhiC~ the arts must paticipate art must return to hackwtrd areas and become f middoturative

Paintinlhas turncd hack from the non-ohjective way to the J ject and the uevclopmelof painting has returned to the figurative part ofjhe way that had led to the destruction of the object Hut on the way back iJlfilting came across a new object tht the proletuian rcvolution hau hroughy() the (lre and which had to be given10rm which means that it had to byI~iseu to the lev el of a work of art Enric~u by a new painting spectrumby fo rm and composition the new arts must gie this object shape on an a~lttic level that is to say they must elevate every th~~atic subject into a pai ting and rhat painting is the plane on which a two-dil~nsional and frontal evcJopment of the content takes place hefore the spectator ~fter returning t the figurative way Ind the way of the painting art will end U~lt the fram within which after all the picture comes imo being

If you destroyed the footlighs a fl I cooperated in that in Mayakovskis il1stey Boufi then we must nol top doing that reinstall the footlit~hts and place ohjects or content hefore l he in an artistic form From now on the artistic sense will take first ph~ The lain ta sk of the Soviet artist will be to create great artistic paintinpy This is w I I am utterly convinceu that if you keep to the way of COl1stpuctivism where you are now firmly stuck which raises not one artistic iss~amp except f(ll pure 1I litarianis1ll anti in theatre simple agitation which may yen one hundred per cen consistent iueologicall y but is completely castratcu jI~ regards lrtistic problems nd t(lrfeits half of its value if you go on as yoy are (keep this let ter so that y( can check up later) then Stanislavski will merge as the winner in the theatr antI the old forms will survive And amiddots to architectlle if the architects d( not produce artistic architecture the Greco-Roman style of yeltovski will evail together with the Repin slSle in painting The culture of the arts must ot disappear and they arc f1f artists So found yo ur theatre as an artistic creati( 1 dont builu it on the Hnes of ltI circus but in the same footlights as those in hich the new artistilpainting will stanel But if you demolish the footlights if y( r clements leap out of the painting performers who run into the auditorium r from it it will amount to nothing These are my thoughts in brief This estion coldd be gone into much more deeply in a discussion

2 Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Conversation with Picasso

The present text derives from a conversation which took place at Boisgeloup in 1935 Picassos remarks were transcribed immediately afterwards by his interlocutor Christian Zervos editor of Cahiers dArt a journal in which the artists work was regularly reproduced The resulting notes were informally approved by Picasso prior to their

IV) Modernism as Critique 499

publication Besides a large number of sculptures his representative works of the mid-1930s include still lifes and lyrical figure subjects painted in a decorative and brightly coloured late-Cubist style First published as Conversation avec Picasso in Cahiers dArt X 7-10 Paris 1935 pp 173-8 English translation published in A H Barr Jr Picasso Fifty Years of his Art New York 1946 from which the present version is taken

Imiddot J It is my misfortune - and prohably my delight -- to use things as my passions tell me What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to hwe to stop himself putting them into a picture hecause they don t go with the basket of fruit How awful for a painter who loathes apples to have to use them all the time because they go so well with the cloth 1 put all the things I like into my pictures The things -- so much the worse for them they just have to put up with it

In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages Everyday brought something new A picture used to be a sum of additions In my case a picture is a sum of destructions I do a picture -- then r destroy it In the end though nothing is lost the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else

It would be very interesting to preserve photographically not the stages hut the metamorphoses of a picture Possibly one might then discover the path followed hy the brain in materializing a dream But there is one very odd thing - to notice that basically a picture doesnt change that the first vision remains almost intact in spite of appearances I often ponder on a light ami a dark when I have put them into a picture I try hard to hreak them up hy interpolating a coloI that will create a different effect When the work is photographed I note that what I put in to correct m y first vis ion has disappeared and that after ali the photographic image corresponds with my first visio n before the transshyformation I insisted on

A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand While it is being done it changes as ones thoughts change And when it is finished it still goes on changing according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it A picture lives a life like a living crcature undergoin g the changes imposeu 011 us hy our life from day to day This is natural enough as the picture lives only through the man who is looking at it I -

When you hegin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries You must he on puard apainst th ese Destroy the thing do it over several times In each destroying of a beautiful discovery the artist does not really suppress it hut rather transf(lrms it condenses it makes it more suhstantial What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds Otherwise you become your own connoisseur I sell myself nothing

Actually YOLl work with few colors But they seem like a lot more when each olle is in the right place

Abstract art is only painting What about urama There is no abstract art You must always start with something Afterward

you can remove all traces of reality Theres no uanger then anyway hecause the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark It is whtt started the

500 Freedom Responsibility and Power

artist off excited his ideas and stirred lip his emutions Ideas and emotions will in the end he prisoners in his work Whatever they do Ihey cant escape hum the picture They form an integral part of it even when their presence is no longer discernihle Wheth er he lihs it or not man is the instrument of nature It forces on him its character and appearance Imiddotmiddot lOne cannot go against nature It is stronger than the strongest man it is pretty much to our interest to he on good terms with it We may allow ourselves certain liherties

hut only in details Nor is there any figurative and nonfiguralive art Everything appears to us

in the guise of a figure Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed hy means of symbolic figures See how ridiculous it is then to think of painting without figuration A person an ohject a circle are all figures they react on LIS more or less intensely Some are nearer our sensations ami produce emotions that touch our affective faculties others appeal more directly to the intellect They all should be allowed a place because 1 find my spirit has quite as much need of emotion as my senses ])0 YOLl think it concerns me that a particular picture of mine represents two people Though these two people once existed for me they exist no longer The vision of them gave me a preliminary emotion then little by little their actual presences became blurred they developed into a fiction and then disappeared altogether or rather they were transformed into all kinds of problems They are no longer two people you see but forms and colors forms and colors that ha ve taken on meanwhile the idea of two people and

preserve the vibration of their life I deal with painting as I ueal with things I paint a window just as I look

out of a winduw If an open window looks wrong in a picture 1 draw the curtin and shut it jLlst as I would in my own room In painting as in life you must act directly Certainly painting has its conventions and it is essential to reckon with them Indeed you cant do anything else And so you always ought to

keep an eye on real life The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place from

the sky from the earth from a scrap of paper from a passing shape from a spiders web That is wh y we must not discriminate between things Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it except from our own works I have a horror

of copying myself Imiddotmiddot I I 1 The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation That is the

whole secret of art I go ti)r a walk in the forest of FonraineblcltlU r l~et green indigestion I must get rid of this sensation into a picture Green rules it A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions People seize on painting to cover up their nakedness They get what they can wherever they can In the end 1 cant helieve they get anything at all Theyve simply cut a co1t to the measure of their own ignorance Th ey 1111 ke ever ything from God to a picture in their own image That is why the picture-hook is the ruination of a paintinp _ a painting which has always a certain significance t least as much as the mat) who did it As soon as it is hrought and hung on a wall it takes on quirt

a different kind of sin ificance ~l11d the painting is done for

IV)) Modernism as Critique 501

Academic tramlllg ill beauty is a sham We have heen deceived but so well deceived that we can scarcely get hack even a shadow of th e truth The heauties of the Parthenon Venuses Nymphs Narcissuses are so many lies Art is not the application of a canon of beauty hut what the ins tinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon When we love a woman we dont start measuring her limbs W c IDve with our desires - although everything has heen done to

try and apply a canon even tmiddoto love The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof colonnades and sculptures were added because there were people in Athens who happened to be working and wanted to express themselves Its not what the artist does that COLlnts but what he is Cezanne would never have interested me a bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques Emile Blanche even if the apple he painted had been ten times as heautiful What forces our interest is Cezannes anxiety -- thats Cezannes lesson the torments of Van Gogh - that is the actual drama of the man The rest is a sham

Everyone wants to understand art Why not try 10 understand the songs of a bird Why does one love the nii(ht flowers everything around one without trying to understand them l Hut in the case of a painting people have to untlersltmd If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity that he himself is only a trifling hit of the world and that no more importance should he attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world though we cant explain them People who try to explain pictures are usually barking LIp the wrong tree Gertrude Stein joyfull y announced to me the other day that she had at last understood what my picture of the three musicians was meant to be It- was a still life

How can you expect an onlooker to live a picture of mine as T lived it A picture comes to me from miles away who is to say fi o oJ11 how far away I sensed it saw it painted it and yet the next day I cant see what Ive done myself How can anyone enter into my dreams my instincts Illy desires Illy thoughts which have taken a long time to mature and to come out into the daylight and aoovc all grasp from them what I have heen abouf- perhaps against my own will

With the exception of a iCw painters who are opening new horizons to painting yount pa inters today dont know which way to go Instead of taking up our researches in order to react clearly against LIS they are ahsorbed with bringing the past back to life - when truly the whole world is open hefore us everything waiting to he done not just redone Why cling desperately to everything fhat has tleady fulfilled its promise There are miles of painting in the lTlanner of hut it is rare to find a youn man working in his own way

Does he wish to believe that man cant repeat himself To repeat is to run counter to spiritual Jaws essentially escapism

Im no pessimist I dOIl t loathe art hecause 1 couldnt live without devoting all my Iime to it [ lo ve it as the only end or m y life Everything I do connected with it gives me intense pleasure But still I dont see why the whole world should he Llken up with art dem~ncl its credentials and on that suhject give free rein to its own stupidity Museums are jllst a lot 01 lies and the people

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who make art their business are ll10stl y imposters I cant understand why revolutionary countries should have more prejudices ~bOUl art than out-or-date countries We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stllpidities all our mistakes all our poverty of spirit We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things We have becn tied up to a fiction instead of trying to sense what inner life there was in the men who painted them There ought to be an absolute dictatorship a dictatorship of painters a dictatorship of one painter to suppress all those who have betrayed us to suppress the cheaters 10 suppress the tricks to suppress mannerisms to suppress charms to suppress history to suppress a heap of other things But common sense always gets away with it Above all lets havc a revolution against that The true dictator will always be conquered by the dictatorship of common sense and maybe not

~ Herbert Read (1893-1968) What Is Revolutiona~ rt

Written as oQe of five contributions to the symposium on Revolut~ Art staged by the Artists International Association (formerly the Artists InteYlational) in London in 1935 (see also Vs19) Read was the most informed and sy~~thetic supporter of the Modern Movement inngland in the 1930s and a close frie~ of Henry Moore His essay testifies on the one han~ to the character and persiste~~f current arguments for a revolutionary function in cJ~ure and on the other to t~~ separation of the small English avant-garde into factions wnich variously reflected tne major tendencies of European art at the time Social Realisih Surrealism and fo0straction First published in B Rea (ed) Five on Revolutionary Art iB~ 1935)rom which the present version is taken

[ I Revol utionary art should be [e~futionary That surely is a simple stateshyment from which we can begin tbe diltCwssion We can at once dismiss the feeble interpretation of such a starcmen0 an a~nction to paint pictures of red nags hammers and sickles factories ~l~ machinesgt~ revoluti~nary subjec~s in general But such a feeble l~t erpzctatlOn cloes actullly persist among Commul1lsts and was In tact responslblcyfor the failure ot tk first exhIbitIon orgalllzeu by the Artists Internationay It is responsible for tQe partisan adulation of a competent but essentiaFy second-rate artist like ))ie~ Rivera

We can hest ap~)rch the question from the angl~f an abstract art like architecture [ I Architecture is a necessary art and hmiddot)s intimately bound lip with the socj reconstruction which must take place uh4er a Communist regime How 0 we as Englishmen conceive a Communist aihitecture As a reversion to udor rusticity or Georgian stateliness or the bougeois pomp of the neo-clJt~ical style Surely none of these styles can for aolOment be considered in relation to the city of the future Must we not rathcr ct~lfidently look f ward to a development of the new architecture of which Walter Gopius is t foremost exponent of that architecture which in his own words bb~ies itmiddot If forth not in stylistic imitation or ornamental fiippery but in those simpl d sharply modelled deSIgns In which every part merges naturally 1I1to the

~ IV)) Modernism as Critiquer503

comprehe1sive volume of the whole Only in this manner by fOllowjg the path dead) indicated by Gropills in his work and writings can wyenfi~d a concrete expr~si()n of the life of our epoch [ J

But corrcspolciing to the new architecture to a large extent arisiJ~g from the same fertile gn~d of the Bauhaus experiment founded an9directed by Gropills is the arr generally known as abstract The name l~ admittedly a makeshift and betwcCiJ an abstract artist like Mondrian or )ifen Nicholson at

one end of the scale an~l~n equally so-called abstract artisy~ike Mirb or Henry Moore there is only a remJre connection But for the mOIyent these di fferences do not malter ~uch nam~ repr~sent the modern ~ho~)1 in painting ~nd sculpture 111 Its WIdest and moSt tYPical aspect and theJe artists I Wish to claim are the true revolutiomry arti~ whom every Craquon1l1lunist should learn to respect and encourage

Such an opinion will be Illet by formidab~oPPosition precisely among COl1lmunists who are interested in artComnyinist artists from Germany will tell you that they have been through an t9ft that abstract art is dead and that in any case it is incomprehensible tOAe proletariat and of no use to the revolutionary movement Like the simplybouampeois of another generation they ask for something they can understand realistic art above all something they can use as propaganda

Actually 1 believe that such artif)ts are con fessirg their fail ure - as artists The abstract movemen t in art is ~t dead and not li~ly to be for many years to come That it will gradually be)ransformed not only th dialectical conception of histor y btl1 the slightest acgtiaintance with the historyJf art compels us to admit But how it will be tra14sformed is more than we ca~ tell The facts we have fo recognize are that I1J the artists of any intellectual f~ce belong to this movement thH this mOVeJilent is contemporary and revolutiona~ and that onl y the apparent independel~e and isolation of the abstract artist - ~is refusal to toe the line and beconie an emotional propagandist - only this fact linders the

I ~ Communist from acJpting the abstract movement in art as the con mporary revolutionary move ~ent in art

To descrihe this attitude in the abstract artist as formalistic as mere dec()~tive dilettantism not only betrays a lack of ltesthetic sensibility but an ignorance of the actual ideal and personalities of the artists themselves Most of the art~s ill qUestion aImore or Jess openly in sympathy with the Communist movement Why thenio they adopt in all its integrity what is called the formalist attitude

The qU1tion cannot be answered without a short digression on the nature of art Any fonsiderable work of art has two distinct elements a formal element appealiug to our sensibility for reasons which cannot be stated with any clarity but wch are certainly psychological in origin and an arbitrary or accidental eltem t of more complex appeal which is the outer clothing given to these und rlying forms It is at least arguable that the purely formal element in art do s not change that the same canons of harmony and proportion are present iy primitive art in Greek art in Gothic art in Renaissance art and in the art )f the present day Such forms we may say are archetypal due to the physical structure of the world and the psychological structure of man And it is for this

I