“WRITE about why we need painting”—this was the call I received from Poland, together with Stefan Kisielewski’s essay “Why We Need Music.”1
My first impulse was to answer with the motto of that essay, “I know that I do not know,” but I remembered there are already many reflections on this theme piled up in my innumerable notebooks.
In the end I could not flee the challenge of formulating at least my view on this question as a painter, but replacing the word “we” (Poland, society, humanity?) with the word “I”; that is, radically narrowing the problem to myself and only then trying to widen the skein of my thought.
This will not be about the sociology of painting; I can’t afford to write about painting from such a point of view—these are quite simply fragments of an answer to the question that is so clear internally yet that is so hard to formulate.
I remember a phrase of Goethe’s in his conversations with Eckermann, which I read a hundred years ago, I believe in an abbreviated German edition; today it still sounds in my ear: “Our business is not to solve the problem but to formulate it” (Aber die Probleme wohl zu stellen).
THE PROBLEM
There will be no solution to the problem here either, but a reflection on it, as well as a few observations, examples, experiences from the practice of painting and of art in general, because for now I am struck not by differences but by where painting and music and poetry converge.
So first: Why do I need painting, why am I compelled to fix the experience, the shock I felt in the street, for example, looking at the violet calves of a fat woman or in a church at an ordinary man in a gray-green raincoat and with a blue cap on his smooth pink baldness?
Vision? I’m afraid of using too many fancy words, but I don’t have anything to substitute for this word. Usually I look at the world as if at a geographical map, everything is equally important, or rather everything is unimportant, and suddenly I see one or other combination of forms and colors, through which I discover a scrap of the world that surrounds me, the most insignificant object: purple calves, a red scarf, a dirty handkerchief on the table, a blue rag for wiping brushes that has folds and shades as bewitching as the folds and shadows of a snowy mountain range, or with similar suddenness, as if by accident, a man who begins to exist for me in his whole essence through a wrinkle I notice, an asymmetry in his face, or the color of his tie.
I would like to emphasize that I don’t consider my approach to painting—generally proceeding from an experience or shock that is fortuitous and exclusively pictorial, not derived from any theme/subject projected in advance—a universal model. It may have been dominant in painters of my generation, with a similar artistic genealogy, whose bugbear was above all “literature.”
But if I begin to write for myself, I describe what I feel and consequently what I can assert without any addition by the imagination. Does such a vision necessarily generate the urge to fix the experience? In his Lord Chandos Letter, Hofmannsthal takes the opposite view. Regardless of what one calls the vision, I’m certain that it is entirely different from our usual way of seeing and filled with a different content. In this initial sensation there isn’t even the shadow of the thought of whether and who might need it apart from myself. Art for people? But of course, but that isn’t my business—my business is to express, to fix a sensation. But why we need it? Thinking about this I happen on a text of Mandelstam:
Too often we forget that the poet raises every phenomenon to the tenth power. Often an unimportant shell screens off the more deeply hidden carnal reality of the work. In poetry that reality is the word as such.
In painting, that reality is the patch of color, which constructs the form in a painting (Cézanne) or simply gives that form fullness of expression.
ENS REALISSIMUM
It seems to me that this intensification, this monstrous thickening of an experience in the face of even (or precisely) the most unexceptional, the most banal phenomenon, this discovery that it is—more, that the painter uncovers it as a sort of ens realissimum2—this is the essence of painting and its meaning. In music, in poetry, the same thing occurs, only expressed with different materials. The attempt to transmit such sensations is the act of art. So often the artist defends himself against the attempt, puts it off, runs away from it, because it’s too great an exertion, because for him the necessity, the inner urge to transmit is not always clear—“Oh, it’s just stupid,” he tells himself, “this need I have, this whisper in me that’s too soft, it’s an illusion, it can’t possibly relate to anyone but me.”
Not understanding the decisive importance of that shock, that whisper, even not knowing that something like it exists, is a source of error in many spies and eavesdroppers, who, disdaining this single cause, evaluate the artist’s work either according to the level of his skill, the criteria of one or other preestablished conventions, or even according to the greater or lesser “resonance” of his work at a given moment. How many people see the art and accept it or how many are shocked or scandalized by it, as if the positive or negative number could be a criterion!
“Whoever speaks to a few, speaks to all,” Norwid writes somewhere. To reach a person capable of being moved by a painting, there is only one way: “Aller au fond de ses sensations”—to plumb the depths of one’s sensations (Proust).
THE PRESENT
An art made from the first with the thought of people and even contemporaries, contemporary man? But that is a flight from oneself, from the desire for truth in oneself. I don’t know what a contemporary person is, and who does know? Thibaudet wrote years ago, I think in one of the articles he published in Nouvelle revue française before the war, that in the 1830s a certain critic wrote a book about the era called Nameless Era, because the ten years contained so many diverse movements and threads that he couldn’t find a name for it. Today every literature textbook tells us that that was the Romantic era.
Not knowing contemporary man, I know eternal man, whose face is visible/shines through in art. Why does Egyptian sculpture give me something more than rapture, why is a drawing of a horse in a cave across a distance of fifteen thousand years closer to me that the best drawing from Degas’s last period?
I remember the strange impression, the certainty I felt years ago in the Mellon Gallery in Washington: under the enchantment of several small pictures of the Italian Quattrocento, El Greco, Cézanne, Degas, and others, I understood that you could invite all of them, the best of every epoch, to tea. They would drink their tea in harmony and would converse pleasantly with each other as if they were contemporaries. You wouldn’t be able to invite Ingres, he would spoil everything. What would unite them is precisely what is outside time or above time, that is what matters!
So maybe here we are coming to the root of the problem.
NEW DOUBTS
Where, in what, does an artistic sensation reside? The black dog running away with a piece of red meat in its mouth in the painting by Snyders in Grenoble was a shock to me in 1935, and I experienced it again thirty years later, in 1965, with an astonishing freshness of memory. Did I care so much for the fate of the dog? No. So it can all be ascribed to the effect of pure forms and colors divorced from any content? No again. Poliakoff, the purest of the pure, an abstract painter, is supposed to have studied the distribution of paint and color of the early Italian masters, tracing their juxtapositions and harmonies.
Why does this artist, who also conveys sensations, but as if purely aesthetic ones, never in my view attain the strange intensification that so-called figurative art does, whether the figuration is Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son or a few white blocks and bottles of Morandi? (The comparison of Rembrandt with Morandi should be followed through; maybe I’ll return to it.)
MONSTROUS CONDENSATION
So painting and art in general do not serve only a need of mine, but a common need we have of a language for the condensed transformation of emotions that usually die out in us before we can bring them to any fullness, and which can’t be seen as necessarily ennobling or civilizing. In a musical context, Kisielewski, arguing with Waldorff, recalls Hitler’s tears at Bayreuth.
The protagonist of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata abominates music because it depraves, and demands that the state keep it under lock and key. Greece was no less afraid of music than the hero of Tolstoy’s story.
I quote Mandelstam:
In the ancient world music was an annihilating element, the Greeks feared the flute and the Phrygian scale. They considered it dangerous and seductive and Terpander had to wage a tremendous battle for every new string of the cither.
The fear of music, more than of poetry or art, is perhaps only testimony to the fact that music acts more powerfully on the elemental in man.
I myself took distance from music a long time ago, but a few bars heard suddenly (only old music, music from Vivaldi, Bach, Schumann, Chopin, up to Scriabin, not further) awaken such emotion in me that even the effect of art, by which I live, pales in comparison. What are these mysterious sensations, so various in degree, in clear or obscure materials? From where, why, does the rhythm of a poem, a fragment swimming up in the memory . . . “I thought that lyre and style, though carried like a swan on a wave . . .” may cause a shock no less powerful than that of music or painting; what do those records of experiences mean, those that, outgrowing us, enlighten? Norwid believed that the poet “touches the zenith with his key where a lighter aura flows . . .” But I break off here, the tone of my essay would have to change if I wanted only to write about the heights, Rembrandt, Bach, Norwid. But even here there is no clear limit between the flawed but authentic expression of an unknown artist and those enormous mountains and peaks.
NECESSITY AND GRACE
So I come down to the ground of the quotidian. I return to those moments of shock, vision, necessity, which the authentic artist feels it is a sin to neglect and suppress during the days “that make rags of us.” Today more than ever this urge—to express a sensation unclear even to oneself—can take a million different forms. The unrelenting changes of rhythm, tempo, changes in the artist’s materials, the dizzying growth of the number of techniques he can use, all of this plays a part and has its significance. But the kernel remains eternally the same: the nature and importance of the experience itself, as well as the transparency of its expression, the artist’s capacity to penetrate to its essence and to express and convey it through his work.
Art (so painting too), which has been a human need from the prehistoric caves to our time, what will it be in an epoch when an artist (contemporary?) shows his own urine in test tubes, this year at a big exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, or another already famous artist shows detritus and feces collected in hermetically sealed layers and sells them like hotcakes in a well-known Paris gallery—who knows; no “rational plan for a new cultural model for the next two decades” will tell us. Will art take the path that Penderecki anticipates in music, choosing, as Kisielewski writes—an aesthetic conception that may be impure and unmusical, may be hypothetical and auxiliary or marginal, but has the virtue that it concludes an alliance with life, favors active existence? That would be a clear answer to the question of why we need music, painting, poetry.
And if it is the contrary? Will it become more and more laconic, allusive, hermetic, an art for a small circle of initiates? Perhaps a path to authentic, religious contemplation? That would also be an answer to why we need art. But then it would be closer to the catacombs and the convent. “The convent is an experience”—I’m quoting Kisielewski again—“an achievement that belongs to all of humanity, though only a few may experience it directly.”
One way or the other, we have needed painting and the other arts from the dawn of time, and will continue to need them as a heightening of the consciousness of life and a testimony to the intimate truth of man.
1973