Art and Artist [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520347618

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A R T AND A R T I S T

ART & ARTIST

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley and Los Angeles

1956

UNIVERSITY O F CALIFORNIA

PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY

PRESS

London, England Copyright, 1956, by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-8104 Designed by Rita Carroll Manufactured in the United States of America

PREFACE

One evening in San Miguel de Allende, Rico Lebrun began to talk about the need for a medium that would give artists an opportunity to tell in their own words what they feel about their work. Although the artist's intent is expressed through the shaping of materials, sounds, colors, and words, his innovations in style, his experiments with new media, and his views of life and nature may sometimes be clarified in words. The social problem of the artist is in many ways similar to that which confronts people in all walks of life: to find understanding among his fellowmen, and if understanding is not immediate, at least to elicit tolerance, consideration, and respect for his views and ways of expression. Most of us prefer to hear and see things that are familiar to us. We do not want the unknown or the strange to intrude upon our peace of mind. Generally, works of art are accepted if they fit into prevailing popular concepts. But, if they emphasize different aspects and enter the realm of the unfamiliar, rejection frequently is their fate. The farther away from the familiar the artist goes and the more he arouses anxiety, the more the initial doubts, questions, and apprehensions of the audience may change into a defensive hostility which will override the acceptance and enjoyment of the emotional impact. As a result of this tension, the artist in our society is considered the odd man, the element which does not quite fit into our practical world. He lives in the present

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PREFACE

but thinks intuitively of the future and when he introduces new ideas into music, painting, or architecture, he makes demands that lay a heavy burden on his audience. If the initial shock is to be utilized constructively the work of art must be examined with an open mind and with a willingness to respect the amount of newness and strangeness that attends the creative process—no newer and no stranger than the scientific changes we accept so readily. Only then can we be ready to evaluate the experience, to accept it or dismiss it. What the artist really wants to know from his audience is whether he has struck a chord which keeps ringing. Mere applause or logical criticism cannot help the artist in his work and does not guide him in distinguishing between shallow production or effective creativeness. The responsible man in the audience is willing to fulfill this function and to communicate to the artist the impact the creative work has had upon him. This volume, then, is presented in the hope that it may serve to clarify and strengthen communication between the artist and his audience and among artists, themselves. The initial suggestion for this volume was made by Rico Lebrun. This suggestion was clarified and developed by five people: Alfred Frankenstein, Ernest Mundt, Michel Loeve, August Fruge, and Rita Carroll. We are indebted to many others who joined us in informal discussions about possible contributors and who, in many instances, took time to see and talk to the artist. For the articles that appear here in translation we particularly wish to thank Professors Rudolf Arnheim and Warren Ramsey, Lucie E. N. Dobbie, Ernest Mundt, and Max E. Knight.

CONTENTS

RUTH ARMER

Ruth Armer, Painter

1

ERNST BARLACH

Selected Letters

9

ANTON EHRENZWEIG

The Mastering of Creative Anxiety

33

SABRO HASEGAWA

My House

53

ALEXANDER ZSCHOKKE

An Encounter with Paul Klee

Mexican Journal

New Sound Techniques in Music

King and Queen

Sculpture for a Public Building

An Interview

61

RICO LEBRUN

68

OTTO LUENING 89

HENRY MOORE 103

ERNEST MÜNDT

108

JEAN RENOIR 125

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CONTENTS GEORGE RICKEY

Kinetic Sculpture

149

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE The Paintings of Giacometti

179

JACK SHADBOLT Picture in Process

195

W. EUGENE SMITH Walk to Paradise

207

EDUARDO TORROJA Notes on Structural Expression

219

CESARE ZAVATTINI Encounter with Van Gogh

229

PLATES (Following page 52) RUTH ARMER

"Abstraction 6"

Photographer, Bob Hollingsworth

ERNST BAKLACH

"Meeting Again" 1926 Barlach Estate

(wood)

Courtesy,

ALAN DAVIE

("Structure of doodling"—Ehrenzweig)

1953

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

"Three Figures" 1948 (bronze) Pierre Matisse Gallery

Courtesy,

RICO LEBRUN

"Mexican Anatomy" 1954 "Buchenwald Cart" "Study for The Triumph of Death after Traini" "Butcher Shop, Mexico" 1954 HENRY MOORE

"King and Queen" 1952-1953 Courtesy, W. J. Keswick

(bronze)

ERNEST MUNDT

Sculpture, San Miguel School Photograph, Ira Latour

1953

(bronze)

1955

PLATES JACK SHADBOLT

"Emblems after Fire" 1950 Courtesy, Vancouver Art Gallery. Photograph, Jack V. Long "Trophies" 1950 Photograph, Howard Severson "Façade—Pine and Rock" 1954 Photograph, Ken, Victoria, Canada W. EUGENE SMITH

"Walk to Paradise" 'Tribute to Franz Kafka" EDUARDO TORROJA

Grandstand of the New Hippodrome, Madrid Photograph, S. v. Kaskel Design for a Railway Station

RUTH

ARMER

A native and resident of San Francisco, Ruth Armer has taught painting in her own school and in the California School of Fine Arts. She has always objected to the "let go and express yourself' kind of instruction and believes in a firm foundation in the principles of color, composition, and technique. Now that she no longer teaches, Ruth Armer works on her own paintings every day in her studio on Russian Hill.

R U T H ARMER, P A I N T E R

I began by painting landscapes. I do not know that I ever accomplished this, but when I painted nature—trees, houses, groups of people—I tried to convey the entity of the scene, the integrity of the objects, and the relationships that existed between them, rather than the literal likeness of a particular view. I have never been interested, consciously at least, in self-expression or in critical comments on the things I was depicting. The heat of the sun on the sand, the richness of the healthy golden grass, the strength or delicacy of a tree, the relations existing between the rocks and the growths of a wooded hillside were what I tried to record. Feelings that nature impressed upon me were my theme. An accident interrupted this direct contact with nature and, while recuperating, I listened to a great deal of

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recorded music. Never before had I connected the qualities I had been painting with anything but visual sources, but now it occurred to me that music was similarly suggestive. I found myself receiving pictorial impressions from its emotions and from its form. Listening to Wagner, Mozart, or Schonberg I tried to re-create this experience in my own medium of line and color. Later, to my surprise, a musician actually named the composers whose work had suggested the painting. These drawings inspired by music contained no realistic forms. I used rhythmically ordered shapes, lines, and color to describe my impression. What bothered me was that all these paintings had no spatial depth but appeared as flat patterns. I thought it might be the lack of nature forms in these drawings that kept them from having spatial dimensions. This was the one time in my life when I made a self-conscious effort to correct myself in terms of what was then current art: I tried to work realistic forms of nature into these musical compositions. It was a failure. Even human anatomy could not be adapted to the flow of rhythm that I felt I had to produce. Although the effort to combine abstraction and realism did not work, I did discover what was to be of the greatest importance to me. I found that the kind of forms and relations first suggested by music came to me without that stimulation, and that these forms began to demand free movement in space. To provide them with the opportunity for movement in deep space became my main concern. It has been the subject matter for most of my present work. When I speak here of forms and space, or forms in space, I should explain that the word "form" has two different meanings for me. Form is the shape of threedimensional things, and form is an over-all meaningful

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organization: objects have form in the one sense, music has form in the other sense. Perhaps one could say that in painting I start with shapes and work toward form. Relationships are what I am painting. I am not speaking of forms as seen against a background. I do not see background because, when I begin a new canvas, space itself, to me, is an object as is the form. The space and the forms disintegrate themselves and build themselves up until every part of the canvas relates itself to all other parts. The forms I paint are not realistic objects of nature, although they seem, sometimes, to relate distantly to inorganic or organic matter and even take on the illusion of being alive. If a form begins to look like a real object, it jumps out of context and I change it. The forms I paint are neither shapes nor symbols. I know nothing of symbolism and am always distressed when someone discovers a shape that suggests an object to him, such as a fish or a face that, to me, has absolutely no meaning other than its necessary relation to the total form. I was pleased recently when a woman who had owned one of my paintings for quite some time asked me whether I would mind if she turned it upside down. She wanted to efface the image of an umbrella that had suddenly formed itself in her mind. Perhaps the minds of most people work that way, at least with paintings. They are not happy until they have recognized something. The forms I paint are created out of space itself, like a fluid that, on occasion, solidifies or crystallizes and takes on visible dimension. These solidifications, sometimes influenced by thé force of gravity and sometimes free from it, cause and reflect other such formations in the surrounding space. They influence this space, intensifying it or

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lightening it, and they themselves are influenced in return, becoming heavier or lighter, larger or smaller, more opaque or transparent, grayer or more brilliant in color, until an order seems to be established, an over-all harmony, a free, unhindered movement. The paths suggested by these attractions and repulsions need not be confined to just the limited area of the canvas. There may be implications of extension in all directions, especially when a painting tends to become part of a field of energy without matter, consisting only of its own tensions. Description in words distorts what painting means to me. It leaves out the emotional and spiritual necessity under which I work to compose a rhythm of forms. What I paint is really an emotion, and I am most interested in the emotional response. Analysis of how form develops offers no explanation that could help the observer to understand what has been done, or why. It might possibly be of interest to some, but the emotional impact communicated is what counts. There is one thing that always surprises me. Some people say: "I just love your work, but I don't understand it. I love the color; I love the movement; of course I can follow the rhythm, but I just can't understand it." I think they do. If they can follow that far, they have understood all that really concerns me. What I want to create is a milieu wherein one can flow with bits and pieces of a luminous universe. Tensions are introduced not to "balance a composition," but to resolve their discords in the tranquility of harmonious coexistence with all the elements in the painting. This tranquil harmony of successfully resolved strains which is so important to me has no static position. Most of my forms are not fully crystallized, and their position and movement in the picture depend on the path of the observer's approach to them. If they are seen before or after looking

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at some darker or lighter mass, they may move toward a forward or backward position in space. It is this very activity of seeing that keeps the organization alive and moving. As an illustration I have included a drawing made on scratchboard rather than an oil painting, because the original is in black and white it loses little in reproduction. In my oils I work only with the palette knife after a few brush strokes have established the first directions. These paintings show areas of gradually changing colors and textures that might not explain themselves so clearly in reproduction as they do on canvas, and so not fully illustrate the story. Occasionally I work on scratchboard. This is, of course, a more limited medium than oil painting, because all I can do is to take the black surface for deep space and build it up by means of lines into forms that stand out in white. This simplicity may be helpful here in showing what I have tried to describe.

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This scratchboard drawing also illustrates the development of a composition better than a finished oil painting. In a painting an area may have been painted over several times and completely lose its original identity, something that cannot be done with the white lines of the scratchboard that are all there to stay. So the whole process of working remains here graphically recorded as a progression from the simple black to the complex grays and whites created by the scratches of the tool. Perhaps it can be "read back" to some extent from the finished drawing. I am often asked how I begin a painting. Usually when I approach a new canvas I find that after a short time some form suggests itself. I do not know just what brings this about. Perhaps it is the naturally uneven lighting of the surface, some stray reflection from outside the window that starts to jell. I am quite passive in following these suggestions, real or imagined. As soon as one brush stroke has been put on the white ground, the rest of the painting is, in principle, committed, since any area of the canvas so established determines all others. Working out these many relations is a lengthy process. Very rarely do I see the complete composition at the beginning. Usually it is the first shape that suggests the nature of its vicinity. This may later turn out to be a very minor event in a distant area of space. It may also suggest a formation at the other end of the canvas. These areas and forms together determine the next thing that happens, and so gradually the painting unfolds. I am not certain of the colors at the beginning and start with a rather neutral palette. As the areas and forms start to react on one another and the organization takes shape, color emerges with it. A dominant form demands a dominant color, a blue here will demand a red there, and a

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pink, a yellow, a green in other places. What determines a particular final color scheme I do not know. Generally, there seems to be a swing to opposites. After a gentle and cool painting there often follows a vigorous and more colorful one, but it also sometimes happens that a whole series will be related in color and emotional suggestion. While painting I am without objective criticism. I am unaware of past paintings or the paintings of others. I am completely one with the canvas and with its suggestions, developing what is trying to emerge. When my concentration dims or the suggestions fade I put the canvas aside. The next morning, I may know how to proceed, or I may see that the statement is complete or that the whole thing is no good and lost. I may find that more has to be done without knowing just what it should be. In that case I may leave the canvas for days, weeks, or months —and often that means going over the whole painting again because any change in one place may influence every shape and hue in the whole field. Frequently the work ends up in the fireplace because some area has become cramped and nothing will free it, or because the physical ridges and textures of the paint block the adjustments that have turned out to be necessary. While working on a painting, its forms and the shapes of its areas stay so clearly imprinted in my mind that it is sometimes hard for me to be sure that the canvas says what I think it says, for the image could exist just in my imagination. It is not until I put a painting aside long enough for this image to fade from my memory that I can hope to look at it objectively. Only when I do this, when I see my painting as I see others, can I hope to know if I have done what I intended and if the painting is finished.

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There are actually two kinds of critical attitudes involved in the way I work. While I paint, I am concerned with the immediate context of each form, area, or space configuration, and am critically aware of the harmonious distribution of the tensions they suggest, or, rather, on which they insist. Later, when I am able to see what I have painted, I criticize it from the outside. My own personal problems never seem to influence my work. I may be upset, or tired, or preoccupied, but all this does is make me produce less. It might be said that my preoccupation to provide the forms I paint with the utmost freedom and harmony they demand indicates a central problem of my own, although why it should be only mine I do not know. Possibly, it is a problem shared by every one in the world today. Trying to solve it through painting is, to me, a spiritual necessity. Notes of an interview with the artist by Ernest Mundt.

E R N S T

B A R L A C H

Born in Wedel, Holstein, in 1870, Barlach grew up on his father's farm. He studied in Hamburg, Dresden, Paris, and Berlin and traveled in Russia and Italy. In 1938 his works were officially condemned by the Nazis who considered his sculpture and painting degenerate. He was labeled a 'culture defiler," and 380 pieces of his sculpture were destroyed or displaced. He died in 1938.

SELECTED LETTERS

To Friedrich Diisel

Hamburg June 15, 1889 Of the three ways in which the life and activities of man are reproduced—sculpture, painting and drawing, and story telling—the first is naturally the most familiar and the dearest to me, the sculptor. I observe keenly, continuously—front and back, left and right—keeping my eyes on my work and creating with hand and tool what the eye, simultaneously, judges and measures. I do not represent what I, myself, see from this or that angle, but rather, what is the Real and True; this I have to extract from what I see before me. I accord this mode of representation an absolute preference over drawing, for sculpture is not an artificial art; rather, it is a healthy art, a free art, unencumbered with such necessary evils as perspective, foreshortening, lengthening, and other tricks. For

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this reason I am also opposed to reliefs which, doubtless, permit greater freedom in composition and a wider scope of ideas but which lap over into the area of painting. I am not entirely satisfied with sculpture alone, so I draw, but since I am not quite satisfied with that either, I write. I had an urge to write even when I was a child who, happily, had learned to read and write. I used to read all the time acting out in play what I had read in stories and then in my own scriblings varying what I had read. Today, I have learned to observe. I am busy with large sketches for sculptures, and, at the same time, I paint the small world in which I move—the world that my eyes and spirit see. What I have written so far are merely fragments, attempts to portray a few people. In doing this I have discovered that I have inside me, like everyone, an inexhaustible reservoir of sterling substances, and I merely have to draw from this reservoir and fill the proper vessels. Life is so infinitely abundant. Every glance from my window into the schoolyard where youngsters romp during recess; every glance into the street is a rewarding excursion; walking through the streets, merely tarrying in a restaurant, awakens my consciousness to a great variety of delightful scenes. I am planning to buy a paint box. Do you know what it is like to see a maiden with eyes afire and hot breath toe the very line between yielding and resisting; then, how you feel; frightened and faint-hearted about that great happiness, that bliss, which is almost too much for you, like too much gunpowder for a cannon. To me, painting is that maiden. I have really and truly made up my mind to paint, after rejecting the opportunity ten times. Rest assured that all the girls in the world mean

BARLACH

11

nothing to me at the moment. I paint as I walk along the street; I taste, see, and feel color; the world is nothing to me but a conglomeration of color patches; and I am fascinated by the thought that my fantasy is now allowed to storm along unleashed. When I have finished my present work I will have to take a complete rest for several weeks, because my present infirmity troubles me a good deal. So, I shall go to Friedrichsroda for some time and take my paint box along. What do you say to this? It's an experiment, and if it doesn't turn out, it can be discontinued any time.

To Friedrich Diisel

Dresden January 13, 1893 How much the desire to love and be loved is in a man's bloodl How many times have I sworn to myself, with curses and fury, never to have any more truck with womenl But lo and behold, when Miss L. showed up the other day in the studio I dismissed my model after fifteen minutes of grudging work claiming it was too dark and that I couldn't see anything any longer—all this only ten hours after vowing to exercise my profession in preference to anything else, especially to any association with women. I dismissed the model so that Miss L. could come in. What a girl she is! Engaged. Thirty years old. She is the friend of a fellow artist in the studio. For five, long weeks she was with us having her portrait painted. She has black eyes, and a lot besides that can t be described in writing —but it's something! I confess I wrote numerous poems during the time she was here, spent a fortune on baubles, and committed many other foolishnesses for which there was no justification. I am ashamed of myself, but I won't

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be any better next time. She still shows up from time to time, to sit for a colleague who is completing a bust of her; he had fallen somewhat behind in his work! She was here again today. When my colleague and the other artists had left, she and I stayed behind in the dusk, practically alone. We made coffee and chatted on the stove, I mean, beside the stove. Well, this is the way we live in Dresdenl Nevertheless, I started a large figure this morning and worked with models; another figure is almost finished; some further compositions are also underway. At the same time I keep on sketching in the streets and beer halls—• we are busy all right. I drafted a "storm" which breaks loose, picks itself up, shakes its wings, ruffles its feathers eager for flight. I intend to do it in large size during the summer. I composed a long novel before I started on my illfated trip to Hamburg. I put in more work, thinking and editing, than usual. I read it to Luise Schenk. She found a number of things the matter with it, made some objections, wanted a greater emphasis placed on the heroine. . . . But "she," too, is drawn after a real-life model. Let me tell you about the original—not much though, since, alas, I cannot. Even this little bit should be written surrounded in violet-stemmed waves of rose fragrance, not in the smoke from my cigar. Well, then, she is a sales girl. During the summer at 7 A.M. she used to take the same road that I did to the academy, which I attended with astounding punctuality. She was graceful, rosy, fresh. I dressed myself as impressively as possible and exercised the tenacity and cunning of an American Indian in tracking her along and keeping watch. Sure enough Wilsdrufferstrasse was resurfaced twice this summer—don't they always. But how

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can any lifting, pushing or pulling contraptions prevail against the power of a pair of eyesl Not at all. How can oculists prevail against the vision-sharpening power of love! They can't either. She wore a white hat—I would have discovered it among hundreds of white hats in the crowd. Her eyes under the hat brim ensnared me more mercilessly day by day, beyond redemption. . . . At last on one of those sultry nights I wrote her a long, long letter and asked her to read it. . . . There was no answer. When I went, personally, to get it, she told me that she was engaged or about to be! . . . I had a last, long talk with her. She was friendly and talked sympathetically; but although I excelled in dramatic effects, it did no good. I suppose there should be more women like that; at any rate they are rare around here.

To Reinhard Piper

Friedenau February 8, 1908 Klossowski's book about Daumier is wonderful—a trumpet blast. The text is good, too. I've read only a part of it so far. The form of this book makes you feel, I think, the deep, forceful ardor of an artist's passion. What some people may not comprehend when looking at Daumier's works, will be easily discerned from this concise, chiaroscuro rendition in words. Then, too, a completed life, whose results are apparent, whose richness is demonstrated and manifested, claims your sympathy and stimulates receptiveness. The three nude females made the most powerful impression on me at the Black and White exhibition at the Sezession in December, 1907. What a powerful Michelangelo temperament! We live in times that make you a coward, that make you ashamed of your

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basic impulses. Only here and there can you let yourself go, somewhere off the beaten track.

To Dr. Wilhelm Hadenberg

Güstrow August 8, 1911 I shall, of course, be pleased to send you some photographs. I am a little more reluctant to send you the seven sketch books, because it is one thing for me to point out individual pages in each book, and another for you to visualize how to work your way through the thick jungle of these half-finished and incomprehensible sketches. Still I think it is a good thing to send them to you after all because I would like to demonstrate that my style is not borrowed from some where, ready made—from the Japanese, some say. I cannot and do not wish to deny that Egyptian and Indian works, for example, have made strong impressions on me. But all my keenest inspirations have come from nature, as I like to think they did to other artists in the periods to which I feel related in tone and expression. It would take a volume to enlarge on this. I acknowledge that I feel uncomfortable in relation to "Classicism." Everything I yearn to do I find accomplished elsewhere—even in Negro and American Indian sculpture. Nature often displays the solemn and the enjoyable, the grotesque and the humorous in a single object, in a single line. If you are puzzled by my feelings here, please compare the penciled draft of the "fat peasant woman" in my Russian sketch book with the sculpture that resulted from it. I did not change what I saw. I saw it that way because I beheld the unpleasant, the comical, and (I dare to say) the divine—all at the same time. When I read something about myself I am, naturally,

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interested—in a curious sort of way. Perhaps it will amuse you to know that someone who has no claim to artistic judgment called me a plattdeutsch sculptor; this impressed me, for a moment, as the brazen truth. As a matter of fact my father was a doctor who took me in his carriage while he made his calls in the country in summer and winter, year in and year out. Ours was a simple way of life in the country, we were not conscious of our attitudes. To outward appearances I was a rather silly boy, but inside I was a poet rather than an artist. I absorbed everything, but with so little awareness that later, when I became an artist, I did everything that I was asked to do without question, taste, or prejudice. Only when my youthful lack of consideration, like rudeness, showed up, did I return, as it were, to a familiar setting and become aware of what my own world really looked like and what my art ought to reflect. If I had been more aware of myself earlier, I would perhaps have stayed with genre pictures, the anecdotal . . . As for that "plattdeutsch," I look upon it this way: it is a naive, juicy, hardmouthed language suited to everything that is human and nonscientific. I really do attempt to express in plastic form whatever feeling for the elementary I have inherited from the plattdeutsch race with which I have been so familiar since earliest youth. Not the thing that man is himself or is only occasionally (he has become too bourgeois), but the part that is his soul—with its mythical content—reaches to all heights and depths. To be honest, I confess, I have hardly any ties with European liberalism. Actually, I feel more akin to the Russian, to the Asiatic mind, which can only be understood mystically, than to the average, educated contemporary European. The phenomenon "man" has always seemed to me to

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be, in a painful way, a mystical, uncanny being. I see in man the doomed, the bewitched, as it were, but also the primeval. How am I to represent this in the usual naturalistic style? I feel that the outward appearance of man presents only a mask, and I am tempted to look behind the mask. How, then, am I to be bound by the details of the mask? I know, of course, that the mask has grown organically from the thing that is basic; hence, I depend upon the mask after all. I have to find ways of representing what I feel and sense rather than what I see. Yet I must use what I see as a means to representation. You may say that I make the job tough for myself, but actually I just go on working, trusting my good luck, and only rarely indulging in such reflections as those just written. Ultimately, I must acknowledge, no aspect reveals itself unless you reveal your own face. You get nowhere with cunning or cleverness. In short, the visible becomes for me a vision; but I'll quickly admit that little or nothing comes from big words. I write so much—though these self-reflections are out of place—because I wish to put the Eastern influences in the background—their proper place. However, I grant that the Gothic and Etruscan have played a part in my artistic development. Until I was twenty I lived in North Germany on the lower Elbe; I was born in Wedel, in Holstein. I first studied at Dresden under Diez, who continually urged me to sketch "in the street." During that period I did the "Woman Collecting Herbs." After that, from 1895 to 1902-1903, at Paris, Hamburg, and Berlin, I can only describe my work as dissolute and maniacal. I made my living from decorative works: drawings, designs for a silversmith, and the like. When I began to do monuments for graves, things clarified in my mind. Then, while passing

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through Warsaw on a trip to Russia, I was inspired by seeing human figures just like those I had visualized in my urge to sculpture. This was in 1906; I was thirty-six then. I started working in wood in 1907. It was not until 1909 that I went to Italy. I consider myself a modern artist, I cant exactly say why, I just feel that I am. May I ask you to read all this rather cautiously; moreover, to read between the lines. Some of it will seem to you genuine and not artificial Although I am reluctant, really, to say anything about myself, I do want to answer your questions. Such self-speculations as these seem to me permissible only in a dialogue, and I look at them that way. I suppose it is in the nature of things that after many failures the urge for architectonic compactness develops: the more you work from your inner self, the more powerful frame you wish to select. I really believe that I am well along on the path to a stylized representation of mankind. Only mankind shaken by destiny, driven to abnegation of the self, and thus heightened into the gigantic seems appropriate to sculpture. Mankind is somehow tied up with the concept of eternity—and though rooted in time has passed beyond its misery; mankind's represented expression of joy or suffering cannot be smiled away.

To Reinhard Piper

Giistrow December 28, 1 9 1 1 I haven't yet had a chance to read, in the real sense of the word, your book on Kandinski, and I can see that I won't for a while. From just glancing through it, I cannot, nor, indeed, do I wish to, deny the writer's high motives.

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On the contrary, the book seems to me to be "sincerely intended." But that makes the latch fall shut with an even louder clank, so far as I am concerned. This means: I just don't go along, instinctively. There is a boundless abyss. Nowadays I frequently find myself admitting to various people that I am just a barbarian; As a barbarian, I believe this good man, Kandinski; I believe that dots, specks, lines, and smudges (as in the illustrations on pages 42 and 88) do shake his soul; but I merely believe him and then— goodbye! We could argue about this for a thousand years. I am, mind you, not entirely inexperienced. There are times when I, too, sat and "created" lines. There were intervals, pauses, when brain and hand were accommodating, but everything else seemed asinine. Here, I would like to add a word that won't be lost on you as a Schopenhauer fan: compassion. I must be able to join in the suffering . . . a joining that goes so deep in understanding that it takes the very place of events presented. Can you have compassion with the forms on page 98 . . . or would you substitute page 88. This is a question without a question mark. Of course I could project something into it or create something out of it. Actually, I think that most works of art, and the best, are created by a desire—aroused by the order of chance and the harmony of chaos—to rob the untouched and undefined of its virginity, and make it come to life, make it become a source of communication with the souls of fellow men. This, then, would be the reverse process of the one mentioned above. I think that we must have a common language to enable us to know everything. Otherwise, someone could say the most sublime and beautiful things in Chinese, and I wouldn't pay attention to them. If, then, I am supposed to relive a spiritual experience it must speak to me in a

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language that permits me to reexperience the deep and concealed. Just as my mother tongue is the one that suits me best, so my artistic language is the human figure or the object through which or in which man lives, suffers, rejoices, feels, thinks. I cannot overcome this. Nor can I compromise by accepting an Art of Esperanto. Indeed, only the elemental emotions of the human race are great and eternal. The things that arrest my attention are what a human being has suffered and is able to endure, his greatness, his concerns (including myth and dream of the future). My own petty little sentiments or personal feelings are entirely inconsequential—a mere caprice— but by entertaining them I step over the boundaries of human concerns. Man as ego must partake in his "self' of the high and the low, whatever you like; but pages 88 or 98 do not touch my "self' in any way. If there are any traces of human figures in Kandinski s paintings they are so concealed that they merely mystify. I feel nothing when I look at them. I do not believe that a new art form can be logically presented, as Kandinski thinks, except as pure literature, as a mental exercise. However, my criticism amounts to nothing, because after all I, as the critic, am not a colleague of the writer. I could well imagine that Kandinski would, on occasion be wholly unmoved by the facts that shake me most deeply. He would say to me: "You are not an artist, you are an actor. You pretend to have feelings, but I create visions and feelings, moods and sensations, by direct transmission, without a medium, like the telegraph." That's all right, if feelings could be invoked by order. Blue means this, yellow means that; perhaps it does, but whether it has the heavenly power to turn the Ought to Must is the question. When colors and lines form hu-

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man figures—or even vice versa—they have this power, for they get it from the human soul. It often happens that colors and shapes seen on walls or other things suddenly turn into pictures when a soul is given them through fantasy or imagination; by this act they are drawn into my being; before, they were outside it. At the most they may have caught the eye by being less conspicuous, more colorful, or more stimulating than other surfaces around. That man's egotism can be aroused entirely apart from artistic stimulation is a different matter altogether. Whether I can convince you of all this or whether you consider me normal is, after all, another matter, too.

To Edzard H. Schaper

Giistrow May 10, 1926 I am convinced that I did not accomplish any meaningful work until the ability to sculpture and to express myself poetically had, independently, achieved a definite form. As long as the mere abundance of my feelings, my general impulse, drove me to create—or rather allowed to be created whatever happened to come out—as long as this was true, only vagueness was the result. Even to this day I have to struggle to prevent one thing from blurring another. I was thirty when I began to express myself in dramatic form; and it was at the same time that I felt the urge to sculpture. I am not saying that "I wanted to make forms" because I recognized that all conscious striving was of no avail. I had to submit to a command independent of me and my wishes, a directive that forced upon me a sort of inner passivity. And so it is that when I write I perceive acts and figures whose

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speech I can almost hear and for whose steps I can almost point out the way. Although I could disown, as it were, any responsibility, I do see that I can create nothing except what is akin to my own self, my personality. Whatever I, as opposed to my personality, consider as limiting, as narrow, as determined, as cursed by mortality can all be ignored I suppose, since I want to point out that I am searching for my true self in dark unconscious depths. It is probably sufficient today that I consider my "self' different from my "personality." All my works are merely parts of that unknown darkness—parts created to speak and act; hence, I cannot object when I hear it said that my sculpture is nothing but an intermediate step between the Whence and Whereto. I have to force myself to say all this. I feel very keenly my inability to elucidate intellectually. Indeed, I can't quite see what good such an attempt will do; actually, I feel that none of this is my business and that I should be content with being aware of life and, to the best of my ability, being able to give form to this awareness. I'll try to add a few words about my life. I am fiftysix, was born in 1870 along the lower Elbe in Wedel, in Holstein. As a youth I lived a typical middle-class existence; often accompanying my father, a doctor, in his carriage when he made his calls on the farmers. Given up wholly to a life in rain and wind; aware of myself in experiencing clouds, forests, water; forever occupied in writing and drawing without any direction; through appropriate training became a sculptor; always felt the urge to express myself extravagantly in poetry or prose. By some accident my "Dead Day" came to the attention of

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the public when the Panpresse publishers invited me to contribute some lithographs; thus the book of my drawings was published. It was a two-month trip to Russia in 1906 that gave me, I guess, a feeling for limitless space, which encouraged me to various sculptures. Space there is so immense that the human element can maintain itself—if it can be maintained at all—only as a crystallized form. It was then that as a sculptor I succeeded for the first time in shaping such forms; whether I succeeded as a dramatist I dare not say; I dare not say whether I have grown beyond the primitive beginnings, and whether my striving for simplicity and clarity has found any measure of fulfillment.

To Hans Barlach

Giistrow January 22, 1929 The reception of the group ["Fighters of the Spirit," placed in the University Church at Kiel in 1928] was cool and negative, just like the reception of the "Angel" in the cathedral. Two days ago someone bent the sword during the night. All rightist groups are up in arms against me; every kind of nonsense about me is blared out with relish. Even worse are the diatribes of the patriotic organizations, especially the Stahlhelm. My sketches for a memorial in Malchin have been brought to nothing by denouncing me as a Jew, and also by stating that I signed the Communist petition against heavy cruisers. Every dog that bites, or otherwise behaves like a dog, takes the chance of getting hit by a rock thrown at him. But these gentlemen operate anonymously, from

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the safe shelter of irresponsibility, hence they don't take even as many chances as a dog; their behavior cannot be described as bitchy, but a good deal worse. I am trying to get my hands on some documents to have these accusations in black and white and I will then be forced, against my inclinations, to go to court, because the Stahlhelm is an organization with a large membership, hence powerful in numbers. Its attacks extend into all parts of the country like the tentacles of an octopus. The denunciations are made confidentially, and everyone denies having had anything to do with them.

To Reinhard Piper

Giistrow December 27, 1930 Once the house is built things may change, but as long as I can possibly get away with it, by ruse or by force, I shall keep my apartment. Isn't one entitled to keep a quiet corner for a (Nordic-Germanic?) contemplative life? Or isn't one? I question whether such rights will be recognized in the future. What a calm before the storm! You live entwined in ominous comfort, pretty much in accord with your tastes, and you don't worry as long as is possible. But all these people, Nazis and Stahlhelmers, are instinctively my enemies, evil wishers from the unaccountable flow of their very blood; they will make short shrift of me when the hour comes. But you are right—let's have no political Christmas letters. Hence, no accusations about the methods that are used to make my life on earth intolerable. I am determined to stand up against this; they shall not triumph . . .

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To Friedrich Schult

Giistrow March 2 8 , 1 9 3 3 Your kind invitation . . . reached me while in a thousandfold turmoil, and I must mention these things so that you know why I am unable to accept. Some of them you may have heard, such as the removal of my memorial statue from the Magdeburg Cathedral, which was demanded by the government. It is clear that this is merely the beginning. Moreover—I know you will keep this confidential—my position is being undermined: various prospects for orders have disappeared as if by higher command. For six months I waited for a job to do in Stralsund until, to escape a worse fate, I withdrew my sketches under heavy pressure. Other prospects have not materialized, because of the suddenly circulated myth that I am a Jew. Waiting—exposed to anonymous messages ( sometimes threats openly written on postal cards, sometimes scraps of paper with defamations of me and my dear ones fastened to my door)—in short, I am finished here. But after all this is my studio and my home, which I do not intend to leave, which I want to keep to the end, even if they club me to death here. At least I am certain to take one of the killers with me as the last resort. I haven't any wish to celebrate. The winter made a wreck out of me. I am not sure that I would be fit to work now, even if I had any work to do. [The Nazis say] that I slapped the national feeling "in the face"—exactly where is the "face" of this feeling situated? If you have to personify, I'd say in the rear end. Wohlers recently wrote me that he had told a friend about my having been awarded the Pour le mérite; whereupon the man growled: "Ah, that Jew."

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Yes, there is much gall in this world and I predict jaundice and a terrible hangover. Symptoms are visible here and there already. Greetings to you.

To Reichsstatthalter Hildebrand of Mecklenburg Güstrow March 6,1934 I have before me a clipping from the Lübeck Generalanzeiger quoting you in a few sentences that constitute a clearly antagonistic position toward me as a person and as an artist. Your position is a fact that I regret, but which I must accept, even though I have lived in Mecklenburg for thirty years as a youth and an adult, and even though there is scarcely a person in all Germany who has derived more of the form and essence of his work, from its very beginnings, from his close ties with the German nation. [The Nazi charge against Barlach was that his work was "volksfremd"—without roots in the national German character.] The purpose of this letter is not an attempt to change your opinion or to mitigate your judgment of me. From your words, as quoted in the Generalanzeiger, I believe I can assume that you appreciate an honest inquiry; therefore, I am taking the liberty, Sir, to ask you to enlighten me, by amplifying your statement in Lübeck, concerning my general rights as an artist in Mecklenburg and Lübeck. I have lived to see, among other things, that a celebration on my behalf planned by the Schwerin State Theater has been canceled on very short notice, without notifying me, without reasons being given in the press. Such can-

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cellation without stated reason, leaves the door wide open, of course, for all kinds of interpretations unfavorable tome. I supplied four items to the Rostock Art Club for the exhibition of portraits of distinguished persons of Mecklenburg; portraits of persons who had been specifically singled out as eligible for the exhibition. Mind you, I supplied these on request, without any effort on my part. These paintings were removed; again, without my being informed about it—a step that is tantamount to censure —and without anyone considering it necessary to state the reasons. I now ask you, Sir, to visualize the perplexity to which I have fallen victim—a perplexity about the rights that I have as a citizen of this country. It is with respect to these rights that I am compelled to ask you for a frank declaration, a confirmation, and, unambiguously, for your position. I believe that I am entitled to this because I am so deeply rooted in this country that the thought of leaving, of seeking my fortunes as an emigrant, is very far from my mind. I shall stay on in my post whatever the consequences. But I need an unequivocal indication ( 1 ) about what arrangement I may have to make for the future, in view of the damage to my reputation by the aforementioned, as well as other unfortunate experiences; and (2), whether I can expect to have more of the same on similar occasions. Thus, by presenting my situation not as one to be deplored, but primarily as one shaped by influences whose origin remains unknown to me, I am expressing the hope that you will help me to discover the causes of my uneasiness; assist me, that is, with the same straightforward-

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ness to which I believe, from your statements in the Lübeck address, I am entitled. It is possible to have respect for one's opponent—and I trust that I may add this without being misunderstood —but one, cannot describe undercover opposition (such as that evident in Rostock and Schwerin) as other than despicable. Assuring you of my deep trust in your willingness to meet my request.

To Hans Barlach

Güstrow November 25,1934 I would certainly like to know how the removal of my Memorial for the War Dead from Magdeburg Cathedral came about; but I can guess well enough how it happened. The minister of the Cathedral is an aggressive member of the Stahlhelm. In his eyes the "pacifist" theme attributed to my work is more than enough reason for banning it. He seems to regard Christ's "Love Your Enemy" as a regrettable aberration—he, the Christian minister. Of course, there is the question of whether or not the Memorial is actually "pacifistic"; you can argue about all this, but let's forget it. How I should like to mail the clipping from the DAZ to a number of our contemporary bigwigs and use the occasion to repeat the question that I put to Reichstatthalter Hildebrand of Lübeck and Mecklenburg; namely, what rights as an artist do I have in this country? I should like, also, to repeat my request for protection against certain incidents. However, the answer I received from him has discouraged me. I don't want to

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make a nuisance of myself by pointing out that, all told, I have been at my work for forty-seven years; Mr. Hildebrand certainly can't say that about himself. Nevertheless I would never think of advising him in his own special field. Of art he knows nothing—indeed, he would have to swallow that—but one gets tired of the self-righteous pose. Might makes right.

To Dr. Karl Fischoeder

Güstrow May 28, 1936 You asked me whether any reason was given for impounding my drawings. Why certainly. They were seized on March 24. On May 14 the following reasons were given: "The publication Zeichnungen by Ernst Barlach was sequestered in accordance with the ruling of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, since its contents are not in harmony with National Socialist art sentiments. I. A. W. Funk." I have nothing to add. Best greetings.

To Hans Barlach

Güstrow December 12, 1936 A letter from Professor Amersdorffer tells me about a public statement of the Literature Division of the Academy expressing laudatory sentiments and awarding me an in-aid-of-work prize. My account has already been credited with RM 1,000. What pleased me most of all was the courage of the Literature Division! (Not to be confused with the Literature Division of the Reich Chamber for Fine Arts, whose president, Hanns Johnst, honors me with his furious hostility.) My situation is not really

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precarious at this moment—surely there are others much worse off—but the moral support which the approval and statement of the Literature Division constitutes is, of course, extremely valuable.

To Dr. Alfred Heuer

Güstrow August 1 1 , 1937 Please don't call me a "professor" and even less a "doctor"; I am just a sculptor and a "Culture Defiler" [Kulturschänder] at that. This is the label they put on my drawings seized in 1936 and exhibited in the Degenerate Art show. They have pilloried my book of drawings by exhibiting it in a glass case (so that the public is unable to look at it and thumb through the pagesl). They cut out a few pages and placed them beside the book to make the honorable public believe the whole volume is filled with "such" pictures.

To Reinhard Piper

Güstrow September 25, 1937 They have now thrown my Angel out of the cathedral here, too; they want to melt it down. This is the fourth church case: Magdeburg, Kiel, Lübeck, Güstrow . . . Leo von König was here recently to paint my portrait; he will be back soon to go on with it. He, too, now belongs precisely in the same boat as those whom I would describe as "doomed to a life of emigration in their own country." By Eastertime, 1938,1 shall have been a sculptor for fifty years; I started in 1888; quite a length of time, full of change, a succession of different periods, especially colorful in recent days. For the time being I

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am removed from the membership list of the Literature Division [of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts], and if I wish to work again I will have to file an application. It was done to "avoid double professional listing in the Reich Chamber" [as writer and sculptor], but how long will I last in the [Sculpture] Division as a "Culture Defiler"?

To Fritz Schumacher

Güstrow October 22, 1937 I hope you arrived safely and happily in Silbermühle; I was persuaded to stay by von König, who painted several pictures. I wonder whether I have already told you, or whether you know, that my wood sculpture "Reunion" from the Schwerin museum has been placed in the Nürnberg "anti-Bolshevist" exhibition? What I can expect as a consequence of this—knowing how consequences are drawn in certain places—will not make me uneasy. I think it wise to belittle this, yet the atmosphere is heavy and it doesn't augur well. König, too, is among the outcasts; his canvas, commissioned officially, under Göbbel's auspices, had to be removed and stored.

To Dr. Heinz Priebatsch

Güstrow October 23, 1937 I shall not leave the country. . . . I can see no salvation for me in that, even if I should be successful and have all the things usually characteristic of a good life . . . (When a Reich delegate recently was asked: "What should Barlach do?" He replied: "He can go abroad." Fortunately, for him, I was not present.) A man can be

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forced to flee, but I shudder when I contemplate that in exile you can also become exiled from yourself or wither away in homelessness. A young man might, instead of stagnating as an emigrant, have confidence in being a better German abroad than the present time will permit him to be at home. There is the example of Karl Schurz . . . but he was a refugee and would not have left voluntarily.

To Hans Barlach

Bad Harzburg February 9, 1938 It has been decreed that my War Memorial in Hamburg is to be removed. When this is done all my major works will have been scuttled and erased from the record of these times—in Magdeburg, Lübeck, Kiel, Güstrow, and Hamburg. Other works of mine have been removed from museums. I make no accusations, but I have no regrets either, and I certainly do not recant.

To Reinhard Piper

Güstrow August 16, 1938 I am selling my property. It is almost finished. I shall go wherever it will be possible to work for a few more years at an adequate level. But where? I don't yet know. I will have to try first of all to regain some of my strength . . . Frau Böhmer will accompany me on this path into the unknown. Without that help I would, presumably, choose a shorter way to those places where everything is good; that is, where "far and wide you can't see a Nazi." Do you remember the excellent drawing by Rudolf Wilke in Simplicissimus? His shabby tramp says:

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"Wonderful scenery here, far and wide no policeman." A policeman indeed. What a harmless misfortune! What year was that? A rather heavenly time. Selections from Ernst Barlachs letters in Aus Seinen Schriften (Munich, R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1947), and in Lehen und Werk in Seinen Briefen (Munich, R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1952). By the kind permission of Mr. Nikolaus Barlach and R. Piper & Co. Verlag. Translated by M. E. Knight.

ANTON

EHRENZWEIG

An Austrian by birth and a trained jurist, Anton Enrenzweig followed the legal tradition of his family in Vienna until the Nazis moved into Austria. He then abandoned his legal practice and turned to his first interests, art and psychoanalysis. He has devoted his time since then to painting and teaching, stressing the relation between art and psychoanalysis. He lives in London where he teaches at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

THE MASTERING OF CREATIVE ANXIETY

Schopenhauer found in great art an inexhaustible wealth of form which yields new relationships with every inspection so that a work of art never looks quite the same no matter how often viewed. It is impossible for the artist to consider in detail, during the comparatively short spell of creation, all the complexities and subtleties of form that his admirers and critics discover in his work. These unpremeditated elements are not the outcome of accidents, they are far too numerous and consistent for that, but arise from the automatic-unconscious way in which the artist works. As a rule, the stimulation of the unconscious throws the orderly conscious mind into disorder. The study of neurosis has shown how desperate the measures can be by which the human personality wards off the disintegrat-

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ing influence of the unconscious. Some psychologists hold, therefore, that the automatic order of artistic creation cannot be the product of the deep unconscious, but is the result of higher near-conscious (pre-conscious) faculties which do not differ in their orderly function from the conscious mind. Indeed, a good craftsman performs with greater ease when he works automatically. The artist, however, differs from the craftsman in that he does not achieve by automatic skill what could be performed just as well, or nearly as well, by conscious effort. The artist's automatic performance follows other laws and is free from certain limitations by which conscious performance is bound; its complexities cannot be emulated by a conscious effort. The artist can discipline even the totally inarticulate, seemingly chaotic "doodlings" which constitute his automatic "hand-writing" so that they support and fit into the larger forms of the conscious composition. While his conscious attention is occupied with the larger forms representing his subject, his hand is guided by his automaticunconscious form sense. Although the intrusions of the unconscious generally create chaos and disintegration, yet the artist can compel his unconscious to give service unattainable by conscious effort; like Faust he summons the spirits of the underworld and turns their destructive power to creative use. The artist pays a price for this dangerous intimacy: the "creative anxiety," the often painful tension which is the conscious symptom of a strong participation of the unconscious in the creative act. From experience, the mature artist learns to tolerate this anxiety and even to cherish its coming as a state of inspiredness. But if the artist has not learned to control his unconscious form sense the anxiety-creating tension welling from his unconscious

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may be too great to be tolerated. The artist may experience this as a fear of "letting go" or of 'losing control," of allowing unknown forces to overwhelm and disintegrate the conscious personality. This inability to utilize the anxiety-creating tension incumbent in unconscious participation is characteristic of the immature artist. Young art students often trace meticulously and tidily the outline of some object; the rigidity with which the pencil is grasped and the unwavering attention focused on the model betray an anxiety that has not yet been controlled. Nothing is left to "accident," that is, to those nervous and erratic "doodlings" in which the unconscious so often reveals itself. The beginner's rigidity should not be taken to mean lack of talent. It may be a manifestation of the anxietyforming conflicts from which a talented artist creates. Facility, itself, is not a mark of talent. After months or years of fruitless toil the miracle may happen: without obvious reason the student gains inner freedom, and thus takes the most important step toward becoming an artist. His anxiety remains—it may even be greater than before —but instead of paralyzing him, it supplies him with creative tension. The mature artist can face his anxiety to the precise extent to which he has developed his automatic-unconscious form sense; this form sense has taught him to trust his unconscious. The amount of anxiety that can be faced and the degree of unconscious form control achieved are interrelated. Hence the art teacher has to keep both aspects of artistic development in mind. Unconscious form control without its share of anxiety tends to degenerate to "craftsman's skill"; we cannot avoid arousing anxiety in trying to reach and train the unconscious form

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sense. It is dangerous, however, to talk a beginner out of anxiety, an anxiety which has its psychological justification as long as he cannot control his unconscious form sense. Some present-day methods of art teaching tend to isolate the control of anxiety from the control of the unconscious form sense, and the results are harmful. These methods are the upshot of "modern" educational methods which enjoyed their vogue in the late 'twenties and early 'thirties. The psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious was interpreted to mean that all the teacher had to do was to release the power of self-expression from binding "inhibitions." Thus, the art student was plied with reassuring encouragement intended to dissipate his inhibitions and anxieties. Splendid results seemed to be attained by this "modern" method in the art education of children and the mentally ill. With very little encouragement the child was led into experimenting boldly with form and color and produced aesthetic effects of a freshness that the inhibited adult could not match for all his aesthetic sensibility. What could be more suggestive than to counteract the inhibitions of the adult art student and to release in him the creative power of the child which had become stifled by adult rationality and restraint? Did not the mentally ill, like the child, pour out rich fantasies in their art which bore close relation to surrealist art, also at its height in the late 'twenties? Did not surrealism, itself, succeed by determinedly casting off adult inhibition? A quarter of a century has gone by since then and we have ceased to be astonished by the alleged revelation of the unconscious in infantile and schizophrenic art. After a spate of children's art exhibitions, we became aware that children's art all over the world displayed the

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same characteristics of undisciplined boldness; its initial freshness grew stale surprisingly quickly. We learned that children's art is at its best when the pressure of the unconscious is at its lowest, that is, during the "latency" of infantile urges between the sixth year of life and the onset of puberty. This comparative weakness of unconscious drives would explain the child's small need for sustained aesthetic discipline, the lack of which makes his art so shallow. His weakly organized aesthetic activity cannot as a rule withstand the renewed upsurge of his urges at the beginning of puberty, at which time it is so often stifled into a rigidity that is the despair of secondary school teachers. I am doubtful that children's art can teach us anything about how to resolve the adult's or adolescent's defensive rigidity into a true aesthetic discipline. (William Johnstone, Principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, has drawn my attention to this aspect of child art.) Increasing familiarity with schizophrenic art has brought similar disappointment because we have realized that, like the pseudo-madness of surrealism, it does not come from an inner liberation. Schizophrenic art, far from impressing us as being free and uninhibited, now appears to be enclosed in a kind of "strait-jacket" rigidity which surpasses the immature rigidity of the art student. Schizophrenic rigidity, more manifestly than the rigidity of the normal inhibited art student, serves a defensive function against a truly overwhelming anxiety. The schizophrenic's dread of annihilation is far more poignant than that of the immature artist. The disintegrating personality of the schizophrenic demonstrates the very real psychological danger which the defensive rigidity and underlying anxiety are warding off. When a new attack

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of illness brings to an end one of the creative "spells" (usually restricted to periods of recovery) the rigidity of a schizophrenic's artistic production might be expected to show signs of a beginning flexibility, but instead it disintegrates without any transition into complete confusion and disorder. Similarly, if the impatient art teacher persuades his student to l e t go" prematurely, that is, before his unconscious form sense can withstand the onslaught of anxiety, the result is not flexibility but confusion and disorder, which is not far from a total annihilation of form. With insensitive ferocity the student slashes at the canvas so as to deaden, as it were, an intolerable anxiety. Unfortunately this blind fury does not further the student's development. In opposition to the "modern" method of art education stands the old "academic" method which knows little about anxiety and other psychological complications, but is concerned exclusively with training the form sense, regardless of whether this form sense concerns the conscious aesthetic skill of the craftsman or an automatic artistic discipline. Perhaps it is an advantage that there is so little psychology in academic aesthetic drill, because its absence is less likely to do serious harm to a gifted student. There is little pedagogical method in this teaching; it is art criticism transplanted into the classroom, that is to say the fastidious form analysis practiced by art critics who dissect the work of art into complex form relationships of which the artist himself is little, if at all aware. What is the result if the artist or the art student is made conscious of all these hidden complexities? The artist will realize that every detail he adds, even the smallest stroke, will profoundly affect the balance of all

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these relationships: that every added detail influences the flow of the linear composition, the distribution of tone and color, the placing of the pattern within the rectangle of the picture plane, and the like. There is a fairly simple double effect to which many art teachers draw the student's attention. Every outline can be seen as circumscribing a solid body against the background of the picture plane or else as a negative "hole" which the outline cuts out from the solid background. Both form combinations have aesthetic merit and should be sensitively shaped by the artist. Certain black and white patterns in primitive ornamentation strike us as particularly bold and plastic. We then discover that the ornament can be "read" either as a dark black pattern on a white ground or as a luminous white pattern standing out against a black background. The striking plastic effect of these "ambiguous" patterns is explained by the dynamic tension between the rivaling form combinations which strive to push each other from consciousness. Does the primitive artist who creates such patterns constantly alternate his attention from one to the other in order to watch their simultaneous aesthetic growth? The artist cannot possibly encompass in his conscious attention the countless number of alternative form combinations carried forward with every new brush stroke. A diffuse and unfocused "stare" enables him to control these many simultaneous and rivaling form developments through his unconscious form sense. The great disadvantage of the academic method of teaching art is precisely that the student will try to master the many form processes through his conscious attention alone. He may then become struck with what we might call "centi-

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pede's paralysis." The centipede of the fable was asked how he managed to move his hundred legs all at once. When he began to think about it, he was no longer able to move. The fable illustrates the limitation of conscious attention which can attend only to one thing at a time. A teacher who appeals exclusively to a student's conscious aesthetic sensibility as a means of controlling the multiple form processes of art, runs the risk of aggravating the student's anxiety and rigidity into "centipede's paralysis." I have seen this happen frequently, particularly with gifted students whose artistic sense of responsibility is sharpened by the teacher's criticism. With others, the one-sided training of the form sense may produce only effortless automatism—that craftsman's skill cultivated by a centuries-old tradition of academic art teaching. There are more enlightened methods of teaching art than the two extremes which I have discussed. There are methods aimed directly at educating the unconscious form sense and, at the same time, keeping the anxiety aroused within bounds. I once had the good fortune of participating in a drawing course given by Professor Hirschfeld-Mack, formerly of the Bauhaus Dessau. He told the students to bring along newspaper and charcoal. The cheapness of the materials, no doubt, helped to overcome any anxiety of "spoiling" one's work. We placed the sheets of newspaper on the floor and, bending over them, drew a series of circles, allowing the arm to rotate loosely from the shoulder. We kept rotating on the same spot until the feeling of "making circles" was quite automatic in a self-hypnotizing rhythm of going round and round. This automatic consideration of the basic "abstract"

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forms was to ensure that in the future the student would not be able to draw any pattern, whether representational or not, without stimulating at the same time the sense of "doodling" with basic linear forms. After a while, innumerable circles sprang up all over the classroom, small and big, gray halos and deeply outlined black rings, circles concentric, intersecting, touching, or separated. We marveled at the diversity of pattern which the simple rotating movement had produced, and how this diversity expressed the different personalities of the students. But I was not prepared for the searching criticism to which the professor then subjected our "doodling" exercises. He pointed out careless design; for example, two circles whose point of contact had remained indefinite, and he suggested that the student should have made them clearly intersecting or neatly touching. My reaction was one of dismay—that I should be made to answer for a design which I had produced in such an irresponsible mood without conscious self-criticism. I felt caught unaware and resolved to be more careful next time. The unwelcome result was anxiety. Because of this anxiety I could no longer abandon myself freely to the sensation of "doodling" which had penetrated my body and was no longer a part of conscious critical thought; the path to the unconscious was barred. Admirable as the purpose of the "doodling" exercise was, it failed in my own case. The exercises had been aimed mainly at stimulating the unconscious form sense, but due consideration had not been given to the great amount of anxiety that can be aroused by the shift of the form control from conscious attention to automatic production. The anxiety in itself would not have been harmful had it been properly guided. It would have helped

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me replace the initial playful irresponsibility of my exercise with creative tension, manifested in the open-eyed "stare" that betrays the stimulation of the unconscious mind. Apart from the anxiety, which in my case had been induced by a remark made by the teacher, "doodling" exercises do arouse anxiety. Recent developments in modern abstract art have helped us to understand this anxiety. The structure of "doodling" was noticeable in the work of early abstract painters like Kandinsky and later Hartung, but it was left to younger men, like Jackson Pollock in the United States and Alan Davie in England, to exploit to the full the emotional power of "doodling" and its anxiety-creating meaninglessness. For the unconscious, nothing is really meaningless or "abstract." The slightest and most transient allusion expressed by scattered, almost imperceptible distortions too diffuse to be articulated by our conscious vision, can be given meaning by the unconscious. The unconscious projects its symbolism into any form material, although to the conscious mind the forms remain "abstract." This unconscious projection is not a reckless imagination fed by the slightest of cues, but rests on the unconscious faculty of "reading" inarticulate, diffuse codes which the too sharply focused conscious attention cannot decipher. Representational art also contains the "doodling" structure of unconscious form production but here it is confined to the slight distortions and scribbles considered as the personal "handwriting" of the artist. Much of the emotional effect of representational art depends on the inarticulate forms of this "handwriting" but they remain more hidden than in abstract art. Conscious attention is safely diverted to the larger forms representing the sub-

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ject of the work, and the artist's automatic "handwriting" is only unconsciously appreciated by the viewer. Modern abstract art, by bringing these inarticulate "doodlings" into the open, without affording conscious attention its customary fare, merely stimulates the unconscious mind which alone can read them and so arouses a maximum of anxiety. No wonder that this type of abstract art arouses more antagonism in the observer than representational art—or even the more geometric abstractions of Mondrian and his followers. The unconscious form sense is not, as we shall see, confined to the production of inarticulate "doodlings," but can also produce recognizable order of a complex kind that cannot be attained by conscious calculation. The inarticulate structure of "doodling," however, remains a domain of automatic form production and cannot be imitated by "skill" alone. The academic mannerisms imitating its chaotic quality usually can be recognized. Conscious analysis of genuine "doodling" is impossible. In the frills and arabesques of artistic "handwriting" there are no individual, independent units. The embryonic form elements will join and disengage in a fluid medley. We cannot discover any definite purpose or direction in them. The artist's hand, engaged in nervous handwriting, flicks about in haphazard little jerks without aim, but I believe it is guided by an unconscious purpose deciding and acting in split seconds. Artists, generally, have recognized the emotional and aesthetic effect emanating from this hidden world of the unconscious form sense, and academic skill has often tried to draw it into its own orbit of conscious mannerisms. It is not easy to see that the pernicious habit of "texture making" is the direct descendant of "doodling" abstract

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art. In the textured surfaces of academic art the "doodles" are no longer "abstract" and anxiety creating. Certain surfaces are set apart, sealed off safely and antiseptically, to be filled in by interesting texture. How could a student possibly feel that this texture making ought to obey an unconscious discipline? What is so seductive about such mannerisms is their cheapened emotional effect. Contradictory though it may seem, they are conscious mannerisms aiming at a haphazard unconscious stimulation, but they lack the secret order of our unconscious form sense. An example from the realm of music may make this clearer. The emotional quality of a singer's or string player's "technique" is partly connected with the many inarticulate inflections, jerks, wobblings, and slurs with which the automatic-unconscious distorts any articulate melody. They cannot be articulated by musical notation and are entirely left to the unconscious form sense of the performer who thus supplies an essential structural element to the living melody. These glissandos and vibratos have nothing to do with the mannerisms of entertainment music which often abuse them. The greatest performer makes use of them but he applies them automatically, and they are unconsciously appreciated by the public through the individuality which they impart to the tone quality of the singing voice or string instrument. In original Negro jazz the inarticulate inflections seem to overgrow the articulate melody though, again, they do not follow any recognizable pattern and are still automatically controlled. The civilized and debased derivative of this primitive music we meet in our dance halls where guttural jazz singers make their voices deliberately and self-consciously flutter and slur in the stereotyped glissandos and vibratos of a "singing

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saw." They achieve a pleasing soft thickness of tone but never that heart-cutting edge which remains the prerogative of the irregular, truly inarticulate inflections of primitive melody. The important point is that the stereotyped, manneristic inflections have not become part of the fully articulate melody. They are still heard only unconsciously which explains their emotional effect. Similarly the stereotyped "textures" may be applied by academic mannerists in a conscious way; but they also evade conscious appreciation and so create their emotional, though cheapened, effects. An amusing illustration of how manneristic art contrives to pluck at our heartstrings by shifting its artifacts from consciousness into the unconscious was afforded to me when a friend of mine once showed me a series of engravings in the style of nineteenth-century romanticism. Their sentimental emotionalism was flat or at best unintentionally humorous. But one among them had a curiously sinister effect and I said so to my friend. He at once pointed to a form in the background that had escaped my attention. The engraving itself represented a pair of lovers in a small boat tossed in a storm-swept sea against a sky of thunder clouds. One of the clouds billowed into the indistinct shape of a giant hand grasping for the sun. My friend was right. It was this threatening shape that I had not consciously seen, but which nevertheless must have been responsible for the sinister feeling of doom that gave such pathos to the plight of the two lovers. Now that I could examine the cloud hand consciously my critical faculties sprang into action and the picture appeared just as flat and insipid as the rest. We are emotionally defenseless against feelings aroused by unconsciously perceived forms, even when they are produced

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by self-conscious mannerisms as in "textures," stereotyped flutters of the voice, and the like. Through working on our uncritical, unconscious mind they produce cheap emotionalism; but they betray their lack of true depth by their missing tension, that unconscious anxiety, which we have learned to take as a symptom of genuine automaticunconscious stimulation. Generally, "background" forms tend to be vague and ambiguous or even totally inarticulate like automatic "doodlings." This appears justified from the viewpoint of traditional realism when we consider the haziness of distant objects or when we consider that psychologically they remain out of focus and have to repel conscious attention by their lack of articulation. Hence, even in traditional, more inhibited art the "doodling" function of the unconscious can control the shaping of them. We attribute the cause of our entire emotional experience to the more distinct forms in the foreground of a picture: but the background forms, because they are seen unconsciously, exert great influence on the emotional impact of the picture as a whole. For example, it is astounding to observe to what degree the facial expression of a conventional portrait depends upon the inarticulate forms of the background even though we can give them no definite meaning. In viewing a portrait we usually focus on the eyes of the portrayed person and it will be the expression of the eyes that will be influenced by form features outside the focus. Their expression will change as the portrait grows and the background forms are added. If we cover the cavernous rocks behind the Mona Lisa we can see how much her smile will lose in diabolic mystery. The fact that imagery formed by the automatic-unconscious tends to be less articulate or differentiated than

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conscious imagery was recognized by psychoanalytic theory long ago. Classical examples of unconsciously formed imagery are the ambiguous swimming visions of the dream and, if we care to look more closely, the artist's first conception—indistinct yet potent—of a future work of art. This difference in structure between consciously and unconsciously formed imagery is explained by the fact that the unconscious mind as a whole is more primitive and less differentiated than our conscious mind; it preserves in its undifferentiated imagery the child's more primitive vision of the world. The child is not capable of making the finer distinctions of individual objects which the adult mind achieves. From the rational adult's viewpoint, the child fuses or rather confuses what should be kept well apart. The riddle of how the creative mind elicits order and harmony from the unconscious is solved if we consider that the working of the unconscious is only less differentiated and not really chaotic. The unconscious mind builds images that follow a definite though more primitive form principle of its own. However, to our adult conscious mind the unconscious imagery merely appears confused rather than fused, vague rather than generalized. It is interesting to note that the stiff over-concreteness of schizophrenic imagery is not really childish or "primitive" as is often assumed, but serves as a defense against the generalized, more primitive imagery of the unconscious. The artist, however, delves into the fluid ambiguity of unconscious imagery and widens again the all too sharply defined focus of his vision into a more comprehensive view. In his daydreamlike nonfocused "stare" he can view and comprehend the entire structure of his work at a single glance. Although his "stare" blurs out the definition of

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single form elements he is able to relate every detail to the whole and detect the slightest flaw. To correct the flaw he may concentrate his focus on it and refashion it under the guidance of remembered over-all vision. This easy oscillation between two techniques of vision—concentrated focusing and blurred "stare"—depends on the degree of flexibility that the maturing artist has achieved after overcoming the initial defensive rigidity. Its rhythm is the very essence of creativeness. The poet broadens (de-differentiates) the clipped precise meanings of words as used in everyday language and restores to them the submerged imagery and allusions inherent in their sound. He must feel the unconscious undercurrents of subsidiary themes and images which every new word sets into motion. The action of the unconscious form sense can be compared with the performance of a mechanical brain or computing machine. In a second these machines can calculate complex combinations which would take a man a long time to figure out and, similarly, the ability of the unconscious to attend to many generalized form processes simultaneously transcends the narrow focus of our conscious attention. To say that our unconscious operates in other "more generalized" dimensions of time and space may be criticized as "unscientific" mysticism but it seems to be verified by the formal achievements of the artist. The unlimited permutation of the twelve-tone row in Arnold Schonberg's method of composition is far from being an intellectual play—as is suggested by opponents of his music—but is best explained by Schonberg's own dictum that the composer's unconscious form sense can manipulate a row of tones "regardless of their direction" in time. Perhaps it is easier to understand now

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why the mature artist can overcome the beginner's rigidity and is able to face the anxiety which comes with the stimulation of the unconscious; for him the lack of differentiation in the unconscious holds no terror, it has become the basis of that highly complex order which will yield to future inspection an inexhaustible flow of form relationships. He can afford to abandon himself to his unconscious because his own unconscious form discipline will ensure that no disintegrating breakthrough of the repressed urges, symbolized in artistic creation, will occur. To put it in more technical terms, he is able to weaken the inhibitions of his superego by strengthening his unconscious ego functions. Art is very often effective therapy because it is precisely such a readjustment of the personality for which the psychoanalyst aims in treating the neurotic. Thus the tasks of the analyst and of the art teacher may often be complementary. Analysis is needed to resolve the more severe cases of neurotic and psychotic anxiety which defend the patient's ego against the undifferentiated functions of the unconscious and prevent him from giving up his rigidity. Once this initial obstacle is removed the teacher affords his pupil the opportunity for mental gymnastics which help to make his weakened, yet rigid, ego functions supple and athletic. I mentioned earlier how the creation and passive appreciation of "ambiguous" patterns, such as the black and white patterns of some primitive art, require that our attention oscillate between focused and diffused techniques of vision. Psychoanalytic case studies have shown that this oscillation creates discomfort and anxiety with certain observers who lack well-integrated personalities ( Frenkel-Brunswik). I think a fuller knowledge of artistic

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creation has allowed us to understand this better. The rigidity of attention that creates this discomfort can be taken as a defense against the disintegrating effect of the unconscious, which in psychotics becomes tantamount to a fear of self-destruction. Thomas Mann once wrote that the artist has to accept self-destruction in order to be able to create. I, myself, believe that creativeness does not so much sublimate libidinous urges as it serves to absorb self-destructive Thanatos urges. The relief which comes with the rhythmical disintegration and reintegration of ego functions during creative activity may be connected with the absorption and neutralization of self-destructive Thanatos urges which would otherwise destroy the ego. The psychotic's overwhelming dread of self-destruction prevents the free oscillation of this rhythm and thereby eliminates the only remedy which could restore his disintegrated personality. Some recent experiments under the auspices of the Menninger Foundation were aimed at determining finer distinctions of personality types. It was found that there are "focusers" who rigidly cling to a chosen pattern; their attention is not easily diverted to form features outside their focus. It is not surprising to learn that "focusers" tend to suppress their feelings and have little imagination; they seem to suffer from unconscious anxiety. The opposite type, the "nonfocusers," tend toward inert daydreaming and have little control over their emotions. Neither type could partake of the alternative oscillation between focusing and nonfocusing (diffuse staring) which constitute the mental gymnastics of a healthy and creative personality. Roughly speaking, the teacher can best help a student to deal with his anxiety by bringing it gradually into the

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open. When the student has trained his automatic-unconscious form sense and is confident of his ability he will be able to tolerate and utilize increasing amounts of anxiety. The art teacher's task is similar to that of a psychotherapist. Both must unlock the hidden fantasies of the unconscious; both must handle the resistances opposed to revelation of the unconscious. The psychotherapist explains to his patient time and again that certain attitudes represent resistances to the stimulation of the patient's unconscious. A lifetime of experience in depthpsychology goes into the understanding and resolution of the manifold resistances, and it is not the task of the art teacher to acquire such therapeutic skill. What can be expected of him is that he recognize the psychological problem involved and that he show the patience and sympathy which the student needs. It is this understanding that distinguishes the true art teacher from the artist who teaches to supplement his earnings. A student's refusal to take manifestations of his unconscious seriously is one of the most discouraging attitudes the teacher encounters. Some of the participants in Professor Hirschfeld's course considered the doodling exercises as child's play and unworthy of a serious artist, others considered the results of the exercises as merely "accidental" or owing to awkwardness. Some modern methods of teaching art favor the use of techniques which invite "accidents": running colors, monoprints from diverse inked surfaces, collages of torn paper and other readymade objets trouvés. Students may appreciate the often pleasing results of such techniques which cannot be emulated by more conscious efforts, but they often fail to see the benefits they can derive from such exercises. They fail to understand that the disruption of complete con-

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scious control by many "accidents" brings into play the unconscious form sense which, in its superior flexibility and adaptability, can respond quickly as they emerge in rapid succession, incorporating them into the design as if they were intentional. Every artist continually adjusts his design as he works to some little accident or unintended mistake and this pliable, passive attitude to his growing work is an essential ingredient of a creative personality.

RUTH ARMER Abstraction 6

ERNST BARLACH Meeting Again

A L A N DAVIE Structure of doodling—Ehrenzweig

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI Three Figures

RICO LEBRUN Study for the Triumph of Death after Traini

RICO LEBRUN Butcher Shop, Mexico

HENRY MOORE King and Queen

Morning Light

Noon Light

Afternoon Light

ERNEST MÜNDT Sculpture, Son Miguel School

JACK SHADBOLT Trophies

JACK SHADBOLT Façade—Pine and Rock

W. EUGENE SMITH Walk to Paradise

W. EUGENE SMITH Mild Tribute to Franz Kafka

EDUARDO

TORROJA

Grandstand of the New Hippodrome, Madrid

EDUARDO TORROJA Design for a Railway Station

SABRO

HASEGAWA

After completing his studies at the Imperial University in Tokyo, Sabro Hasegawa traveled abroad for several years, living in China, Europe, and the United States. Considered one of Japan's foremost abstract painters he fuses traditional and modern philosophies and techniques in his paintings. His appreciation for Japan's traditional culture and his understanding of its relation to Western man forms a pivot for much of his teaching. At present he lives in San Francisco where he teaches painting, calligraphy, and tea ceremony.

MY HOUSE

This is my house. It was built by an elderly Japanese carpenter. This is the floor plan of my house. I want to tell you about the two elements in it that I appreciate most. Two things that I enjoy every day and every night and for which I am very grateful to my ancestors. First, the pattern made by the mats that cover the floors in my houSe. This is a sketch of one floor mat, called tatami. It measures approximately three by six feet. It is made of compressed straw and is about one and a half inches thick. I t has a cover woven from I grass, a tall slender grass. The edge is bound with linen or cotton or a combination of the two. This binding is black though occasionally brown

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may be used. The surface of the tatami is smooth and pleasant to touch. No one wears shoes in a Japanese house so the mats are always clean. We sit directly on the tatamis, sometimes using a small sitting cushion, called zabuton. We also place our sleeping cushions (futon) directly on the tatamis. Literally we live on the tatami. Sitting on them brings me endless pleasure because of the texture of the surface and the patterns suggested by the bound edges. The tatami is the module for the house. "A" is a room of eight tatami, "B" is a room of six tatami, and the size of a room is usually so indicated. Five of us live in my house, my wife and I and three children. Seventeen tatamis for five persons means that each has three and a quarter tatamis. Since a tatami measures about eighteen square feet, this allows each person sixty-one square feet. This living area is about average in Japan today—a little less than it was before the war. We have built-in storage facilities (C and D ) . All sleeping equipment—cushions, quilts, pajamas—is kept there during the day. Closets are generally divided into two parts. I take advantage of this arrangement by using the

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upper half for sleeping equipment and the lower for my brushes, ink stone, and other materials for painting. In the eight-tatami room we also have a writing desk, a book shelf, a small side board, and sometimes we bring in a dining table. The desk and table are very low because We use them while sitting on the floor. This room is thus used for sleeping and working as well as for entertaining guests. Most Japanese houses have verandas ( E ) usually facing south. The south room opens onto the garden; the veranda serving to unite the two. The view of the garden from the room, or when we sit on the veranda, brings a sense of participation in the changing of the four seasons of thé year. The garden is designed to imitate nature by extracting her charm. When we look at the garden we relax in contemplation of nature's gifts. In my house the entrance hall ( F ) is six by nine feet: half the floor is paved with stone—this is where people leave their shoes—the other half is a wooden floor. There is also a bath (G), an enclosed, covered court (H) which contains the well, a kitchen ( I ), and a toilet ( J ). Throughout the Japanese house the pattern of the floor mats is one of basic and strong visual elements. Eight- six- and threetatami rooms are the most popular. There is a very beautiful square room of four and a half tatamis; the half tatami is in the center (this is a room I do not have). Rooms range in size from three tatamis, through six, eight, ten, twelve, and fifteen. The fifteen-tatami room is usually the largest found in a private dwelling. Large clubs or hotels with banquet halls may have rooms of twenty tatamis or more. Smaller rooms give the feeling of an asymmetrical pattern and are more intimate. The formality of larger rooms is emphasized by more sym-

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metrical patterns: the larger the room the more symmetrical the pattern. Doors also follow the standard measure of three by six feet, though there are deviations. A wall nine feet wide may be divided into four doors of two feet, three inches each. Ceilings are either seven and a half or nine feet high. Pierced carvings or small sliding doors often occupy the space between the top of the door and the ceiling; this is decorative and also provides ventilation. With our consistent standard of measurement, all lumber can be prepared at the mill according to the module, as also the paper needed for doors and walls. Building and repair work are thus simplified. The main support for the roof, traditionally covered with straw or reeds, or with ceramic tiles but today often with zinc plates, are wooden posts. Most of the walls slide open or can be removed entirely; it is thus possible to turn two small rooms into one large room. This also provides greater ventilation, a necessity during the hot, humid summer months. The traditional Japanese way of living can be described as an example of modular measurement, from the smallest utensil to a large dwelling. As the tatami border shows, the module allows for very pleasant variations of patterns. The tatami gives a sense of stability because it adheres to a strict module but at the same time the module allows room for imagination. The linear pattern of the Japanese house bears a striking resemblance to the paintings of Piet Mondrian in his most austere period. In a sense, we live in and on Mondrian paintings. I feel this very strongly; especially when I see the numerous straight lines of the house, the rectangular patterns of the black lacquer frames oijusuma (removable partitions; papered

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on both sides with plain or decorated paper), and the natural wood frames of shoji (single-sheet, white paper doors.) It might be said that we do not need Mondrian paintings in Japan because we live within them. But as one who appreciates the fascinating beauty of the pure abstract patterns of traditional Japanese architecture, I think that Japan today needs the reminder of Mon, drian in order to rediscover the treasures of her heritage. Living within the Mondrian patterns means we move around in them. By moving around our changing perspectives emphasize and enrich the enjoyment of these extremely strict, straight-line compositions. Measurement of all these changes is based on the arithmetic of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, I-Ching, which deals with the figures in mathematical relation to the universe. Though the rule of the module is strict it contains all possibilities for true creativity. As the fundamental theory of the Book of Changes emphasizes harmony between Yin and Yang, which means harmony between shade and sun, so the asymmetrical structures and patterns created in accordance with this harmony produce a feeling of balance in which we can live and relax. This harmony is reflected in the serenity apparent in the Japanese home. Simplicity and cleanliness add to it. These elements developed early in Shintoism, and later happily combined with Zen Buddhist emphasis on directness. Zen Buddhism influenced the development of an architecture of extreme simplicity, and at the same time provided a deep feeling for eternity. We feel this in the serenity of the home. The second element in my house which I enjoy is the part of the house marked "K." In my house it is a onetatami unit. This area is dedicated to purposes entirely

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beyond physical or bodily functions. We do not use this space for eating, sitting, or sleeping. It is wholly dedicated to art, religion, nature, or a combination of the three. It has a mental and spiritual function. I think this proportion of one unit to seventeen is good. It is a proportion the average Japanese house reserves for "unusefulness." The material used in building this area differs from that in the other parts of the house. Although the natural hues of the walls of the other parts are restricted to neutral tones of cream, ochre, or white, brilliant colors and textures of the walls are applied here. The columns, floor, border, and ceiling are finished with imagination in order to display unusual kinds of wood, special finishes, and colors. This area is called the tokonoma. It serves as an artistic frame for a vase or a basket of flowers and leaves, a hanging scroll painting, or a scroll of calligraphy. Any treasured object may be placed here. Within this framework flower arrangements and works of art have a place of their own. Here, they are fully appreciated and respected. When the occasion arises, the tokonoma is converted into an altar and serves a religious purpose. If a guest is present he is given the place nearest the tokonoma. A good guest pays homage to the holy, beautiful, or natural objects that are to be found there at all times. I wonder whether contemporary architecture, which in theory and practice places so much emphasis on the functional, gives due consideration to the true purpose of living: to art, to religion, to nature. Is due attention being given to the tokonoma by the architects of today who follow a style similar to that of the Japanese house? The old traditions of the East spread over a wide expanse of India and China. They were gathered up, condensed, and made viable by the Japanese, who are his-

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torically, young people among the Orientals. The cultural position of Japan in relation to China and India is similar to that of the United States to Europe. I do not believe Japanese architecture is an ideal one. We have problems, many of which stem from the fact that our architecture was developed within local traditions. Today, we should strive to revive the best of our heritage in a language more contemporary and universal. I believe a meeting of Eastern and Western traditions would be beneficial to both.

ALEXANDER

ZSCHOKKE

The Swiss-born sculptor, Alexander Zschokke, studied at the Academy of Munich. In ig3i he taught at the Academy of Düsseldorf where he made the acquaintance of his colleague Paul Klee. In the months preceding Klee's departure from Germany, Zschokke modeled his bust. Zschokke's memorial tribute to Paul Klee gives us a portrait of the artist that is more unique and fascinating than that of the modeled portrait.

AN ENCOUNTER WITH PAUL KLEE

The School of Arts and Crafts in Dessau (formerly known as the Bauhaus) was the center of experimental art in the German Republic, and it became one of the first victims of the change in thinking that foreshadowed Hitler's Third Reich. It was closed in 1931. To save Paul Klee (who had been teaching there) from the molestations he might well expect, Dr. Kaesbach, Director of the Düsseldorf Academy and a man of imagination, offered him a position at his school. Since the department of painting had no vacancy at the time, Klee was assigned a laboratory course in painting techniques. The Academy of Düsseldorf was a conservative institution. Compared with Dessau, it was reactionary. The appointment of Klee as a teacher was a daring gesture, and friends as well as foes expected some fireworks.

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When we meet someone of extraordinary reputation, we usually find that the impression of the celebrity differs from what we have been led to expect. I had imagined the painter of those symbolic and fantastic compositions everyone exhibited or collected to be a man quite different from the one I met in the lobby of the Academy in the late fall of 1931. To tell the truth, I would have taken him for just another one of those industrialists with fur-collared overcoats and big cigars so conspicuous in the Rhineland at that time, except for those eyes that looked out from under his elegant hat with such a strange scintillation. Those eyes—large, reddish-brown, shoe buttons in an immobile face with thin, sharp lips—were unique. I thought the man might be a night club magician or an equilibrist. He gave the impression that he "had been around" and knew how to handle an audience. When he doffed his hat I was surprised by the unexpected height and shape of his forehead, as well as by the solid BerneSwiss accent of his greeting. Frequent faculty meetings were part of the Düsseldorf academic tradition. During these professorial gatherings, which usually took place in a library room lighted by two huge globes, Klee loved to play with his fingers, creating on the table top complicated shadow designs that later somehow found their way into his paintings. He was entranced by the doodles that his colleagues produced during the often rather boring discussions, and he studied them after the meetings with solemn seriousness. The painter Campendonck, Klee's friend and colleague, cynically maintained that Klee would make a new picture out of every third line of those scribbles. One day, I asked Klee's permission to model his portrait. Previously, I had tried to enlist the help of Director Kaes-

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bach who was one of Klee's personal friends, but he thought my plan hopeless because he believed Klee would not appreciate that kind of art and would consider it highly "bourgeois." It turned out that Kaesbach was one of those admirers who, in love or in art, are blinded by their own enthusiasm. Approached directly, Klee accepted without hesitation—under one condition, however, that I never would have expected: he insisted that the bust must be truly life-like; he wanted no variation on a theme. As I began to work, Klee registered surprise that I did not use calipers to take exact measurements. Klee had never posed for a sculptor before, and he soon became so excited that the work proceeded under considerable tension. His eyes jumped back and forth, now fastening on my hands, now on the wet clay, now on the developing form. To see my hands work simultaneously in several places astonished the painter and made him ill at ease. From the conversation that accompanied the session I gathered that Klee was experiencing plastic space for the first time. Mystified, as I said, by the fact that I worked with both hands, he became so upset that he decided not to come back. My disappointment ended when a few days later he asked me, perhaps out of curiosity, to continue. After a few more sessions the clay model was finished, and then Klee saw the shining white plaster cast. It had been difficult for Klee to accustom himself to the gray color of the clay. Now the white bust, standing there before him like another new object, confounded him completely. He maintained it was no longer Klee but one of those Greek philosophers with white heads. He was a painter not a philosopher.

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Had this idea sprung from Klee's intellect, it would have been pathetic. But it sprang directly from his vision. Klee's eyes, highly sensitive to minute changes in color and material, were not prepared simply to accept the transformation, immaterial to the sculptor, from gray to white. The sensuality of the moist clay and the dry clarity of the white plaster represented, in Klee's eyes, two separate realms of material and expression that held nothing in common. Klee expressed a reaction not unusual among visually minded people. A few days later I suggested to Klee that his bust be painted. This plan pleased him very much, because it would lead to a new object that he could already visualize, and because it would dispel his fear of looking like a Greek philosopher. During this time, Klee had been thinking of introducing some sculpture techniques to his class in painting techniques and he had his students experiment with modeling and carving plaster tile. But he was too intelligent and conscientious a person not to discover very soon that sculpture follows laws of its own and that the potentialities of painting exist on an altogether different plane. He returned to help me paint his bust, and went to work on those parts where the bluish beard colored the yellow skin. This sculptural interlude took place in the year before the National-Socialists came to power. With the outbreak of their so-called revolution, Paul Klee (now considered a KuUurbolschetvik), together with Kaesbach, Campendonck, and other members of the Academy, lost his position. They were all summarily dismissed and replaced by mediocre imitators of the land of official art favored by state governments, with or without dictator-

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ship. Klee retired to his small home at the outskirts of the city. Repeated searches of his house were I at one of the indignities to which he was subjected. He found the machinations of the new society brutal, repulsive, and insufferable. One evening, the former director, Kaesbach, and I were invited by Klee to an excellent supper of olives and tuna, spaghetti and wine. Klee proved to be a true connoisseur who made every effort to serve his guests wine and food to the point of perfection. The discussion turned on the events of the past few weeks that, for Klee, had been confining and cruel. They had passed, but Klee was deeply concerned. He felt the worst was yet to come. Our conversation was interrupted by Klee's white tomcat. The sidling and strutting of this fabulous animal— Klee, in his adoration, considered him an oriental prince bewitched—always intrigued him with its mysterious significance. As if the cat had given the signal, our host suddenly changed into a puck, a demon, a dejected clown. We felt that we should leave, although the evening was still young, but Klee asked us to stay a while longer. He appeared with a large portfolio and confided that he had drawn the National-Socialist revolution. The portfolio must have held some two hundred drawings. They were the strangest and most ineffable things I had seen produced in those incomprehensible times. A sheet with a few straight lines, seemingly awkward as if drawn by a child, opened the series. I must confess that this slight beginning, in view of what the revolution had actually done to us, seemed to me strangely out of keeping with the seriousness of a situation that, after all, was also the artist s own. Yet, as the series progressed, the drawings

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became more and more intense. After some twenty sheets Klee interrupted the showing to refill our glasses. Then he began anew. We looked at no fewer than a hundred drawings. The effect they produced I was quite unable to comprehend. These abstract linear forms, these powerfully simple pencil strokes, had created an apocalyptic thunder and noise. Their vehemence was sickening, their projection of mass brutality so overwhelming that the events of the past weeks returned with full force to shock the mind. When Klee felt how strong an impression his drawings had created, he again interrupted his presentation and produced a sheet of black paper showing a strange figure in white somewhat resembling a balloon. My companion and I felt that this drawing was not one of the cycle on the revolution. I was particularly intrigued by this sketch and explained to Kaesbach, who was still completely absorbed in what he had just seen, that not Klee but I was the "author" of this drawing. Kaesbach seemed almost frightened by so preposterous a remark, but Klee laughed and cagily admitted that, yes, the drawing might well have been one of Zschokke's, that, in fact, it was the plastic idea as he had felt it in the studio while I was working on his portrait. I was reminded of Campendonck's remark. More drawings of the revolution followed. Their increasing violence affected me like Beethoven's last scores that express the drama of his creation to anyone who can use his eyes, even when he cannot hear the music they describe. Klee, though producing drawing after drawing, seemed to have vanished from the room. His strokes and dots, his shapes and symbols performed a dance of madness. Exhausted by the deluge of impressions, my companion had to shut his eyes.

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Klee closed the portfolio—but like a sorcerer who hesitates to end his magic, he held us, his victims, with the spell of an enigmatic smile. He had produced these drawings under great difficulties. Now he had shown them for the first time. In those days of Gestapo supervision, even showing them was fraught with danger. Those drawings were so clearly an outcry against the National-Socialist ideology that the men in power, had they but been able to read their message, would have done more to Klee than merely search his house. Klee felt that his guests would not betray him. This confidence, together with our admiration, warmed his heart. I met Klee again several months later on the train from Berne to Basel. He had left Germany and returned to his first home. We spoke of the days in Düsseldorf, and Klee said with bitterness: "My best pupil has betrayed me. To see him join the enemy, to paint flowers and goats again . . . it is beyond words." His red-brown scintillating eyes, darkened now by sadness, seemed to search for a world sinking and lost, the world of Paul Klee. "Begegnung mit Paul Klee," by Alexander Zschokke, originally published in DU, Schweizerische Monatsschrift, Vol. VIII, No. 10 (October, 1948), 27-28, 74-75. Translated by Ernest Mündt.

RICO

LEBRUN

Rico Lebrun was born in Naples and spent his childhood and youth there. His sensitive perception and keen empathy for humanity, derived from these years in Italy, remain in his work throughout the changes of style which have evolved. The most ambitious and widely known of his work is the "Crucifixion" a triptych. In 1952 Lebrun went to Mexico to teach painting for a year and a half at San Miguel de Allende. Following this sojourn, so fruitful in his present works, he returned to his home in Los Angeles.

MEXICAN JOURNAL

TAUROMACHY I "Well, go on, tell us more about him," said Paco Olsina to me. It was the night after the disgraceful corrida in San Miguel. They had had poor bulls and had been poorly received. El Prieto, the picador, had been hit on his right hand by a Coca-Cola bottle. Now he and the torreros, Pepe and Simon, Father Ybarra, and myself were eating carnitas in Olsina's place. EI Prieto was very old for his profession. He had been at it so long that even now, in his thin undershirt, his shoulders and shoulder blades simulated the heavy embroidered coat he wore in the

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ring, scarred and studded like armor. He had a groove under his right armpit where he clamped the shaft of the pic like a vice or the brake of a truck. He was a master. The others were masters too. So was Father Ybarra. So was I. We were talking about the misfortunes of masters. "O.K.," added Olsina, "he cuts his ears off, and . . . ?" "One ear," said Simon. "Van Gogh cut off only one. What do you take him for? One of those old mansitos we had in the ring yesterday?" "Please, muchachos, don't step on the laurel," said Father Ybarra. "On the glory. . . ." "What glory?" said El Prieto. "I think he wanted to dedicate fear to Gauguin. I think he wanted to offer remorse to Gauguin. He also would have liked Gauguin as a muerto, a dead one." "Would he have been just as good a master with both ears on?" asked Simon. "Of course," said I. "But this terrible thing became part of his reputation. As with you, so with us, too, the audience loves to see us in picturesque misfortune and dirty disgrace. Van Gogh obliged by committing the harm they constantly wish for on himself. It was with gratitude and relief they made him a hero." "He should have cut off Gauguin's . . ." said Pepe. "Please do not horrify us," said Father Ybarra. "Gauguin had plenty of sorrow later. He was brave, too. Pepe, you look like Gauguin." "So, now," said Olsina, "everyone thinks you can paint better with an ear off, or with the cash off, or with calamity on." "Barbaras!" commented El Prieto, spitting out a piece of bone. "All right," resumed Olsina, "but what about his

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love for the pobres? What would have happened to his paintings of potato eaters if they all had been able to afford meat on clean table cloths? Would he have liked to see them well fed but unpaintable?" "He was a spokesman for the human condition," said Father Ybarra, "he was not a soup kitchen. But you bring up an interesting point. I have often asked myself, was Goya so miserable in his heart after all when he made the "Disasters of War"? I say how lucky for him that the world offered unbearable spectacles very much like those of his own soul. I think somehow he would have been desolate without cruelty. Sometimes he seems to tell the victims he depicts, 'Why, you gullible ninnies, on top of it all you had to go and get killed.' He is like a righteous father who hopes the children will disappoint him into a great rage." "Very few critics," said I, "have taken such things into account. Only the greatest ones. The others make it out all wrong. When they simplify they ascribe it all to pity or protest. There are many sob sisters in painting who get gored by their own compassion." Later, they were describing the trick certain fighters use in giving room to the horns first and then brushing their midriffs against the flank of the bull to fake valor. "Do you work close?" asked Simon superciliously, staring at me. "Do you work close to the picture?" "Of course he does," said Paco. "I have seen him do it. Close it is, boy. He ruins many an effect because he is a mule against fear. He can paint out a whole house in a picture and replace it with a firefly." "No me digal" said Simon. "Don't tell me! He doesn't know what he's doing. I don't change my mind in the middle of a veronica."

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"It's not the same thing, stupid," answered Paco. "Can't you see that it is not? The way they work they never see the animal until it's all over. You could say that they work blindfolded like horses and stay in close. Others, the notso-good painters, work away from the animal and save their glass posteriors with great precision. They live longer, they paint worse." "You," said Father Ybarra pointing to me, "should paint a fresco in this town. In a church. A chapel. Like Matisse did in France." "I don't wish to step on the laurel again," said Olsina, "but I saw the photos of Matisse's chapel and I wish to ask you, Father, what kind of St. Dominic is the one Matisse drew on that wall? Weren't you telling me that the Dominicans have deep and wide ideas of the world and of God? Can that be portrayed in one elegant outline?" "He is a Frenchman," said Ybarra, "and a great painter. He does not coincide with theology. El Greco did because he had a mind like Aquinas. Matisse can't. That's not religious painting but a Frenchman's ex voto. It looks simple because it is simple. Arrogantly so. Simplicity and freshness of heart are not enough. It is for this that Angelico is a painter of sermons and Greco a painter of mystery. There is a difference between rosary and rapture." "Sure," I said, "but I would have trouble enough with you, Father. You celebrate Mass using Latin, an unintelligible but highly meaningful language. The parishioners understand the ritual even if they can't read the words. Yet you expect me to forget that the change from transitory to eternal belongs both to painting and to faith. You ask me to forget that I believe in redemption through the transformation of elements from paint to vision and from faith to fact. A fresco depicting the Holy Heart

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should be a forest of forms with the spectator in the middle, the spectator received. He has to knock and he will be received. You don't want him to knock and enter, you want him to weep outside. No gothics, no baroque masters ever yet made a proper structure for the throat of Mary considered as a nocturnal calliope full of raging celestial love. You want silly faces." "He is loco," said Simon. "Que bruto!" "He is not," said Ybarra. "He should be a preacher." "He should be what he is, even if you can't afford him," said Olsina. "He is not a sharkwalker." And he added, "A sharkwalker wades and walks a shark up and down the tank when they have doped the animal to take him from one aquarium to another. The shark must be kept doped but not allowed to go to sleep." "Barbaras!" said Simon. "Ambulatory solace, with arms cradled around the furious and mute cemetery; melancholy Vesuvius plugged with Secanol." At this point Eddie the singer, entered the room. "Old, amigos," he said. "It's '0I6,' not 'old,'" said Simon looking at him and then turning to the rest of us, "Who is he?" "A singer," said El Prieto. "A poor splendid songbird, I t Happened One Night,' 'I am Nuts About You,' 'Marquita.' He is a sharkwalker. He is a lullaby baby on the TV top. Imitate him if you dare. 'Savage indignation catnaps here, word-besotted traveler, he.'" "Please do not desecrate Swift, and where did you ever read that?" asked Ybarra. "In the cemetery," said Olsina. "They all, mas o menos, say that in the cemetery." Eddie had justfinishedsinging "La Vida No Vale Nada" a mil dolares para noche.

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"What does he say?" whispered El Prieto. "What lingo is that?" "Aztec," said Simon. "He sings Aztec for the Portuguese." "Shut up," said El Prieto. "The poor singer, the poor faded, splendid wings. Look how he drinks from the bottle with the long spout. That is Spain urinating symbolically in the face of the affectionate outsiders, the beamers, the dance specialists, the incorrigible innocents."

TAUROMACHY II Paco Olsina, doctor of the bull ring, after having operated on the boy from Leon for an abdominal horn wound:

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"With no complications setting in, he will be all right in a couple of months. A good boy, with plenty of courage, but too careful and too rash at the wrong times. "When they ask me how soon they will be well I feel like answering 'Never' (that is, to most of them). Never, go back to the farm; you can do everything in the ring except facing the bull as his superior. "The born fighters are rare. They are not just in love with a notion. They seldom ask, 'How soon will I be well?' They ask, 'How soon can I get back in there to murder the next son of a bitch of an animal?' I beg your pardon. "And anyway I am fed up with the ludicrous calvary of the profession, with credits, with success, with critics, with careful heroes, with calculating fools. . . . Every month I patch up the disastrous effects of their calculations. . . . Untutored temerity takes a lot of Mercurochrome. "A great many of these novilleros come from places in life where the going is so sordid and tough that nothing could be worse . . . they think. They might just as well gamble and face hardship if it comes with music at the entrance and glory at the end. "But the learning is rugged, the horns have a realness more terrifying than any humiliation, any hunger they might have had to endure. "They want to learn fast, they take risks. . . . And when you take risks without style the daring looks comical. The errors of a stylist are hard to achieve. . . . Only masters can take risks, but to become a master you have to act as if you were one, and sometimes the pay-off is fatal. "The perfect combination of daring and mastery was Manolete. His configurations were the product of emergencies he promoted and solved in a classical style, shaped by maximum danger and as alive as the animal. They had

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to be. His indifference to risk and his technical resources were unique in a wild and fated way." "He was a great man," I said. "Possibly. Manolete was indifferent to risk but not to personal sorrow. He said to me once. 'My only true critic is the horned animal. I answer him deadly and square; I make new configurations to honor him and to avoid being demolished at the same time. Those are the only passes worth making. And then the punks full of prunes repeat my passes as a demonstration of skill, ten centimeters away from having guts. They even improve the wobbly stances I had to take while I was inventing. They polish them all

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up and it makes me cry to see them perfected and unnecessary. . . . But they can have my moves. I have got a ton of them in my system. . . " "They called him the Monster," said I. "Of course. He had them all scared. He was not a career. He was tauromachy honoring itself. "Don't misunderstand me. There were plenty of them around him almost as good, almost as great. I just wanted to say that in the long rim, having seen what I have, I get sick of the 'almost' idea. We settle for the 'almost' every day and not only in the ring." "No," said I. "If only painting easels had horns."

TIRANA Tonight they will set fire to the Tirana, also called La Colonela, for the feast of Corpus Christi. She is ready, towering over the square. Jesus Pinata made her with bent canes and paper as "The Woman Who Told Lies." He gave her an oversized head and eyes with the insipid and military stare for which she was famous in life. Her hollow interior is studded with giant firecrackers. In her adulterous loins he has placed a petard which will be the first to ignite, slowly winking garnet, then glowing to bright petrnia, then exploding with insane rage. From here, with a scurrilous whistle, the fuse will light up a vine of coruscating morning-glories in the shape of her heart, which will rise through the sulphur of the wind pipe and the magenta tongue which will flare out in a comical malediction. Piece by piece the white breasted, wide-hipped firefly will blow up from the hell raging within her until she becomes a

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veritable furnace of misery slowly rotating on one small foot. A thousand black faces of men looking up at her will laugh at every boom. Vesalius, working over his dissections, could not foresee that some day this new chart of symbolic anatomy would light up the sky from here to the cold hills of Atotonilco, where a vaquero astride his pony, with his baby boy sheltered in front of him warm in the serape, will come to watch before taking him to bed. The white smoke will finally drift away; there will be nothing but smoldering chunks over the grass of the square. The people will go to sleep. Toward dawn, while it is still dark in the sky, the applause of the women will come at last, the soft applause of two, then ten, then hundreds of hands pat patting tortilla cakes, all through the town. The richest time for painting was one of disasters, of bitter nuisances and big afflictions for almost everyone I knew. But the main issue was lack of rain. The crops were burning in the drought. Bells had been clamoring for rain: then it came, violent, and with such malevolence that it changed fields into rivers and washed all the corn into the gullies. Vivid blue curtains sparked with lightning would advance across a field, carrying the terrible whispering death of crashing arrows of water to kill the credulous plants which had been shaking in anticipation and delight. The bells started clamoring for the rain to stop. Rain deluged the town too, as if someone had opened the gates for spite, some miser turned prodigal in a blind fury. Shutters, tents, market stalls and chairs, batlike skirts, and flying tresses of scuttling women, flapped and slid through the tall arches of solid water spouting from terraces on both sides

of the streets. During pauses the walls were huge maps of mottled pomegranate, chocolate, ice blue, and almond

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green, and the sidewalks of Quer6taro stone looked like slabs of freshly sliced bacon. But this spell which carried the threat of penury for all except the very rich, did something else for me. Suddenly I became outraged at planned and planted labor so easily blown to pieces in my own work, and in a galloping, infuriated mood I squeezed the season of the pictures into a vital span so short that delay could no longer twist it out of existence. From buckets of color, I painted one after another . . . huge, yielding and resisting, scattered and united, vertical and horizontal configurations in registers of the greatest beauty and docility, without tripping once. . . . Soon the images of true execution festooned my walls, upright, gay, sorrowing, arrogant fields of my own, plowed and harvested all at once, and I felt great.

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LEBRUN FABLE FOR A STILL LIFE

This is to be seen on the Street of Good Eats, that side alley of the market of San Miguel which is lined solidly with fried food and soft-drink stands. With a few lunatic touches, using poor material, tissue paper and cardboard, the real shape of the street—a big mouth full of teeth— has been revealed. Because of the flies and the shadows this had been somewhat obscured. A table is set up filling the middle of the alley from one end to the other. Dumped on it is all the food of the tiendas. All the people have been asked to bring whatever they were going to eat that day and spread it, ample, wide and high.

Out of the surrounding provinces twenty-four of the most distinguished and magnificent cardboard Judases have been invited, none less than twenty-four feet tall. Their jaws have to be mechanically manipulated with

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ropes by children leaning over the terraces overlooking Eat Street. All the pigeons of the cathedral will be called into service by spreading corn half a foot thick on the pavement. At night, twenty-four of the most distinguished and unreliable beggars in town will be invited to sit between the towering Judases and, with at least a hundred lighted petroleum flares on the table, the banquet will begin. Wind is appropriate and necessary. If it is not present, the beggars will be under obligation to blow as they eat. The flares will undulate and move fuliginous and sparkling orbits over heart-colored watermelon, the glistening copper of pork meat, the birdlike claws for hands, the trap mouths, the knives, the pots, the moths, and the lice. This, of course, is a morality play. This is about the world that comes to life in the dreams of many, when painting has declared itself bankrupt through a sequence of prohibitions. This is how the answer will come to the enigma of the now disappearing painter's subject.

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LEBRUN THE LANDSCAPE

It is the back of the imperial rhinoceros clad in flowering cactus. To the naked eye its curvature includes more than a province. It is definitely a section of the planet, streaked with rust and cerulean, baking in the meridian latitude. It is reflected in the flooded flats without a break or ripple. Nadir and Zenith have been brought together by a level cataclysm and now they stare at each other stupefied at being Siamese twins. The vultures overhead can be stamped on but they glide away from underfoot. The clouds are stepping stones with enough drift in them to make you stumble. The cries of a thousand beaks plowing the mud are a pictorial image I must find somewhere on the paint board later. The live arrows of heat bombarding the womb of the caves like squadrons of buzzing locusts, is another. The color range is the fahrenheit, intense, orange-below-black, that appears only by shutting your eyes in the sun. The multivertebrate narcissus struck dumb by its own up-ended image, displays in rotation on the vertical clock, ventral ridges, haunches scribbled with pubic blacks, intricate ribs of white chalk. Moving my foot and seeing my twin below keep his in the mud would somehow make this seem more credible. Numerical notation for Mexican hunters. When asking the whereabouts of ducks, remember: muchos means from 3 to 5; artos, accompanied by one wide gesture of the arm, means from 5 to 15; quantidades enormes, with both arms extended, means from 20 to 40; and miliones, with a wide movement of the body symbolically covering all waters, means about 60.

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The question of reality. At dawn, up to your middle in water, you wait for the cantaloupe tint to spread itself all over the pond before you can pick out the sleeping ducks from the grasses. In these reversed twilights, no matter how good your hunter's eyes, humps of mud and shaking weeds simulate birds and movement. But suddenly in one spot you see something about which there is no question, even though it is almost indistinguishable from the rest. You straighten up and take a noisy step forward and, sure enough, up they go and there is a constellation of shots all around the pond.

THE CLIENTS By unanimous request of my clients I painted the items listed below. The clients, who are also the witnesses, who are also the creditors, who are also the debtors, are:

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ì. Concetta Cartone, departed but present. When last seen she was a five-foot moth sprawled through the trap door of the air shelter, with a permanent wave in the cervical section of the vertebral column, a careless face lifting from shrapnel, a friend modestly arranging her gown for the Holy Assumption. 2. Dolores Hidalgo, queen of the marshes, laminated at twilight by cold wind with livid stripes, with bands of swift doves making number eights above her drenched head. 3. Cardinal Ascalesi, who loves Neapolitans, with a merciful velvet hand in the iron glove. 4. Fanny Brice, who understood everything. 5. Michelino Pomodoro who, but for a lethal message from the Maxim Mitrailleuse Manufacturing Company, might have been a trafficker in pornography or Giambattista Vico. 6. Against the times of awful desolation which visit him, I painted for Sid, the literary agent, a memory in Assyrian colors of his journey to the palace of Ashurbanipal; but he remembers only the black beggars, the offal, and the heat. The great king, the mighty king, the king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal, he does not remember. Sid is the terrified squirrel at which the heavenly butcher daily hurls darts, javelins, assagais, spears, but his negligible silhouette permits him to escape. Dylan, the poet, was broad. He did not escape. 7. Others. The paintings: 1. A throat of Mary. For treble effects. (Vox Humana). Sequined by garnet chicklets (so loud did she rage). Studded with a fall of, a considerable decrease of, pierc-

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ing notes, as the Golgotha verdict made itself clear. (Winsor and Newton verdict green.) 2. The calliope of the lungs, banded in seven colors, simulating the word Tundra, a floral display of arterial blood, erased time and again, each harder. (Never occuring to me to look up the Canals of Lambarri as a stillscape reference; when I did, it was late in the season, and the map was obscured by geysers of departing pintails and bluebills.) 3. The head, to be rendered as a container for splitting maja sorrow, color of fire siren at two in the morning, the lunar molars clamped, the trumpet muscle strict, the lake eye flooded (Winsor and Newton geranium lake for eyes). By tapping her head with the butt of his spear the centurion could obtain a liberal helping of tear drops, all below the light values, all in vain.

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4. Item, several edible battle flags meant for rejoicing, heraldic devices for the sellers of homicidal nectars, pistachio ices, skeletal taffy (calaveras), roasted corn, birds in cages, votive legs in silver, hands like black sails opened against the everlasting border of immaculate shirts. (Gay scales for the ill-tempered clavichord.) Everyone looks; nobody sees.

NOTES FOR A SERIO-COMIC LECTURE Briefing for adult pilots

Considering the nature of the sketch, it is remarkable that so many use it without understanding the character of the engagement. The sketch is the shorthand of a language drawing; the language is almost universally known. (Giacometti said to Matisse, "I cannot draw." Matisse, "Neither can I. Sometimes we act as if we knew how, but we really don't know.") You have been briefed for the last five years on the fundamentals. You have labored to see the mote in Michelangelo's eye and the beam in Rubens'. You have seen how ridiculously simple it is, by drawing with the fingers, by never permitting the movement to go above the elbow toward the head, to achieve the remarkable effects of Leonardo and Picasso. May I congratulate you for the civilized and disenchanted zeal with which you accomplished your missions. True, we had some reverses. A small group deserted to teach in universities. A few decided to turn our archaeological negatives into cash through correspondence schools. Some decided to apply the skill developed while dissecting effects and went into

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advertising. One tried to combine this with the pursuit of art on the side. He is now very ill. On the whole, however, we have managed well. The sketch should be the unerring chart of a condition. Its nature should be that of a promissory note to be paid immediately. Inversely, it should never be used temporarily to placate vanity which seeks to affirm itself through the delusion of promises made to be punctually avoided. Anxiety can encourage vacillation to wink promising but untenable hints. It can produce the impression of your having shot a round of ammunition at an imaginary target while the enemy actually is sitting on your rudder. It can reassure for the wrong reasons. The trueness, the fatal precision of a real sketch are determined by elements we already have examined carefully and at length. Naturally, we know that it must be conducted according to the wind and the weather. We know that its pattern, weight, tragic or classical ornament must be in absolute unison with those conditions. We know that the Secretary of State, the Consumers Report on alcohol, dope, and polio vaccine, the trends of general hope or collective malevolence can and must intervene in the making of a sketch. Even when thumbnail size it cannot but submit to these factors. Line, of course, participates to the utmost degree. The motions of the hand must come from much farther up than the elbow. Line will alter its course as it proceeds according to what the ticker tape of these combined portents say from minute to minute. Do not use calligraphic barrelrolls in combat. They are not organic. Do not gun the engine when you don't know what else to do. You know that several anatomies of the human figure are at our disposal now: transparent, sculptural, scat-

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tered, united, frontal, oblique, pervasive (insistent or baroque), and isolated (classical or lonely). The problem is that each of these modes must be reinterpreted again according to the emergency of the universal day and to yourself as a part of the composition, living the emergency for that day. This is why we have been unable to formulate a system: the variants are so many. We can use only one convention in combat: be prepared not to do at all what you did yesterday. Will you now please take your feet off the drawing board and proceed with your mission.

OTTO

LUENING

Otto Luening's interest in Musique Concrète began during his studies with the Italian pianist and composer, Busoni, in Switzerland. This led him to consult with Dayton Miller, the American physicist. In recent years he and Vladimir Ussachevsky have been engaged in experimental work at Columbia University, where both are teaching. Together they have produced a number of musical compositions on tape.

NEW SOUND TECHNIQUES IN MUSIC

Music based on techniques that generate or transform sounds electronically is called concrete music, tape music, electronic music, and sound track music; this last is made by lines drawn on film. In addition to electronic instruments like the phonograph, radio, and electric piano, used primarily to reproduce existing music, instruments like the ondes martenot, theremin, and tape recorder generate new sounds or transform existing sounds into new sonority forms useful for the purposes of musical composition. The film track on which sound can be drawn can be included in the latter group. Ssü-ma Ch'ien, historian of ancient China, ascribes the acoustic formula for the pentatonic scale and for a twelvetone scale to Ling Lun, a Chinese court musician who lived about 2700 B.C. In ancient Greece Ptolemy and

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Pythagoras were pioneers in acoustics and Pythagoras, especially, had a far-reaching influence. His contributions included the demonstration of ratios of three on his monochord, the acceptance of his particular "comma," and the addition of an eighth string to the lyre. He organized a secret brotherhood dedicated to a pure life physically and related, metaphysically, to the perfect vibrations and tuning of the intervals of the "perfect fifth." His travels took him to Chaldea and Babylon, and perhaps to India. It is apparent that this early study of sound held a fascination for creative people. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century these first principles interpreted by Reilly, Helmholtz, Miller, and others led to the purely scientific development of acoustics. Ultrasonic, subsonic, and sonic applications were developed by W. C. Sabin, P. M. Morse, the; Bropkhaven National Laboratories, Bell Telephone Laboratories, the University of California, and the Institutes of Physics in Berlin and Moscow. This development culminated in non-musical uses of sound vibrations for industrial purposes and in a greatly broadened concept of the nature of the audible sound universe. The German writer, musician, painter, and jurist, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), now known chiefly as the hero of Offenbach's opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, described, in one of his stories, new applications for old acoustic principles. In the course of Die Automate he discusses the meaning and function of music and the development of glass and metal instruments. He wrote that higher musical mechanics recognized the most unusual sounds in nature, made tones resonate in the most heterogeneous bodies, and then strove to bind this mysterious music into a form obedient to the human will and vibrat-

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ing at its command. All attempts therefore, to produce sound from metal strips, glass threads, glass cylinders, strips of marble, or to make strings vibrate and sound in other than the usual fashion, were in the highest degree significant. Hoffmann claimed that further progress in these attempts to penetrate the deepest secrets hidden everywhere in nature was retarded only by the commercial exploitation of inventions before they had been sufficiently perfected: such as the attempt to use a mechanical trumpeter for musical purposes when the invention was still in its infancy. In conclusion, Hoffmann stated that the aim of musical mechanics was to discover the most perfect tone, a tone which becomes more perfect as it relates to the secret sounds of nature, some of which can still be heard on earth. In primitive ages, music was filled with poetry and with the divine instinct of prophecy. The legend of the music of the spheres, he continued, must have been an echo of that mysterious primeval time which gave music the power to stir and effect communion with the supernatural and the diabolical. About one hundred years later Ferruccio Busoni, an Italian pianist and composer, who admired Hoffmann's writings, published A New Aesthetic of Music. In this work Busoni described an actual electronic instrument which could transform electrical current into a fixed and mathematically exact number of vibrations. He stated that only a long and careful series of experiments could make this unfamiliar material approachable and plastic for coming generations and for art. At about the same time Arnold Schonberg and his students began using the term Klanggestalt (sonority form) to describe new aural phenomena which stood in marked

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contrast to the earlier concepts of harmony. In Western music these concepts accept the common chord (C-E-G or G-B-D ) as à norm and all other harmonic combinations as deviations, expected to follow and eventually return to the norm. Klanggestalten, or sonority forms, consist of far more complex sounds that stand in fluid and relative relationships to other sonority forms. They, too, often function as sonority centers or norms far more complex than the early ones. Concepts of noise and tone have always preoccupied composers and the will to define, delimit, or extend them has been ever present. Edgard Varèse, friend and protégé of Busoni, and Anton von Webem, a pupil of Schônberg, have been among the most important composers to widen these new musical horizons. Orson Wells, Bunuel, and other moving picture producers developed noises and extra musical sounds into "sound loops" and "sound phrases" using street noises and sounds made by the characters in action as a primitive and natural concrete music (or Musique Concrète). Norman McLaren of Canada produces such sound backgrounds by drawing designs on sound tracks. These designs generate their own rhythm, frequency, and pitch. Here sound is produced by the visual act of drawing. In 1948 a young French scientist, Pierre Schaeffer, modified fragments of noises by all sorts of acoustical methods and presented on phonograph records a "Symphony of Noises." Not until this time was there an effort to organize and use this particular kind of sound material, employing electronic instruments as creative tools and not solely as instruments to reproduce the sound of voice and instruments. In 1952 a program of Musique Concrète was presented in Paris under the auspices of the research center of Radio-

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diffusion Française of which Schaeffer was director since 1950. The group with which he was associated included Jacques Poulin, an engineer, the composer Henri, and later Boulez, and Messaien. Musique Concrète uses magnetic tape for recording and recomposing sounds. These are recorded on a tape recorder with the use of a microphone. The molecules in the iron oxid particles on the tape are arranged in patterns by the sound vibrations. Knowledge of acoustical laws gives the composer some control over these patterns. Tapes can be superimposed. This process, which records one set of sounds on top of another, is somewhat like putting several colors on the same canvas, mixing them to get the right shade. Two or more tapes played simultaneously on multiple sound tracks produce a complex of sonority forms. Tapes can be cut up and spliced together in new sequences. They can be run at increased speeds, raising the pitch to the upper threshold of hearing; or the speed can be reduced, lowering the pitch. Tapes can be played backward at normal, half, or double speed, and through the use of electronic devices the sound can be prolonged and reverberated. Controlled distortion can be used to change the quality of tone. It is also possible to erase any material recorded on the tape. Everything that can be heard is potential sound material and can be recorded. The term Concrète as used here implies that the compositions are made by collecting any sounds and modifying these on the tape recorder, finally combining the separately developed sections rather than working from a preconceived masterplan. Vladimir Ussachevsky grew up in Northern China where candles and oil lamps provided the only source of light. When he was very young he became interested

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in electricity and he came to this country prepared to enter the California Institute of Technology. But the pull to music won out and he pursued the career of composer and teacher. His interest in electricity narrowed to a general curiosity about electro-acoustical devices. When the tape recorder came on the scene he could see new possibilities and in December, 1951, began experiments with sound transposition on an early model of the Ampex tape recorder. In these early experiments, and in our later collaboration at Columbia University, Peter Mauzey ( an instructor of electrical engineering at Columbia) gave Ussachevsky and me valuable technical advice. He introduced Ussachevsky to the phenomenon of reverberation and the latter, excited by the possibilities for creative application of this unique faculty of the tape recorder, experimented with reverberation immediately. These early experiments produced from ordinary piano tones the sound of deeptoned bells, gamelan-like sonorities and the dimensional illusion of many-leveled, pulsating passages. On May 9, 1952, Ussachevsky presented a few examples during his part of a composer's forum concert. This was probably the first concert demonstration of experiments with tape recorder music in the United States by a local composer. At that time, Ussachevsky had no knowledge of the work done by the Musique Concrète group in Paris. It was not until a month later at a Brandeis University festival that he heard examples of the work of the Concrète group. In August, 1952, Ussachevsky demonstrated. the "new sounds" at the Bennington Composer's Conference. My own interest in this type of music stemmed from my studies with Busoni in Switzerland ( 1 9 1 7 - 1 9 2 0 ) . On my own I began to explore the field of acoustics and this

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awakened a desire to consult Dayton Miller, who proved most helpful in clarifying concepts of new sound relationships. In 1949, in the introduction to Harry Partch's book Genesis of a Music I ventured to predict that if new musical ideas were used in conjunction with electronic and other scientific developments in sound we could expect a strange and beautiful music to result. At Bennington, equipped with earphones and a flute, I began developing my first tape recorder compositions. Ussachevsky was at the controls of the Ampex. Immediately, it was apparent that the new medium made actual sounds heretofore existing only in the composer's imagination. When several short pieces were completed, an informal performance was given at Bennington. After thé concert a number of listeners announced to us that this was it!—"it" meaning the music of the future. Almost immediately Oliver Daniel telephoned from New York and asked if we could provide a group of compositions for the October concert, sponsored by the American Composers Alliance and Broadcast Music Incorporated, under the direction of Leopold Stokowski at the Modern Museum in New York. After some hesitation, we agreed to provide several pieces for the program. We packed the borrowed equipment into the back of Ussachevsky's car and transported it and ourselves to Woodstock, New York, where for two weeks Henry Cowell placed his home and studio at the disposal of the wandering tapesichordists. After borrowing other equipment including an enormous loud speaker (the size of a large dog house), we set about completing some of the compositions already begun and started composing new ones. I set myself the objective of using the flute as a sound source, developing

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one impressionistic virtuoso piece (which sounds like ten flutes), one weird, exotic piece which takes the flute far below its natural range, and an "Invention" in twelve tones which uses very complex combinations of canons and other devices of counterpoint. Ussachevsky composed an eight-minute work using piano for the sound source, except for one place where human voices were used. The piano sounds were transformed into sounds resembling deep-toned gongs and bells, organ-like harmonic clusters, a gamelan orchestra, and metallic crescendos—all shaped into an expressive unit. In late September we transported our traveling laboratory to Ussachevsky's living room in New York and completed the compositions. The first public concert of compositions for tape recorder in the United States was given in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, October 28, 1952. Ussachevsky's "Sonic Contours" and my "Low Speed," "Invention," and ''Fantasy in Space" were played. The reception by laymen and professionals was cordial, and the press reviews ranged from cautious admissions that the sounds were interesting to statements about pathbreaking productions and the complete newness and indescribable genesis of the works. Next, we decided to make a piece for the tape recorder and orchestra, using the tape recorder as solo instrument. The work was commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra, and we believe it to be the first of its kind ever performed. The première took place under the direction of Robert Whitney in Louisville on March 20, 1954. "Rhapsodic Variations for Tape Recorder and Orchestra" was composed according to a preconceived plan. We utilized the variation technique and the more familiar techniques of

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composition but with unconventional results. Ussachevsky and I made our plans for the piece together, exchanging musical sketches for criticism and review. Sometimes actual musical materials such as harmonies, melodies, and rhythms were borrowed from one another and used in other ways. The effect of each section as a whole was discussed, tried out, and often amplified or changed. Standard composing devices like canon, imitation, augmentation, dimunition, and retrograde motion were used and, even when the approach was improvisational, earphones were worn while composing to keep the sound under constant aural control. In contrast to the predominance of extra musical sounds in Musique Concrète, in tape music we employed the human voice and existing musical instruments as sound sources. In 1951 The Northwest German Radio and Bonn University launched their program entitled "The World of Sound of Electronic Music" over the Cologne station. These experiments were initiated by Dr. Werner MeyerEppler, Herbert Eimert, Robert Beyer, and Fritz Enkel. Later demonstrations took place at the International Summer School in Darmstadt, 1951-1952. More elaborate performances were presented at the New Music Festival of 1953 in Cologne. Some literature on the subject has been published in Germany. German electronic music is made of sounds produced by a specially built electric generator. The sounds are transmitted directly to the tape recorder through a complex control panel without the use of a microphone. The taped material is then developed musically through a very involved tape manipulation. The laboratory of the Cologne Radio is the best equipped in the world, but although the Germans have produced sound generators and electronic instruments and have

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made interesting experiments with this material, it would be premature to attempt an artistic evaluation of their contributions at this time. The Parisian group established a library of sounds which has been functioning for several years. It has also built a specially designed auditorium for presentation of the new music. The hall contains several ear-shaped loud speakers into which sound flows. These are regulated by a magnetic coil which is controlled by an operator who directs the flow of sound and who, incidentally, infuses the word "conductor" with a new meaning. Composers working in these media are convinced that music produced in any of these ways opens a new world of sound. It has nothing in common with electric instruments that imitate traditional instruments and its aim is not to displace the latter. Rather, it generates new sounds that cannot be produced in the usual ways. The aims of responsible composers who are working with the new media have been expressed repeatedly both verbally and in print. They state that no matter how electronic sounds are brought into being it is most important that they eventually be used to make music and not mere sound effects, whether this music is impressionistic or composed according to preconceived formal plans. The vibrating electrons produce an endless number of sounds from a single tone to the most complex combinations. The composer's task is to sort these sounds, to arrange them, to develop them as compositions, and eventually to demonstrate the superiority of aesthetics over any technical manipulations. Besides supplying a fresh repertory of sounds, the new media provide ways and means to reinterpret established musical techniques. Canonic devices, augmentation, dimi-

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nution, retrograde motion, and other contrapuntal devices can be used with a greater complexity than in usual music. Rhythmic developments and counter rhythms can be far more intricate than those possible to play on usual instruments. When instrumental sound sources are used, involved ensemble passages can be composed that go beyond the possibilities of any existing combinations. Synchronization of the tape recorder with the orchestra is difficult but it is possible to manage. On the whole the public has accepted the new media as a legitimate, new source of sound. The possibilities and value of the new media in connection with movies, radio, and the theater have also been generally accepted. The place of the media in traditional musical performances has caused the most controversy, possibly because psychological reactions to the new music are entirely different from listeners' reactions after hearing other music. Some audiences and critics have described music using the new media as weird, distant, dream-like, disembodied, and suggestive of outer space. Others protest that familiar, sharp rhythmic accents are not used in the same way as in the past and that the content of the pieces does not fall into the emotional patterns established by the classical and romantic schools and by most of the moderns. Exponents of electronic music in the United States include Edgard Varese and Louis and Beebe Barron. Varese anticipated later developments when he made his experiments and wrote his compositions in the 1920's. His music demonstrates some of the electronic principles underlying the German experiments. He combines these with mathematical acoustical organizations of his own and chooses sounds from any source useful for his artistic purpose. He uses the tape recorder to realize his aims.

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His composition "Deserts" for tape recorder and orchestra was first performed at the Concert de l'Orchestre National under the direction of Hermann Scherchen on Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, December 2, 1954. Ian Hugo's motion picture, The Bells of Atlantis, was provided with a musical setting by Louis and Beebe Barron and was first performed at the Venice Film Festival in the autumn of 1952. Others who have produced tape music in the United States include John Cage and Tom Scott. John Cage adhered closely to the aims of Musique Concrète but deviated when, in his selections and arrangements of materials, he was guided by a philosophy of chance, Oriental in its origin. In the field of science RCA Victor has produced a sound synthesizer, the practical use of which remains to be proved. The French group has devised a system of notation which uses letters, numbers, rhythm patterns, and other symbols instead of pitch notes. This system has been followed by John Cage and others. Luening and Ussachevsky have used greatly modified musical notation clarified by verbal directions, some numbers, and other non-musical symbols. The German group has developed a system of notation based on frequencies and ratios. In addition to the Radiodiffusion Française and the Northwest German Radio, the radio stations in Milan, Rome, the British Broadcasting Corporation in London, the Stockholm Radio, and Radio Basel have broadcast compositions in the various media. In the United States the works of Luening and Ussachevsky have been broadcast over the Columbia Broadcasting System, the National Broadcasting System, and the Association of Educational Broadcasters. Local stations in Louisville, Los Angeles,

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New York, and elsewhere have also carried their works. The same composers have appeared on N.B.C. Television several times to demonstrate the media, and their compositions were used in connection with dramas on C.B.S. Studio One and on N.B.C. "Wide, Wide World." A recording of "Rhapsodic Variations" by Luening and Ussachevsky was issued by Columbia Records as part of the Louisville Series in April, 1955, and recordings and tapes of the solo compositions of the same composers were issued by Innovations, Gene Brack Enterprises in March, 1955. Tapes of the French and German experiments and works can sometimes be procured directly from the two foreign radio stations if they are to be used for noncommercial purposes. So far as is known there are no European disc recordings. RECENT COMPOSITIONS, 1953-1955 Louis and Beebe Barron, "Miramagic" (score for motion picture); first performance: Cinema Sixteen, New York, 1953. Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, "Incantation" (solo composition), for Leopold Stokowski; first performance: on Twentieth Century Music, Columbia Broadcasting System, New York, October 25, 1953. Pierre Schaeffer, "Orpheus" (opera-ballet, concrète); first performance: Donauschingen Festival, 1953. , "Mascarade" (score for motion picture). , "Symphonie pour un Homme Seul" (in ten movements). Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, "Rhapsodic Variations for Tape Recorder and Orchestra, for the

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Louisville Orchestra; first performance: Louisville, Kentucky, March 20, 1954. Recording issued by Columbia Records, Louisville Series, April, 1955. Tom Scott, Scene, for American Mime Theatre; first performance: Westport, Connecticut, August 16, 1954. John Cage, "William's Mix" (with eight loudspeakers); first performance: Donauschingen Festival, 1954. Louis and Beebe Barron, "The Legend" ( accompaniment for pantomime); for American Mime Theatre; first performance: Westport, Connecticut, August 16, 1954Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, "Of Identity" (accompaniment for pantomime); for American Mime Theatre; first performance; Westport, Connecticut, August 16, 1954. , "A Poem of Cycles and Bells," for Alfred Wallenstein; first performance: Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Los Angeles, November 18, 1954. Edgard Varèse, "Deserts," first performance: Concert de l'Orchestre National on Radiodiffusion-Television Française, Paris, December 2, 1954. Louis and Beebe Barron, "Jazz of Lights" (score for motion picture); first performance: Young Men's Hebrew Association, New York, 1954, and again at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

HENRY

MOORE

In discussing Henry Moore's sculpture, Rudolf Arnheim makes the interesting observation that . . . "the cavities and holes assume the character of positive, though empty bulges, cylinders, cones. In fact it seems not even correct to call them empty. Their inside looks eculiarly substantial, as though space ad acquired semisolidity. The hollow containers seem filled with air puddles."

E

K I N G AND QUEEN

Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me its best setting and complement is nature. I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in—or on —the most beautiful building I know. When I began to make sculptures thirty years ago, it was very necessary to fight for the doctrine of truth to material (the need for direct carving, for respecting the particular character of each material, and so on). So at that time many of us made a fetish of it. I still think this is important, but it should not be a criterion of the value of the work—otherwise a snowman made by a child would have to be praised at the expense of a Rodin or a Bernini. Rigid adherence to the doctrine (of truth to material) results in domination of the sculptor by the ma-

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terial. The sculptor ought to be the master of his material —only, not a cruel master. I think that the most alive painting and sculpture from now on will go more humanist, though at present there are more abstract artists than ever (there is a natural time lag in the work of the majority, who are following earlier experimental artists). In my opinion, long and intense study of the human figure is the necessary foundation for a sculptor's schooling. The human figure is most complex and subtle, and its form and construction are difficult to grasp: this makes it the most exciting form for study and comprehension. A moderate ability to draw will pass muster in a landscape or a tree, but even the untrained eye is more critical of the humanfigure—becauseit is ourselves.

Can you tell us something about the conception of the "King and Queen"? The idea for the "King and Queen" was conceived by me with no particular setting in mind but with just my general feelings about sculpture in the open air. The first cast of the sculpture was purchased by the city of Antwerp and placed in the outdoor sculpture museum at Middleheim Park. A year or so later Mr. Keswick decided to buy the final cast of it for his estate at Glenkiln. Were the figures modeled in clay over armature? No. Thefigureswere built up directly in plaster. Is the rock base natural, or was it partly or wholly built? There is a natural outcrop of rock. The site is a natural bump on the high ground with outcrop of rock and grass, which is now mown short by sheep and rabbits

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grazing. The actual base is partly built of large stones from nearby, in order to make a level platform for the "King and Queen." Who selected the site? You, Mr. Keswick, or the two of you together? W. J. Keswick, inspired by Henry Moore, selected the site. How long did it take to select the site once the idea of sculpture had come up? The "King and Queen" was tried in two other sites before coming to rest in the present one. This process took at least nine months. Mr. Keswick spends most of his time at Glenkiln, when not shooting, selecting sites for sculpture on the property. Are there more sculptures on the estate than the two you sent? Sculptures on the estate are: "Standing Figure," by Henry Moore "King and Queen," by Henry Moore "The Visitation," by Epstein "Madame Renoir," by Renoir There are other smaller works, including a small Rodin. Are there plans for more sculpture? Nothing is planned. But, as and if Mr. Keswick has the means (which he is very doubtful) he hopes to go on with the idea of creating a large moorland "gallery" for sculpture in 3,000 acres of ground. Can the two pieces of sculpture done by you be seen from each other? No, they are not visible one from the other. How far apart are they? They are far apart. Not in sight of each other. Half a

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mile apart—or more. They possess their environment. The whole point is that they should not appear as a jumbled collection. Is the "King and Queen" visible from some room of the owner's house? The figures are not visible from any room of the owner's house. They are placed up on wild moorland and are quite alone. Possibly too much alone. How much walking distance between first seeing the "King and Queen" and reaching them? From half a mile to one mile distance walking across the hill or along the hill roads—ten minutes or so, walking time. Do they look in the direction of a specific object, house, hill, or lake? They look out on the hills and over Glenkiln Loch. The "King and Queen" have a magnificent view over the Loch looking Out toward England over the border fifty miles away. In making and placing "King and Queen," did you consider the changing light and shadows cast by the sun? Yes. They face south and slightly west. What is the reason for what from the photographs seems a differentiation of treatment (in terms of naturalism) between the Kings hand—particularly noticeable in the rear view—and his face? Perhaps the "clue" to the group is the King's head, which is a combination of a crown, beard, and face symbolizing a mixture of primitive kingship and a kind of animal, Pan-like quality. The King is more relaxed and assured in pose than the Queen, who is more upright and consciously queenly. When I came to do the hands and feet of the figures they gave me the chance

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to express my ideas further by making them more realistic—to bring out the contrast between human grace and the concept of power in primitive kingship. From a letter from the sculptor to Ernest Mündt.

ERNEST

MÜNDT

Ernest Mundt, born and educated in Germany, lives today in San Francisco where for several years he was director of the California School of Fine Arts. He studied architecture at Berlin and, after taking his degree, traveled extensively in Europe and in the Near East. Baroque art and architecture have always interested him and he is presently engaged in research on the subject. Mundt's creative work in architecture, ceramics, and sculpture is straightforward and unadorned. In recent years most of his sculptures have been abstractions in bent copper, brass, and steel tubing.

SCULPTURE FOR A PUBLIC BUILDING

San Miguel is a new elementary school in San Francisco. The neighborhood, in the midst of several more recently developed areas of neat tract houses, comprises many vacant lots as well as small business establishments. The prevailing architecture is the kind that invaded the West in the 1920's; heavy tile on false-front roofs, over-sized ceramics on inaccessible balconies, and baroque entrances belittling the modest homes behind the stucco. In this setting, uncomfortably suggestive of both emptiness and congestion, rises San Miguel School. Precise, rectangular slabs of white concrete enclose unbroken expanses of glass and turquoise mosaic contrasted, in other parts of

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the complex structure, with intricately textured surfaces that seem woven out of red brick and tile. This is functional architecture, warm and intimate and developed with love and understanding for the children who come here to learn and to play. In recent years, the city of San Francisco has budgeted a sum to be used for the embellishment of public buildings by painters and sculptors—a victory for art won through the cooperation of artists and architects with the help of citizens who were both art- and public-minded. This new practice applied to the San Miguel School. In his preliminary drawings for the school building, the architect indicated two places on plain walls where, as an integral part of the plan, sculpture was to complement his design. The Board of Education accepted these plans, and the City Art Commission approved the project after taking special notice of the inclusion of sculpture. At this stage it was no more than a rectangle, a scribble, a word on a blueprint, an idea in the architect's mind. His contract empowered him to choose a sculptor, to work out with him the idea, and to have him execute the work once it had been passed: structurally by the city architect, and aesthetically by the Art Commission. According to his understanding of the contract, the architect thought that the Board of Education, officially at least, was no longer concerned with this particular part of the whole. When the architect invited me to see his plans and develop my own ideas, he was already acquainted with my sculpture. Shown the almost dematerialized structure he was planning, reminiscent in its lightness of a painting by Mondrian, I felt that the architect had called on me because my own work is also not massive, but resembles

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a light pencil drawing translated in space by thin rods df copper, plastic, or steel that delineate volume without filling it. Our first meeting was a meeting of minds. The architect and I soon agreed that what his building needed was not sculpture in the traditional sense of solid stone deeply carved, but a light, happy gesture consummating the meaning of the structure—I should say now, in retrospect and somewhat flippantly, like a flower in the lapel or a bow on a gift package. I began my work by studying the architect's intentions more closely, and soon confirmed my first impression that the delicate surface of his concrete shell would not tolerate any heavy form of a similar material partly covering the wall or—worse—growing out of it like a blister. I saw that the building demanded a contrasting material, light in weight, almost transparent—something free of the static solidity that would hinder the rhythmic flow of a design that seemed to me to be linear by necessity. Perhaps the idea of a butterfly landing on a leaf then occurred to me; in any event I suddenly saw a self-contained form made from a free-flowing, shiny, tubular material touching the wall only at the few points necessary for support. I concentrated on the wall dominating the playground, and a few pieces of light, pliable wire quickly gave me a sketch of an involuted form with a double interplay of advance and retreat, rest and flight that, in principle, seemed what I wanted. Elaborating this sketch, however, I found my eye constantly arrested by what seemed a knot, a crossing of wires that, like a short circuit, stopped the free flow of the polarized space enveloping the metallic line. The end of this vexation came when, after some

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contemplation, I suddenly recognized that there were two separate circuits of movement instead of merely one. Cutting the wires and forming two closed forms that intertwined but never touched gave me the basic configuration of the sculpture: a duality of play and counterplay that needed only refinement and adjustment of its movements to become equally significant whether seen from below, from the side, or from the front.

The sculpture for the other wall, facing the street near the school entrance, evolved spontaneously from the first one. I was so engrossed with the symbolism of playful activity in the sculpture facing the playground that, thinking of the children entering the school, I saw the sculpture straighten itself out to a more dignified form—as youngsters do when adults appeal to their more civilized behavior.

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Technical problems and questions of size now settled, the architect approved two scale models of the designs to be executed in steel pipe brightly porcelain-enameled— one in turquoise and the other in brick red, to respond by contrast to their respective setting. I submitted specifications for the details of execution, and the architect, after sending them to the city architect for transmittal to the Art Commission for its approval, went on vacation.

The material never reached the Art Commission. Instead, it appeared on the agenda of the Board of Education. I was unaware of this development, and was not present at the public meeting when the sculptures for San Miguel came up for discussion. It must have been an unusual meeting with mixed embarrassment and hilarity, and enlivened by puns on passing and passing out (laughter), and "No, No's" from the audience. The commotion was such that the newspapers considered it front-

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page news (with pictures). The reporting was on a gleeful level: "When Board members saw models, they laughed and asked 'Whatzit?' This is bound to become a popular game in San Francisco," or: "Mundt's 'Spaghetti' Stumps the Board." The Board's lack of understanding should be blamed, to some extent, on inadequate presentation. The architect had had no reason to assume a group of laymen would sit in judgment on the designs, because the Board of Education, as he understood it, was not supposed to be involved. Consequently, the members of the Board of Education were not shown any realistic perspectives such as architects would usually prepare for the occasion. All the Board saw was a tray-sized piece of plywood—probably held horizontally, with some writhing, pencil-sized "things" on it. Of course the Board could have endorsed the recommendations of the architect who had been commissioned by the same Board to design the school and who, having had sculpture in mind, should have known what he wanted. But this the Board could not bring itself to do. Instead, the sculptures were referred to the Art Commission for "reaction." The fun had been enjoyed, the press had commented—and now laymen and professional art groups began to write letters. Some of these letters must be quoted at some length to convey their proper significance. Please, if we are to have sculpture or painting on the San Miguel School, have real ones, not a bundle of crooked wire. The condition of the world is too confused already; we further confuse the minds of our children by making them look at embellishments which only a twisted mind could call cultural?

The president of a local society of artists said: . . . We feel that anything so esoteric as this 'sculpture' completely ignores the people who are asked to pay for it. One might

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as well argue about the aesthetics of a pretzel. {'ust owly pretzel goes well with beer. . . .

At least the

A letter from New York read in part: . . . as a member of the National . . . Society who has been very active in trying to maintain the standards of beauty, integrity, and craftsmansriip which have been attained through the centuries by the world's most gifted sculptors, I feel also that as a patriotic American, anxious to maintain the highest heritage of culture for our children, a protest from the East Coast is due. Quite frankly, these twisted pipes suggest nothing more rhythmic than debris from a junk pile . . . it in no way expresses the tremendous achievements of our age, . . . for this period has been the triumph of exact science and precision with research developed to a point undreamed of by former generations—and every serious sculptor has . . . a right to resent such imposture . . .

One writer said that a work of art "cannot be 'peculiar,' but ought to possess uniqueness . . ." It must offer 1) Potential contribution to moral fibre and stability, and, 2) Educational value, . . . An essential for the development of sound moral fibre is the growth of an abiding conviction that we dp not get something for nothing. The gadgetry may have been more cheaply salvaged from an automobile wreck . . . We have contributed to cynicism and juvenile delinquency. [The letter closes with a quotation from Emerson: "though we travel the world over to find die beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."]

Another, bolstering his argument with Dante's dictum —"The highest in sculpture . . . is not to try to mold things beautifully but to mold beautiful things truly" —warned the secretary of the Board that the sort of thing which Mr. Mundt offers—acceptable to certain self-designated art authorities, is purely experiment, and it is not accepted by certain other art groups who have equal right to judgment over such matters. If your Board accepts this work, you are taking sides.

Finally, a woman suggested that the sculptor be asked to submit to a lie-detector test, because "this abstract and 'so-called' modern art is one of the most vicious rackets that has ever secured a 'foothold' in America,"

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The public's reaction gave the Board's attitude a resonance that some of its members regretted, as became apparent later. It also must have hardened their decision never to accept these sculptures. After a few weeks, not having heard from the Art Commission and allegedly interpreting this silence as a negative comment, the Board withdrew its request and rejected the sculptures outright —perhaps fearing, as one newspaper critic intimates, that the Art Commission might recommend acceptance. To reconsider would not only have meant "loss of face," it might also have threatened (according to one observer) the success of a new school-bond issue then in preparation. "Squandering the taxpayers' money on frills" was an accusation not to be taken lightly by a group that depended on votes, particularly when its members were convinced that parents and children would not appreciate these "frills" any more than the Board itself did. The architect learned all this to his dismay when he tried to repair the harm done to his project. Legally, he could have insisted on the terms of his contract and sued for damages. But he also learned that such action would never give him the sculpture he wanted, because the Board, controlling the purse strings, could not be forced to buy what it did not want. In the accepted plans for the school, the sculpture had been too undefined for the Board to be held to the original general approval. Since the Board could not be expected to change its opinion as a group, its individual members were consulted and exposed to an educational effort that involved explanations, drawings, and photographs of similar decoration on buildings in other states and countries. These efforts were received with sympathy and even gratitude. There were intimations that this kind of sculpture might

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be acceptable if only it meant something: a mobile with suspended tennis rackets or other sports equipment, or a grille that illustrated Pythagoras' theorem. The submitted sculptures were clearly beyond reclaim. But the architect and I were encouraged to try again. Ideas were not easily forthcoming this time. My imagination was not arrested by a number of possibilities: other interpretations of the architect's intent, other materials, even illustrative subject; matter, maps, children, the letters of the school's name. The rejected models had been so refined in relation to the building plans, and the concentration on them had so solidly anchored their image in my mind, that I could think of no alternative that would not fall short of perfection. At that time, however, the scaffolding came off the walls of San Miguel, and a visit to the site produced impressions that had not been available from the blueprints. The wall facing the playground stood athwart a street, rejecting its approach so implacably that the gesture was felt for several city blocks. Standing slightly to one side of the axis of the vista, allowing a glimpse of the long glass-and-mosaic front around its corner, this wall seemed to demand that the self-contained form of the sculpture first designed for it be opened to counteract the implications of a dead-end street (which the building did not in fact create) and to lead in a more conciliatory gesture along the wall, somehow implying a movement around its edge. The wall near the school entrance surprised me with the intimacy of its setting when compared to the unforeseen monumentality of the playground wall, which faced north and never was softened by the play of sunlight. Separated from the sidewalk by only a few feet of lawn, the

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entrance wall engaged the visitor as soon as he turned into the street from a busy avenue and led him uninterruptedly to a sudden ending where the view, gliding off along a short, finely proportioned covered walk, came to rest on the old core of the school complex—an unassuming piece of colonial architecture characterized by Spanish detail and a quick-stepping row of tall, narrow windows enriched by the slanting pattern of shadows cast by their profiles. The sculpture I had designed for this side did not meet all the requirements the setting demanded, nor did it make full use of its possibilities. Needed was a form sufficiently full and vigorous in its side aspect to keep the view from running off the wall as soon as the eye had been caught by its expanse. The sculpture also must be a form that offered enough visual variations and surprises to maintain the visitor's interest until he was face to face with its frontal view and ready to enter the school through the covered walk. Finally, the sculpture, through the scale and pattern of its design, must link together the new building and the old one, so different in its plan. Seeing a stick and the shadow it cast against the bright wall, I suddenly realized that the fulfillment of these varied functions, to which I did not want to sacrifice the material lightness I had considered so important, could be realized with the assistance of the sun. From a floating, open piece of sculpture, the sun would trace on the wall a contrapuntal system of shadows, extending over the entire wall at sunrise, compacting it into the sculpture at noon, and later releasing it toward the other end of the building. Encouraged by these new observations, I remodeled the sculpture for the north wall on a larger scale. The

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rounded upward movements of its right arm turned outward and extended into horizontal fingers that, from one direction, seemed to point from the main body of the sculptural form to the open spaces beyond its reach and beyond the confines of the wall. From the opposite direction they seemed to gather in the energies culminating in the upsurge of movement that, returning into itself, was to form the focal point of the long vista down the street without losing animation for the playground area at its feet.

An entirely new idea developed for the south wall. A series of rhythmically related, irregular rectangles, suggested yet not fully defined by a continuous band of metal, wove in and out of their basic plane, touched the ground with a few corners and sloped away freely at others. Seen from the side, this configuration gave an impression of massive yet pulsating solidity. Seen from the front, with the wide band of metal showing only its thin edge, it gave the impression of a delicate filigree. A spotlight attached to the model confirmed the possibilities of this idea. Earlier I had used cast shadows in photographs, to

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help define the side view of a sculpture seen from the front, but here for the first time I worked ®ut a composition that used shapes and shadows as integral parts of the total form. (Illustrated in the plate section.) At the same time, the architect was preparing for all possible arguments that might be raised against official acceptance of the new designs. We substituted steel "tubing" for steel "pipe," a word the connotations of which seemed to have cheapened the original project. We replaced with "plastic lacquer" the former "baked enamel," which, as had been pointed out, might be irreparably damaged by boys with stones. We prepared realistic drawings of the buildings with the sculptures in position. Most important of all, we decided what the sculptures were meant to represent. Since "Playful Activity" had been so obviously insufficient earlier, a more concrete image needed to be substituted. We decided on "The Beach" and "The City," indications of which could easily be read into the compositions—rolling surf in the one, and overlapping silhouettes of houses in the other. The location of the school's neighborhood—halfway between the ocean and the house-crowned hills of downtown San Francisco —gave these titles, in my opinion, additional plausibility. During the preparation of this material, one interesting detail came to light. I had sketched several deep perspectives, showing the blocks of houses framing San Miguel and its sculptures, because this total view had been part of my idea. But the architect decided to isolate the school from its surroundings in this presentation. The residents of the neighborhood, I learned, had so strenuously objected to his plans for the school—which, with its abnegation of the Spanish style, seemed to reduce the value

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of their homes—that he did not wish to rub salt into their wounds by presenting the contrast in a picture and thus perhaps increase criticism of the sculpture. Newspaper reporters were informed of the symbolism of the new project and at the same time reassured that sculptural decorations did not always need to be objective representations. There were many balconies, grilles, and balustrades for which no literal descriptions, were required; rather, their abstract, geometric patterns were accepted as part of an architectural idea. Finally, the Board of Education agreed to consult the Art Commission before deciding on the acceptability of the new work. When the models and drawings were submitted to the Board, they were referred without discussion to the Art Commission. This seemed propitious, but a new difficulty developed. According to its by-laws, the Art Commission was entitled to approve or disapprove a project only after it had been officially accepted, in principle at least, by the city department under whose jurisdiction it was to be placed. The Art Commission informed the Board of this legal difficulty, and suggested an informal joint meeting with its members to clarify the matter. The Board rejected this interpretation of the Art Commission's function, and insisted on a written opinion. Thus, the matter rested for some time. Efforts to break the deadlock were complicated by the fact that the Board of Education was not part of the city government, with its regular channels for negotiation and appeal to higher authority, but a legally independent body deriving its powers from the State. In the meantime, agitation in the community continued. The project was discussed over the radio by a panel of experts, who agreed that my sculpture was not "sculpture in the true sense of the word" but

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"fabricated designs." A woman waving an umbrella threatened destruction of a sculpture of mine then on public exhibit; she told the attendant that "that kind of thing" would never be allowed on a public building. Eventually, some members of the Board called on the Visual Arts Committee of the Art Commission to persuade the Committee to give an official, though only advisory, opinion. The contractor had been complaining that construction work at the school was being held up by the lack of decision. In the interest of art, the committee agreed to make an exception to the rules. After studying the material submitted, the committee recommended acceptance of the rectilinear design and rejection of the curvilinear one, arguing that "the sense of movement, implicit in its shape, is not as satisfactory a solution as is given by the static sense of containment expressed in the rectangular design." The Art Commission's letter of transmittal stated that "the rectilinear design . . . is of such character that it will provide a very good looking and architecturally suitable enhancement of the severe and otherwise unrelieved blank end wall of the building." The Board of Education did not follow this official advice. Perhaps the members were conscious of a new letter from the same society of artists warning them not to fall into "the error of the councillors in 'The Emperor's New Clothes.'" According to a newspaper report, the Board "unanimously approved a motion . . . that the design . . . be turned down. The Board further added that it wanted to 'go on record against any sculptural embellishment of San Miguel.' Prior to the Board's action Mrs. . . . suggested that trees and vines be placed against the exterior walls of the school where Mundt's wire designs were to have been placed. Of wire sculpture in general, Mrs. . . . said, 'I think it's dreadful.'

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Another letter to the editor read: . . . Surely, especially in matters of modern art, the comparatively uneducated members of the Board of Education would be much better judges than the inevitably staid and conventional members of the Commission. [Perhaps the writer echoed the Board's feelings when he continued:] . . . We suspect that [Mundt's designs] are composed of far too much . . . distraction; after all, the ideal school building should be composed of a podium for a stimulating teacher and four plain walls entirely devoid of distraction. There should, of course, be an exit door for the teacher. This functional design could even apply to art schools

But this was not the end. New letters appeared in the press regretting the Board's action, and the Northern Chapter of the American Institute of Architects formally protested the Board's rejection of the proposed sculptural art, charging the Board with having flagrantly ignored the decision of the Art Commission and having "impugned the reputation and the judgment of architect and artist without reasonable cause," an accusation that the secretary of the Board very promptly denied. A few days later one newspaper reported: Boards Clash on Jurisdiction. The City's Art Commission and the Board of Education have locked horns again over the delicate issue of what, by whom, if anything, should embellish the walls of the new San Miguel Elementary School. The Art Commission likes [the abstract adornment], and the Board of Education doesn't. But the disagreement has spread out now to include the respective powers of the Board and Commission. . . . The arbiters of the Art Commission said they were still determined to arbitrate.

The "arbiters" seemed to have no success with arbitration, possibly because the Board, having asked only for advice, was not bound to accept it; but it soon returned to a fundamental point, and made it stick. The Art Commission insisted it had approved the original plans for the school project with the explicit inclusion of sculpture, so sculpture there must be. The Board reversed itself, gave

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up its horticultural substitution, and agreed to accept any sculpture that a jury, proposed by the architect, would choose from among the entries of an open competition to be announced for this purpose. The architect agreed to this compromise, feeling that to have some reasonably good sculpture would be better than to have no sculpture at all—if not for his particular project, then at least for the cause of art on public buildings. For the open competition I submitted new designs, elaborating the idea of the rectilinear design toward a decorative grille using the initials of San Miguel for a motif. The winning designs were two groups of children executed in cast concrete: one group is backed by the Western hemisphere, the other is holding the Stars and Stripes. Looking back over the chain of events, trying to find the point where our—the architect's and my own—plans miscarried, as well as to discover the reason for the whole disturbance, I wonder whether it does not come down to a question of semantics—the definition of sculpture. If the whole affair had not been focused on the new idea of setting aside special funds for "artistic embellishments," the architect, conceivably, could have included my sculpture in his plans, as he had done with door knobs and lighting fixtures, and no question would have been asked. The decorations would have fallen under the heading of architecture, where abstract form is accepted as a matter of course—perhaps because in architecture, form is not seen by itself but only as a wrapper for practical needs, or because architects have a professional standing that laymen do not challenge. (The Board came close to seeing things in this light one day when one of its members asked whether the whole issue could not be left in the

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hands of the architect without involving the Board in matters of detail.) Art, however, falls into a different category. Not decorative art, because, like architecture, decorative art also adorns objects of practical use. But fine art must tell a story. Western civilization has rarely deviated from the idea that painting and sculpture are publicly acceptable only as vehicles for an illusionistic but nevertheless identifiable image of physical reality, no matter how concerned the connoisseur or the specialist may be with the art in them, or how much the individual beholder may be affected by the meaning that goes beyond representation. It is here that I have failed. I had not submitted a sculptural image of visual reality. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps in contemporary art reality is developing a new imagery that awaits acceptance.

JEAN

RENOIR

Among Renoir's films best known to American audiences are Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, The Southerner, The Golden Coach, and French Cancan. In the last picture he has captured on film some of the lyrical feeling for the Moulin-Rouge which his father, Auguste Renoir, evoked in "Bal du Moulin de la Galette," and in other paintings in the milieu of Montmartre.

INTERVIEW WITH JEAN RENOIR One day by chance I read in the New Yorker a review of a book by an English author, a woman named Burner Godden; the name of the book was The River. The review said something to the effect that for its language, at any rate, it was one of the best novels written in English in the last fifty years, but added that the book would probably not earn a cent in royalties. That was enough to make me buy the book. I went at once to a bookstore, bought it and read it. After reading it, I was convinced that here was first-class material for a film. In order to do everything in the proper way, I wrote to Mrs. Godden through my agents, and she granted me an option on her book. I also wrote to her that I thought her subject was a wonderful idea for a great motion picture but that it was not a motion picture story, and she would have to rewrite it with me, changing the events and perhaps even

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the characters but keeping to the general idea which had possibilities for a great film. She very kindly agreed with me, and I found myself with an option on The River. Then I went to see a great many people, but I was absolutely unable to interest anyone in my project. A film on India, in the minds of many people, suggests cavalry charges, tiger hunts, elephants, maharajas. They said to me: "No. But if you'll put in some maharajas and a few tiger hunts, it would make a beautiful story. People who go to see a picture about India want that sort of thing, and it seems to us that you must give the public at least part of what it wants." Nevertheless, I wasn't discouraged, and this is what happened. A man who was not in films at all wanted to make pictures and had found in India a group to finance him; what he lacked was a knowledge of film making, a subject, and a director. He was on good terms with the Indian government and one day he happened to be talking with, I think, a niece of Pandit Nehru, who said to him: "You know it's not easy for a Westerner to make a film in India. If you use an Indian subject you're likely to fall on your face because you'll say all sorts of wrong things. If I were you, I'd start with a picture that includes some Western characters; that will allow a director who is sympathetic to India to establish a sort of bridge between India and the Western audience." And this lady added: "For me, the English author who best knows India today is Rumer Godden. She wasn't born in India but she went there when she was a few months old, she grew up there, speaks several Indian languages and knows the country as if it were her own." The man was much impressed. He inquired about The River, wishing to buy the rights, and came to me because of the option. He said

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to me: "What would you think of making The River together?" I said: "Yes, but on one condition, that you offer me a trip to India so that I can really find out whether I can make something interesting there." So I made my first trip to India and I was completely convinced, and came away with a great love for the country. I wrote the script with Rumer Godden, we rewrote it on the scene while we were shooting, and I made The River. Then Rumer Godden was with you . . . ? She was with me before we started to shoot and she watched two thirds of the shooting. She helped me not only in putting together the script and in rewriting the story, of which she's the author as much as I am, but in many other ways. For example, we made use of many amateurs—the principal character, Harriet, was a little English girl whom we found in a school in Calcutta. I should say here that the professional actors in The River were of enormous help with the amateurs. The amateurs had to be trained—I don't believe in amateurism entirely, I don't believe in chance, I believe that everything is learned. The villa shown in the picture was our headquarters, our source of electricity, our everything. There we established a little school of acting as well as a dancing school, because Rumer had been a dancing teacher. The young actors and actresses had to be initiated in a craft that was new to them. She helped me in giving a professional air to their interpretation.

I was much preoccupied with the question of music. I was fortunate in making many friends in India, especially young cinema people, technicians, young journalists, and actors who introduced me to groups in Calcutta

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interested in the arts, and especially to musical circles where I was able to meet some very fine musicians. Also I had an extraordinary advisor on all that concerns India —I mean Radha, the dancer who plays the role of the half-caste in The River, although she is a pure Brahman. Obviously as a dancer, she was well acquainted with music, especially with that of the south, for she comes from Madras. And so, partly from my friends in Calcutta and partly from Radha, I was able to gain a little understanding of the music and to hear a great deal of it. With the help of these people I was able to record some exceptional Indian music, very classical, very pure, and not at all affected by a Western spirit. In Indian films the music is often very bad; the Indian producers think they're being popular in using European instruments, and often enough, in renouncing the old Indian scale. You know that the Indian scale—like that of European music of the Middle Ages, before the great revolutions of Bach and of the seventeenth-century Italians—had from forty to seventy notes or even more. It was infinite. Indian music is still like that, and many Indian producers don't hesitate to translate the ancient airs on the modern scale and on modern instruments, which naturally give more brilliance but, I think, a very artificial brilliance. It all ends by sounding like fake Mexican music and that isn't very good. So I avoided that. But all the same the music is quite special and I wondered what reception it would have from a European or American audience. In what way did you adapt the novel? I can tell you the big difference in three words: we decided to make the film much more Indian. In the novel, which is a marvel, India comes in through the walls of

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the house; one never goes outside. We decided to go beyond the walls. The role of the Indian half-caste does not exist in the novel; she was an invention, and we invented her so that we could bring more of India into the action of the story. She symbolizes to some extent the principal theme of the film, the relation between two civilizations . . . Absolutely. It is symbolized in her. It exists in the novel but in a very different way—in the thousand little relations between Harriet, the heroine of the film and the novel, and the various servants of the house. It is in the people who come to the house and in their little conversations but not in anything as definite as a half-caste. In a thousand little ways India penetrates the walls of the house—all by means of Harriet. Harriet, like Rumer Godden in real life (because Harriet is Rumer Godden, it's an autobiography, and that can be seen in the film), Harriet is greatly influenced by India . . . Which leads us to question you on another aspect of the film, the understanding by Westerners of Indian religion and philosophy . . . That's also in the novel, and in other novels by Rumer . . . Nowadays you can divide the Westerners in India into two categories: those who think that everything Hindu, Indian, or Mohammedan is greatly inferior, that it's not worth the trouble to learn about, and who eventually build for themselves in India a life that is purely English or purely French or purely Greek, although the Greeks mix more easily; but, on the other hand, there are those who let themselves be absorbed, and these, too, are extremely numerous. In the film we have something that is neither one nor the other but it also exists. It's clear that

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this English family remains entirely English but with the knowledge that a Hindu civilization exists, which is the position of many English people. The film is in some sense a Western meditation on the East . . . Exactly. It would have been very difficult, in my first contact with India, to do anything else. I would have risked going completely wrong. I had to look at India with Western eyes if I didn't want to risk making gross errors. Was it by your contact with India that you became conscious of the theme of "acceptance" which shows more and more clearly in your films? Not entirely. The theme is characteristic of me; it was only developed in India. The great word of the Hindu religion—let's not say religion because it isn't exactly a religion, let's say Hindu philosophy or metaphysics—is that the world is one. We are a part of it, we are a part of the world in the same way that a tree is or your recording machine. This does not mean an acceptance in the Mohammedan manner, a kind of fatalism. The one can act. But, nevertheless, you cannot undo what has been done or, in other words, there is no remission of sins. To remit a sin, in their eyes, is exactly like saying that you can stick your arm back on after cutting it off. This is impressive enough; it is a sort of comprehension by the senses of everything that has happened. It is a religion that bears witness, but it is not a fatalistic one; it is a kind of metaphysics. Moreover, I should say that Rumer and I were greatly influenced by Radha. Radha is a remarkable person; she has a Master's degree in Sanskrit and can read Sanskrit as she reads English and several Indian languages. She is

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a very well educated girl, from a good family, and that means a great deal in India where scholarship is a tradition. But that's not to say that, morally or physically, she is superior to people of other castes. Moreover, the idea of the superiority of one caste over another doesn't exist in India; what does exist is the idea of specialization. In reality the system of Hindu castes is a little like an hereditary system of syndicates. You belong to a syndicate—but you have belonged to it for four thousand years, there is the difference, and you can escape only by death arid resurrection, but deaths and resurrections are many. Radha, with her knowledge of her own country, of her own religion, and her knowledge of the West, was a collaborator of extraordinary perception and intelligence. Indeed, I'd like to use her again as an actress. You may have noticed at the beginning of the film, when she returns from school wearing a little European costume, didn't she make you think of the best Russian actresses? She made me think of a young Nazimova. One could make some extraordinary things with her, but this business is a difficult one, it takes a long time, the beginning of a new project takes years, time passes, and, after all, film making is not a convenient business, circumstances may never permit me to return to India. There's another thing, too. The River did very well, and now everyone is shooting pictures in India. It's full of producers and directors from every country. Did you plan the script very precisely? No, by common agreement we left it quite loose during the shooting. I shot in such a way that in the editing I could either tell a story, so to speak, in keeping with the tone of the book, or I could throw out the story form and have no narration at all. When the previews showed a

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favorable reaction to the documentary aspects (let's say the poetic aspect), I decided to use a form of partial narration that allowed me to show some of the purely poetic parts without having to make them dependent on a dramatic action or on a line of dialogue. But the construction of the script was quite loose and flexible, permitting either solution. While I was shooting the poetic parts I thought I could use them just as they were, but I wasn't sure, and if I hadn't succeeded I would have had to shorten them greatly and integrate them with the action scenes. Thus I shot the film with great caution, but this didn't apply to the scenes themselves; there I was never playing it safe. You know that the normal practice in film making all over the world, whether it be in Paris or in Hollywood, is what they call "taking precautions, protecting yourself." In the army when you sweep out the barracks you want to have a written order to be sure that it isn't a joke. The way to do it in the film is to make several shots of each scene in such a way that you can lengthen or shorten it; in that sense I wasn't any more careful in The River than in other films. Many of my scenes were shot from one set-up, and we had to use them as they were, they couldn't be cut. No, my only concern was in having enough footage, so that I could use, within the general framework of the film, either a style with or without narration. There's another aspect of The River, the metaphoric or symbolic aspect, that I cant define clearly; but many images, for example, the repetition of the three boats coming together, make you think of a meaning other than the obvious one. It's clear that not only I but most of my collaborators, and especially the Hindu collaborators, had our minds tuned to this sort of thing and that solutions of this kind

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constantly came to mind, so, you might say it was deliberate. It was not calculated, but it was deliberate in the sense that we were conditioned to this kind of thinking and were quite ready to make use of this kind of solution. Thus the sequence of the stairs . . . That was wholly intentional, and for a very good reason: this sequence is a work of montage. I did it at the end, holding mostfirmlyto my principles. Because we must not forget something that I repeat all the time, and that's that you discover the content of a film while you are shooting it. You start out with a firm set of ideas but you find that each little step, when the subject is worth doing, is a discovery, and that this discovery leads to others, in such a way that the subject . . . This is perhaps the greatest thing about film making and the thing that gives certain films so much importance in the history of cinematography, in the history of modern culture and civilization. The method of film making with its technical impedimenta, makes for a means of expression that is slow (you don't shoot a film fast), and this battle against technical obstacles forces you, more than in other crafts, to discover and to rediscover. You benefit from the kind of forced halts that would cause a writer to sustain himself artificially. The stops, delays, have a favorable effect on the quality of films, and the one we're talking about was well nourished by them. To begin with I had a great stroke of luck: we had to start on a certain date but the soundproofing blimps for the cameras hadn't arrived. However, in order that the producer wouldn't be in a difficult position, I had to shoot some things without sound. It was a delay but it was an extremely favorable one because what I shot had to be purely documentary. Before beginning the actual scenes of the film, I was forced by this

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documentary shooting into close contact with the country, and that did me a lot of good. The Golden Coach was also an old project . . . ? Yes, but The Golden Coach that was made has no relation to that very old project; I first conceived it in the days of silent pictures, and I saw it as a kind of big adventure story. Now, my ideas are quite different, and when I was asked to make the picture, I accepted because I was very much interested by Magnani. I was convinced, having seen her in many films and in spite of her customary appearance, in spite of her reputation as a romantic, even a naturalistic, actress—I was convinced that I might be able to do something classical with her. That idea guided me. What replaced India for me, in The Golden Coach, was my admiration for classical Italy, the Italy before Verdi and romanticism. And this is expressed in the film by the music of Vivaldi.. . . That's right. My first try was not with Vivaldi; I owe Vivaldi to a friend. You know, when you work in a foreign country, you must let yourself be completely absorbed by it, otherwise you haven't a chance of making anything that'sright.And the person who did for The Golden Coach what Radha did in India was a director named Giulio Macchi, who was my assistant in making the film; Macchi is not only intelligent but cultured and he needled me about Vivaldi. I hadn't yet started a shooting script or even a story line; I had only some vague treatments. I then bought every Vivaldi record that I could find. At the Panaria Company there was a composer who had charge of thefilmmusic for the company, and I asked him to help

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me get better acquainted with Vivaldi. You know, Vivaldi is still unknown, manuscripts of his are discovered every day; he wrote an enormous amount. This musician, just with a piano, showed me many things that I didn't know, and it's obvious that Vivaldi's influence was decisive in the writing of the final script. But what precisely did the music of Vivaldi give you? Just this, the entire style of the film: something that's not dramatic, that's not buffoonery, that's not burlesque, a kind of irony that I tried to approach as much as possible with the light manner that you find, for example, in Goldoni. It is, in general, what you tried to do before in The Rules of The Game, only in quite a different way, I suppose, since many admirers of that picture have been disconcerted by The Golden Coach . . . Listen, we go on discovering things all our life, fortunately; and I think I rediscovered, little by little while growing old, something that I once knew unconsciously. And that thanks to Italy . . . The history of Italy is extremely important. Note that Italy, in my mind, is the active symbol of a certain kind of civilization; the older I grow, the more I am conscious of belonging to that civilization. I have told you my great interest, my great love for India, but that doesn't keep me from belonging to another world. Italy happens to have been the transmitter of the elements of our own civilization. No matter where you go, no matter to what capital city, you will find, for example, that even though London is an essentially English city, nevertheless most of its monuments were built by Italian architects. The Italians have influenced our entire civilization; if we eat with forks, that's because the Medicis brought forks to France; if we

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have chairs of a certain form, it's because we imitated the Florentines at a certain period. Despite saying all this I don't think of Italians as having such importance merely as Italians. They have, I think, an enormous importance because of their geographical position (their country is the site of the Roman Empire, the great concentrator of the elements of our civilization) which has given them all the facilities for assembling the parts of that civilization and then for dispersing them. So, the more I go there the more I am convinced of the importance of Italy in the history of our civilization, and the more I wish occasionally to assimilate the Italian spirit in order to do some things of that kind. In our calling, especially, in die theater, Italians have been often enough our masters; Moliere was greatly influenced by Italian comedy, Marivaux began by writing for the Italians, our classical theater—until the romantic period when German influence became predominant—was influenced by Italy. There you have my great reason for being attracted to Italy. It is, if you wish, the acceptance of what I believe to be a fact, and the fact is: whether we wish it or not, we belong to a general civilization which began in Greece, was continued by Rome, and spread over the entire West while passing through the Christian revolution, that's to say, the Jewish influence. And you wished, first of all, to make a "civilized' film? Yes, I wished to make a civilized film. Thank you for finding the word. I might not have found it myself, but you have hit it precisely. A man has many things in his head, but he can't alwaysfindwords for them. This feeling for civilization was, actually, my real motive in making The Golden Coach. Which explains the sharpness of every detail, so that the

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decoration of a coat or the design on the back of a chair may be as important to the general effect as any turn in the plot . . . Yes, that's clear enough. I think you have to proceed in that way if you want to produce a work that is classical. To draw attention artificially to certain elements, for example to the star, is a purely romantic idea. Even in painting and in design modern man is accustomed to romantic simplification and is lost before classical works, such as tapestries; he finds them confusing. In reality they're not confusing. In the classical spirit there's a feeling for equality that doesn't exist in the romantic. In spite of all the prefaces in which the romanticists proclaimed pretty much the contrary of what they did . . . As always. That's why you have to beware of theories that are too precise, because fate has a malicious way of making you contradict yourself, of letting you reach a goal that's quite the opposite of what you planned. This great contradiction is a very curious thing, and, moreover, it's expressed quite clearly in the writings of all religions, especially the Christian religion. Maxims like "the first shall be thé last" and the parables about riches, the poor being the rich, the little children being the most intelligent —these are not paiadoxes, they are truths. Our world is made up of contradictions, often of funny contradictions. That the mighty shall be fallen, for example. In the course of my life, which is not a long time in history, I have seen that happen four or five times. All through The Golden Coach there is something musical. Thus the rising sound of the violins seems to be repeated in the scrolls of the scenery, even in certain details of the costumes . . . -I will give you the same answer for The Coach that I

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gave you for The River. You try to improve yourself, you try to learn, you try to work constantly; in every stage of your career, you make discoveries. But the discoveries and the little things you have learned go into something like a storage battery, and the electricity that's released from the battery isn't always a conscious thing. So you try to have all this inside yourself and you make use of it with the hope that it will come when you need it. But it doesn't always come when you need it—that's the little drama of creative production. Very often all the things you have accumulated, all the things you have learned, come too late or too soon and not at the moment when you need them. On the other hand, if you work in too orderly a fashion, with notes, filing slips, and classified reminders, and if you try to use these mechanically, arbitrarily, I think you remove yourself from life. I have an enormous distrust of information and theories. We must have them but we must also try to approach each subject as if we know nothing at all, as if we are quite new, and as if the subject is quite unknown. If we don't approach the subject with a certain amount of freshness, we're not alive but dead. Furthermore, we need to enjoy ourselves while we're making films. That's very important. I had a good time making The Coach; it was painful and it was difficult, but I enjoyed myself enormously. At what in particular? Well, at the continual discovery of the classical Italian spirit among the modern Italians. I enjoyed my association with the Italians because I was constantly finding exceptional people, people who still keep a classical freshness, if I can put it that way—especially in their way of approaching the problems of life with a kind of simplicity, in a very direct way, although that is hidden under an

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apparent complexity. But it's only apparent; the feelings, when you reach them, are very direct and simple. Which is again a kind of classicism . . . It is also classicism. A piece of intricate lace, but in this lace little by little you learn to see a design that's quite clear. There's an American critic who doesn't care much for my film; he pays me fine compliments but he also reproaches me in a rather amusing way. He says: "It's a little like a box that you open and inside you find another box, you open that and there's another box, you open that and there's another box." Now I was pleased by this comment The critic thought he was pointing out a defect and that a film shouldn't be made like that; but for me, this game of boxes is very interesting. Here's a question that 1 want to ask about every film: How much was improvised? The film seems to be constructed in a subtle and complex way; wasn't that precisely planned in the scriptP Yes, the framework was very precise. What was improvised was the dialogue. Or, if you prefer, the scenes and their order were planned in advance. But the manner of accomplishing the purpose of the scene and thus the final composition of the scene was sometimes changed. It took place in the same setting and with the same characters, but often the words and the reactions of the characters were different. I think you spend the mornings on rehearsals of the scenes to be shot in the afternoons, so that you can make up your mind about the staging and the breakdown of the scenes after seeing the actual performance of the actors. Yes, that's true. The so-called French system of starting work at noon is excellent, in my opinion, for quality.

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Primarily, because the actors, technicians, and other workers like it that way. They arrive more relaxed, they're able to spend the morning at home with their families, and they can eat dinner a little late but still at home. That's very good, for, then, the director has time to go to the set in the morning or at least to concentrate on some of his problems before being caught up in the whirlwind of shooting. And you shot The Coach in this mannerP Yes, but I've done the same thing with all my films. You rehearse the actors dramatically, without worrying about the camera . . . Oh, I go further than that, you know. I've great faith in the following method of rehearsal. The actors are asked to speak their lines without playing them, without thinking, if that's possible, until they have read the text several times. Then when they begin to have ideas about the text or to have reactions to it, it's to a text that they know and not to one that perhaps they don't yet understand, because you don't really understand a phrase until you have repeated it several times. And I even believe that the manner of playing should be discovered by the actors. And when they have discovered it, I ask them to restrain themselves, not to play the role completely at first, to feel their way, to go warily, and especially to add the gestures only at the last minute, to be in complete possession of the meaning of the scenes before allowing themselves to move an ashtray or pick up a pencil or light a cigarette. I ask them not to fake any natural motions but to conduct themselves in such a way that the discovery of exterior elements comes after the discovery of the interior elements, and not vice versa. In any case, I'm completely

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opposed to the method used by many directors, who say: "Watch me, I'm going to play the scene; now do it the way I did." I don't think that's good, because I am not the one who plays the scene; the actor is. The actor must discover the scene himself, he must apply his own personality to it, and not mine. In this film you sought a dramatic climate that is shared by the cinema and the theater . . . Yes. Because the time and the subject are so theatrical, it seemed to me that the best way to express the time and do justice to the subject was to subordinate my own style to the theatrical style. Is that why The Golden Coach is constructed like a play in three acts? Yes, that's so. In order to bring about the desired confusion between the theater and life, I asked those actors who were playing roles in actual life to play with a little exaggeration, in order to give a theatrical tone that would enable me to establish the confusion. Thus there's no fourth wall; everything is seen from in front. Yes. Note that in certain scenes, in the beginning, I used the fourth wall, but little by little I abandoned it and shot the film almost entirely as though it were seen on a stage, with the camera in the place of the audience. It happened that I used the fourth wall, but not in the same scene; each scene was conceived as seen from one side. Moreover, I should say that the longer I work, the more I work in that way, in all my films. In The Rules of the Game the method's already clear; there's no fourth wall. But in The Rules of the Game there was a continual

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panning of the camera . . . It seems that you use stationary shots more and more and don't cross the stage line. Thus in The Woman on the Beach . . . That's right, but The Woman on the Beach is a film in which the fourth wall plays a large role, for the reasons that I have given you. It is a film with reverse shots. In principle, The Golden Coach has no reaction shots; when it does, it's simply because we have to get close to the actors from time to time, so the audience can understand what they have on their minds. But this is a simple practical necessity and not a style. The style consists in placing the camera in front of a scene and shooting it. You have spoken of classicism, but The Coach is equally striking for its modern character. Didn't you try for a certain kind of modernism, by way of classicism? Yes, that's quite right. Only, if the result is to be modern in a good sense, I believe that one should not try deliberately to be modern. I have told you that I believe in the old masters, in the good examples. I believe that it helps enormously to see films that one admires and that are good. My method of working is quite disciplined, and if you begin by saying, "I'm going to bowl them over, I am going to be modern," then I think that you'll end by not being modern at all. We can be modern and we want to be, because after all we must make our little contribution to the art of our times, but we can succeed in this only by hiding ourselves modestly behind the old masters. Then, in spite of ourselves, and if we are gifted that way, we'll be modern while not wishing to be. Thus you try more for the juxtaposition of the elements than for simply linking them . . . Yes, because that's convenient. I am always guided, you know, by the practical and the convenient. After all, the

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idea is to tell a story, and so wefindthe most practical way to tell it. The story is a springboard for you, not an end in itself . . . It's not an end in itself, absolutely not; but it is a means. And the simplest is the most effective? I think so . . . It's clear that every time I find myself with the problem of a scene to shoot, after having rehearsed it well . . . For example, I never begin with the camera angle, I begin with the scene. I rehearse it and then, together with the cameraman, I decide on the angle. We say: "Well, the scene could be shot like this." There's another thing that I don't do, and that's to break up a scene into various shots and reverse shots, ignoring the total effect—I mean to shoot the whole scene in long shot and then to pick up closer shots and, finally, to make a montage of all these component parts. It seems to me that each part of a scene has one angle and not two. Actually, the cutting of myfilms,except for special cases like The River, is a very simple matter. It consists simply in splicing together one after the other the strips of film that were shot one after the other. You shoot chronologically? Yes, at least the scenes. And often the entire film? Wasn't The Rules of the Game shot . . . Yes, almost chronologically. You can't do that entirely because there are exteriors, and then there are also contracts with the actors, those who are available or not available. But as much as possible, I like to shoot chronologically. And The Coach? It was mostly chronological but not entirely.

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There is another question that we should like to ask you, a question about color. What, in your opinion, is the best way to use it? First of all, it seems to me that color in itself has no importance at all; some subjects should be treated in colors, others are better in black and white. Finally, I think that here also, as in other matters, the technique has to be the servant of the story. The intention is to tell a story and if it helps to tell it in color, then tell it in color. Now, you ask how we should use color? I believe we must use it without putting too much faith in technical means. In their present state of development, the different systems are all very good. Technicolor in London is exceptionally good, but that is brought about largely by the quality of their laboratories; they have teams of experienced people who have worked together on color for several years. Here again it's not the machine or the invention that brings about the technical superiority, it's the quality of the men. Now it's clear that we have a good color technique, and when you have a good technique, I think the only way to work at it is to try to see clearly. Something has happened during the last fifty years; to a great extent men have lost the use of their senses that's an effect of what we call progress; it's really quite a normal thing— you turn a switch and there's light, you push a button and there's fire in the gas furnace. Our contact with nature is now made through so many intermediaries that we hardly know any longer what natural phenomena feel like. You can say that people do not see very much nowadays. Everyone, for example, imagines that the French flag is red, white, and blue. Actually, the French flag is no longer red, white, and blue. The blue—I don't know why, prob-

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ably because the manufacturers who make the blue stuff found that a true blue cost too much—the blue is now violet. The blue is about the color of your jacket, it's like my shirt, it's kind of violet, it's not blue at all, it has nothing to do with blue. Nevertheless, everyone is convinced that it is blue. So, if you photograph a French flag, you see a sort of violet on the screen and people are astonished. That's simply because they've never looked. I think that the way to work with color is first of all to open your eyes, to look; and it's easy to see whether something corresponds with what you want on the screen. In other words, there's hardly any translation of color on the screen, there's just photography. It's a question of putting before the camera what you want to have on the screen, and that's all. Doubtless you know that many different theories about color are being discussed in critical circles. "When painters begin to meddle in it . . ." If a painter or any other plastically gifted artist set himself to work in color film, I'm convinced that he'd do very well with it. He wouldn't use any of his painter's training to obtain good results in technicolor, but he'd certainly be helped by the fact that his work has given him an education of the eye. That's indispensable. It's in this sense that painters can perhaps be of help in color films, because they can bring the collaboration of a man with an educated eye—but not at all in applying their knowledge as painters, rather in applying the exercises that they've had to do with their eyes in order to learn to paint. Then you don't believe in chemical or optical approaches to the problems of color? Absolutely not, I'm absolutely against them. I know they exist and sometimes give good results, but just now

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I'm talking about my own way of working. Personally, I'm too great an egoist to trust the final result of my work to a chemist; I much prefer to trust my own senses and those of my co-workers; I prefer to have confidence in my eyes and in those of the cameraman, rather than in chemical formulas; I think it is more convenient and, once again, more practical. Then you prefer to stick to the principle of actual color . . . That's it. You know there's some faking in black and white, much more than in color. In black and white the contrasts, for example, sometimes give entirely unexpected results. There's an element of surprise that doesn't exist in color. Black and white also gives the director and the cameraman numerous chances to fake. An actor may not do his scene very well, he's a little weak in the expression of certain feelings, so you give him some unnatural lighting, with exaggerated contrasts—on one side absolute blacks, on the other you mask out half his face —and he seems to emerge from a kind of shadow. Immediately, the man becomes very strong, and the scene may be quite good. In color, you have to renounce these tricks. More and more it becomes a matter of being honest —just that. By preference you look for pure colors? That's a question of taste; I like simple colors. In Bengal nature has fewer colors. Compare a tree on the Avenue Frochot with a tropical tree. The latter has fewer greens, only two or three, and that's very convenient for color film. Look at this room for example. It wouldn't be bad in color but there's one thing that wouldn't go, and that's the chestnut shade of the fireplace and this table. But the gray of the door and the walls and the white curtains are

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very easy things to photograph in color. This armchair would be frightful, it would be abominable, but of course it's abominable in real life. Fundamentally, I think all this is very simple: you merely put in front of the camera the things that give you pleasure. You like to use bright colors in the foreground against a rather neutral background . . . Yes, but I think you can do just the opposite. In nature, for example, you can do just that with the greens; you can use a strong background. I have some things like that in The River. We shot in a banana field with very little light, expressly because of the green, which furnished a background of tremendous strength. And the interiors are done in very soft shades . . . Yes, as it is in that part of the world. Down there interiors are often in the shade and very soft. But in The River I didn't begin to render a full impression of the colors of Bengal; there's still much to be done, especially with houses. And you don't worry at all about the laws of color relationship . . . No, I believe that our business is photography. If you stand before a scene and say to yourself: "I am going to be Rubens or Matisse," you might as well put your finger in your eye. No, it's photography, neither more nor less. I think that plastic preoccupations have nothing to do with our craft. I think, for example, that the dresses used in The River have no pictorial value at all; they do have a value on the screen, a photographic value, or rather a cinematographic value. Because we deal with photography—with cinematography—and that's a thing apart. And since color is a realistic medium, it forces the film maker to be realistic . . .

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I am convinced of it. We live in a time when we are all more or less intellectual before we are sensual, and intellectual influences determine our beliefs and our choices. For example, there is a Dubonnet poster in front of the café where I go for a drink and this makes me say instinctively to the waiter: "A Dubonnet." Our senses no longer have anything to do with it; it's a mechanism of the mind and not of the palate. It's that way with everything and it's extremely dangerous. I think one of the functions of the artist is to try to reëstablish a direct contact between man and nature. "Entretien avec Jean Renoir" [Part II], by Jacques Riverte and François Truffaut, originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma, Vol. VI, No. 35 (May, 1954), 14-30. Translated by C.-G. Marsac.

GEORGE

RICKEY

Although b o m in South Bend, Indiana, Rickey lived in Scotland, England, and the Continent from his fifth year until he returned to the United States twenty years later. He took his degree in modern history from Oxford but studied art at the Ruskin School and the Académie Lhote in Paris. In retrospect Rickey comments: "I don't even lmow whether I was, in Scotland, an expatriate from America or whether I am now an expatriate from Europe." There is a happy quality in Rickey's works, a lithe infectiousness which at first belies the precision-tooling and delicate engineering which give momentum to his imaginative constructions.

KINETIC SCULPTURE

I intended to become an engineer as my father had been. Though brought up in Scotland, I expected to follow in his footsteps at M.I.T. But a surfeit of calculus, conic sections, and advanced algebra from an overeager mathematics teacher in my moorland boarding school revolted me just at the time I was beginning to discover poetry, drama, and music. Another teacher, who became the dominant influence of my adolescence, showed me the power of words, and sketched monumental destinies and human values in the study of history. I determined at seventeen to become a history teacher, dropped all the

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sciences from my curriculum, which the British Public School system permitted, and for the next five years committed myself to the history of mediaeval Europe, the English constitution, economics, and the American Revolution. This, too, was an overdose. A year and a half before finishing at Oxford, I heard about special courses for undergraduates in art—a subject the University scrupulously ignored—at the Ruskin School of Drawing in the Ashmolean Museum across the street from my college. In my family we had all drawn and painted, but only because we could, not because there was any future in it. Why not develop this, I thought, in an amateur way, so that I could, while a teacher, make really nice drawings, which I assumed they could teach me how to do, in a style combining Botticelli and Augustus John? By now I had worked out a set of values with art at the top, teaching—especially the humanities—very high, the sciences rather low, and commerce and material success at the very bottom. I had read Malthus and had determined to contribute something to society beyond replacing my parents. I was a pushover for my teachers in the Ruskin School who, after a few months of my shaded casts, labored nudes, and muddy impasto, very improperly urged me to study in Paris (a magical and romantic thought absolutely beyond my most extended range of less than a year before) and to think seriously of committing myself to painting as a life work. I had just enough prudence left to finish my degree and to put out feelers for a teaching job. The August after I had graduated and had survived a painful discussion with my family, I crossed the Channel and rented a little hotel room in Montparnasse. The first real artist I saw was Bill Hayter. He was stooping

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over an enormous canvas flat on the floor slopping some paint onto what seemed to be a meaningless abstraction. It was quite a shock after the Ruskin School. A year and many other shocks later, with my savings exhausted, I got a job teaching history at Groton School. They were very nice about my art and for three years I tried to do right by them in history. I was able, for a while, to earn a living there, with time to paint, and could postpone deciding whether to be an "artist" or not. That was twenty-five years ago. Twenty years later, after diverse jobs, travel, war service, and occasional crises, I was in exactly the same situation. The decision was no longer necessary; partly because I had been on the road to becoming whatever I was all the time, and partly because in America there isn't really a status of "artist." Where so many painters have recently become teachers I was a teacher who had become painter. II I will skip from these early decisions to a time in 1945 at the Laredo, Texas, Airforce Base where, as a staff sergeant, I was working for a group of civilian psychologists on a research project. I had proved quick at the mechanical, electrical, and electronic intricacies of the computers used with the remote-controlled gun turrets on B-29 bombers. During the previous three years in the army I had found that the aptitudes scorned at seventeen were still present. I loved the mechanical problems and the shopwork. I made a series of freehand pen drawings shaded in a sort of late Renaissance style which showed the movement of the cams, motors, differentials, and prisms in various gunsights and hydraulic turrets. These

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were later circulated around the Air Corps on filmstrips. One day I made a crude mobile in the shop. During my hours off from servos, selsyns, and axis-converters I was painting mostly portraits, but I kept the shop separate from the studio. I worked on a gunner "tracking-rateerror-indicator." It might eventually have indicated something if peace hadn't intervened and turned this machine into a beautiful, refined, precisely ordered, very expensive piece of junk. Now, to the present. I have not given up drawing and painting and probably never shall. I am more a teacher than ever, of art now, not history, and have advanced in the profession. I spend all the time I can on constructions of steel, brass, copper, and aluminum which are made to move like machines, and to do absolutely nothing useful. However, like other images, they may mean something as well as fill the eye. It is not that I have been "beating swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks." That would be the most useful undertaking man ever embarked upon and I would be all for it. I am not converting one kind of machine into another or obsolete war machines from the junk pile into art, though I admire very much what artists like David Smith do with "found objects." I like finding them myself and keeping them around. They are full of suggestion and poetry and nostalgia; our junk piles probably summarize our age as concisely as the kitchen midden did the cave man's. I am making brand new models which I hope will not obsolesce as quickly as the torque converters, high compression heads, and wraparound panoramas that crowd one another off the assembly line and all of us off the highway. I find a crankshaft a witty and perverse obelisk for the common man; a

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marker both for his destiny and his way there, summoning, in one turn, strength and lightness, steel and aluminum, pressure and vacuum, fuel and vapor, clear air and lightning, with cunning eccentricity and balanced purpose as it spirals toward the junk heap. I am not in the crankshaft business but there are other machines which are as useless and meaningful; I have made a few of these. Ill Here is how I have gone about it; what follows is not apologia but explanation. First, I attempted to use subject matter without describing it. I tried to rescue shape, contour, space, and the illusion of movement from the mysterious shadows and tactile glamour of the painted surface on which images were projected flatly and fixed forever. I stuck shapes of different materials, sometimes painted, on wires and hung the wires into what were essentially chains with levers attached to the links, balanced the linkage by adjusting the length of each lever and the weight on the end of it against the accumulated systems dangling from the other end. 4

i

For the most successful of these, I cut shapes freely from window glass and hung them from balanced linkage in a system which tinkled like a Chinese wind bell.

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The mystery of this kind of mobile soon evaporated. The apparent magic of balancing was easy if one began at the bottom of the system and worked up, piece by piece, weighing the latest component against the total assembly (now fixed and of known mass) up to that point.

Limits soon appeared. Each component was literally chained to the next. The links permitted movement of only 70°-80° between one wire and the next. This allowed a vertebrate sinuosity (similar to a reptile's, which has similar structure), and a monotonous if fascinating motion. The tracery of the wires was appealing. But it was essentially a drawing suggesting surface, even if a flexible one. The sum of the shapes and spaces was still close to painting, even if released somewhat from the picture plane. I still conceived it as a flat, slightly varying system of spots and angles in the vertical plane. Everything depended from some higher point so that the whole tended

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to have the depressive effect of an easily read system where gravity played too dominant a role. Next, I tried to combat this with systems which, while dependent, appeared to go uphill. Once read they were as gravitybound as others.

My first break from these essentially profile and passive forms was a figure piece in the form of an articulated cross which I called "Prophet." A series of "Leaning Towers" followed in which each dependent component rose vertically above the one supporting it so that the whole bluntly reversed the expected effect of gravity. The last of the dependent links appeared at the top. It did not hang but stood on the summit of a tripod. The main member appeared inverted and was so balanced as to be barely stable. This was achieved by distributing the stabilizing weights of the system remotely from and slightly below the point of support. I drilled a small detent at the very end of a properly directed wire which, owing to the weights around it, sat securely on the point of a tripod, permitting complete rotation. It could sway in any direction up to 30° or so from the vertical with a very dynamic bounce-back. Owing to the small margin of stability, the "Leaning Towers" were sensitive to drafts. The range of movement as well as the visual effect of these pieces were very different from the wire and sur-

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face systems which have become commonplace as "mobiles." I was attempting to establish an expressive kind of order, which all art has, and to challenge the eye and the mind with a mechanical device which employed, yet appeared to defy, gravity. Its moving parts were arranged for mechanical as well as visual reasons—in short a machine. Other machines followed. The next step was to try to set pivot on top of balanced pivot while seeming untrammeled rotation of the parts in a rising sequence. At first the problem appeared insoluble. However, it required merely that the center of gravity of the sum of the series, starting at the top, be below the pivot which supported it—a condition really quite easy to satisfy and one which allows a wide range of possible visual orders—much easier than it is for an acrobat to stand on the hands of an acrobat who stands on the shoulders of a tight-rope

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walker, which is a truly unstable system and one which cannot pivot. I had not begun to exhaust the possibilities of this simple device before I realized that the pivot itself was a limiting factor just because it did require careful placing of weights and this control of the center of gravity. So I trapped the top of an unstable component above its pivot point with a second pivot, as a tight-rope walker would if he could reach up and touch the ceiling: a slight, almost frictionless constraint there would preserve the posture.

Here was the kind of pivoting already used in a toy gyroscope or a watch. Components mounted thus would be restricted, like the balance wheel in a watch, to rotation in a plane (something most old-fashioned mobiles really did anyway, though not my "Leaning Towers") but would not be limited to chains (catenaries) positioned by

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gravity. Now I could mix orbits and churn space. It might not be worth doing, but that could be said of everything an artist does. Perhaps art is only of value as art if it is not worth doing and is done well. SUPPORTS

VERTICAL

\

Ease of movement was important to me. I planned to use as driving force the drafts in a room from the heating system, or from the breezes of summer with the windows open, or from the disturbance of the air as someone walked by. This required minimal friction in the pivots. I tried to achieve this by sharpening them to a gently rounded point checked under magnification with my jeweler's loop, allowing as little play as possible in their bearings. The axes of rotation were kept precisely vertical in order to reduce drag at the upper bearing. Each component was pivoted at its point of balance. This last may seem superfluous in a two-pivot system. However, if one end of a component is heavier and the axis of rotation is not vertical (either from faulty construction or a floor not

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level) the heavy end will swing down to the lowest point and it may take more than a light draft to move it up again. Even with the axis vertical a heavy end creates side pressure at the upper bearing and increases friction. Such unbalance, carefully avoided in the first machines, became the essential quality in later ones, where eccentric rotors were used as motive power for a whole series. These would start in motion as soon as their axis of rotation tilted from the vertical; this was made possible by mounting the whole machine on a pendulum, as in the "Hommage a Mondrian."

LOW FRICTION

MODERATE FRICTION H I G H STABILITY

HIGH FRICTION

VERY H I G H

MODERATE

FRICTION

FRICTION

Out of these thoughts came a series of "little machines" with pivots within pivots within pivots. I made them move with interpenetrating orbits. I cut the shapes and placed the bearings so that rotations overlapped and parts missed one another by a hair or passed through gates which they just cleared. These narrow escapes provided a dynamic

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equivalent to the tensions suggested in painting and sculpture by such devices as the hand of Adam and God on the Sistine ceiling or the cropping of a face down the middle by Degas or the opposing points in a Lipchitz. Such tight spots enrich novels, drama, and the dance much more forcefully than they can be suggested in painting. As a child on the Clyde river steamers I had watched by the hour the gleaming connecting rods in the engine room leap boldly at the catwalk above and just miss it as they turned the great cranks and drove the paddles. I built into my little machines a hint of the recurrent dramatic crises which occur in all engines. As I made these machines, all with carefully adjusted vertical axes, I wondered about the horizontal axis and about combinations of vertical and horizontal. It presented difficulties: to pivot like a weather vane is easy, but to suspend like a bicycle wheel is hard because the slightest overweight of one end of a part will drop it to the bottom of its travel whence no breeze is likely to lift it. Even the natural sag of the rods which hold the parts together will create a heavy side and consequent immobility. The pivot points will he against the sloping sides of their seats creating more friction. I could drill the rods and use shafts without taper but this would produce very high friction and poor response to light breezes and a tendency to force the rods apart, letting the pivots drop still further and thereby shifting the center of gravity. All these difficulties can be dealt with, especially if the scale is large. A combination of both axes, with the consequent infinite variety of mingling orbits, requires spherical concepts, and probably motive power other than the breeze. The drawing shows how rectangular forms pivoted for both horizontal and vertical movement require a spheri-

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cal space to move in. I did this first in the "Space Churn," which was cranked, and later in a whole series of machines employing concentric circles pivoted one within the next, as in the "Flag Waving Machine." Next I started exploring the possibilities of a series of concentric pivoted rings in which the outer circle turns on a vertical axis and is slightly unbalanced. The inner ones are mounted at progressive angles and are brought very near to balance. The motion which tilting initiates in the outer one is transmitted to the inner rings. They respond at random and often at higher speed than the outer ring. These shapes do not have to be rings—this is merely the minimal form (e.g., "Flag Waving Machine"). A corollary to the setting of parts in motion and transmission of motion from one part to another is the use of inertia to secure relative displacement of parts. For ex-

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ample in my "Hierarchy" the inner members are heavy and offer little surface to the breeze. The next level is lighter and offers more surface. When it rotates in response to breeze the inner parts hold to their original direction but describe an orbit, since their pivots and those of the next larger part are not in line. This relationship of a series of alternating (and hierarchical) active and passive parts lends itself to interesting developments mechanically and symbolically.

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Motive power, whether the air, a pendulum, the human hand, a motor, or the seismic effect of walking across a wooden floor, offers difficulties. Though the machines are mechanical devices, I feel they should move either from natural causes or from the intervention of the human will, not from motors. No mechanical doll has the appeal of a hand-operated marionette.

ROTORS HEAVY STARTS

HAVF SIDE

O

DRC

ROTATIO

Many of my machines are windblown but there is the series I have mentioned whose performance depends on oscillation about a horizontal axis arranged on the pendulum principle, usually with a relatively heavy weight on a short rod below and a much longer and lighter superstructure above. The two together are so proportioned that they have a slow period of oscillation (in one as slow as ten seconds) and are barely stable in the vertical position. These, balanced either on knife edges, or on a pair of

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points, are set in motion by a touch of the hand; sometimes in large ones through linkage designed to prevent too hard a shove. The shift from vertical inclines all the axes, the heavy ends of the rotors swing down and continue to rotate for some time, sometimes falling into step with the swing of the pendulum and speeding up, sometimes doing the opposite. The various parts rotate at different speeds and in random directions, permitting a rich visual effect.

In several sculptures recently I have tried to translate the horizontal rotary motion caused by a breeze into the vertical oscillation which will set in motion a series of slightly unbalanced rotors. This is the "Totem." Among its ingredients are two light but sizable vertical surfaces attached to the ends of a pivoted rod. These surfaces are

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themselves pivoted within the rotating frames so that they will offer unequal and changing surfaces to the varying breeze. The pivot is a little removed from the point of balance of the rod. When this is installed in a chassis, which hangs on a string so placed that the system is barely stable, it rocks the boat, so to speak, as the breeze turns it. The rocking motion shifts the axes and sets in motion various other components. A somewhat simpler example is "Seesaw and Carrousel," designed for the Belle Boas Memorial Library in the Baltimore Museum. An extremely sensitive response to gentle drafts resulted with the low friction of the knife edge and the large vanes set horizontally. The horizontal vanes were balanced so that they had a slight slope. Air currents acting on the broad surface produced relatively powerful lift or drop and vertical movement of the arm through a large arc.

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I used a variation of this as drive for a set of concentric pivoted rings in "Carrousel." Brightly colored segments of spheres, fastened to the rings, so that they were slightly

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out of balance, made random rotations in a vivid harlequin pattern when a draft moved the "Seesaw."

j

This last development from previous forms seemed to me to get my work over a hump. Except for the rather involved "Totem" and my hand-powered machines, all my sculpture (and, I think, everyone else's that involves movement) has been limited to rotations in the horizontal plane because of the difficulties explained on page 161. Now, I had a simple and delicate vertical response to horizontal impulses, and my work began to acquire a more fully four-dimensional quality. A series of "Harlequin Space Churns" driven in this manner followed. Another series of vertically pivoted vanes was used in a fleet of ships—brigs, barques, and frigates—with abstract sails and rigging. A hull, fashioned from a solid steel bar, served as the pendulum weight for the wire spars and sheet steel or brass sails (pivoted slightly off balance, of course) and was supported at bow and stern on a pair of points which balanced on another pair set transversely amidships.

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This is a variation of the gimbals used at sea for compasses, lanterns, and dining tables. Essentially a universal joint, it permitted the ship to pitch or roll. The points sit in little cups and are adjusted to make a barely stable system. A slight breeze rocks the boat in any direction; the displacement from vertical then sets the sails in motion. I used thin stainless steel or brass (down to 0.010 inches) for the sails and scored this very thin sheet in rectilinear patterns for stiffness and to make a light-dark relief pattern on the surfaces. Scoring on alternate sides keeps the sail close to a plane. Such pieces as these can be made in almost any scale. However, when the pendulum principle is present a change of scale causes a change of time: the larger the scale the slower the oscillations. I have made ships from eight inches to about eight feet high. There is another and

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subtler result of large scale that appears when the work is larger than the man who made it. This involves aesthetic matters and these I have, up to now, ignored. The foregoing is an exposition of technical means. The technical means, here, as in any art, offer the possibility of relationships. The artist decides what shall be related and what meaning or association or symbolism shall be suggested. The mechanical arrangements offer a fourdimensional canvas on which to compose. Shapes, proportions, spaces, inclinations of axis, orbits, the tensions, speed of rotations, the gamut of metals and colors and surface treatments are areas of choice, limited I admit. But the artist must always accept limits, imposed by his craft, his own capacities, and by his time and place, from which he cannot escape. As a schoolboy I had to write an essay on "Our possessions are our limitations"; I now find the converse more interesting; out of the limitations comes the most important possession of an artist, his style. IV With these details, I have tried to explain the explicable, which is only a fraction of what anyone does, artist or not. The "how" is more elusive, the "why" pure guesswork. The part of the documentation is easily and, I hope, clearly set down. It is transmissible knowledge. I have omitted motive, emotion, human values, self-expression, taste, significance, symbolism—in short, plot, style, form or content; I have omitted "art." This is just as well. I can now proceed with a light heart to talk about the rest, which will be subjective, unprecise, elliptical, metaphorical, mystical, obscure, and more interesting and valuable than the foregoing.

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As I found myself more committed to this métier (it still surprises me to find myself listed as a sculptor) I began to wonder where my machines fitted into the evolution of art. It was obvious that movement itself had been involved in the visual arts from the beginning, in the dances of every culture, in toys everywhere, in mobile masks in Alaska, in the "flying game" of the Aztecs, in the bullfight, in the leaps of acrobats and the swinging of censers, in the water pageants in the Grand Canal and the clock by San Marco, in sliding down bannisters, in skiing and skating, in cheering sections, baton-twirling, marching bands, and in the ball games themselves, in electric signs and formation flying, and now, after fifty years of so-called motion pictures, in a very sophisticated way in the UPA productions. I knew of Ducamp's bicycle wheel as the first "mobile" in 1913, and the exhibition, of the automobile as art at the Modern Museum in 1953, and the works of Calder, Max Bill, Gabo, Pevsner, Boccioni, Léger, and Mondrian in the generation between. This was context enough for my work. These visual adventures occurred in a wider popular context of roundthe-world-flight, instantaneous communication, X-ray vision, space travel, accelerator under every foot, shutter in every hand, mesons, neutrons, pro- and megatons on every atoll, psychiatrist's patter on every rooftop, and an economy where mass production makes cheaper and cheaper things that cost more and more and more to distribute. In such a mechanized environment a machine that is carefully designed to be useless echoes the whimper of many a cog: "What is the use?" My work has approached the limit of abstraction. Yet I recognize that most of the world's art has been "figura-

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tive" and is likely to continue to be. I like it that way. I doubt if there is a purely visual art, independent of association, despite the last generation's pressing of analogies with pure form in music. I was frankly surprised at the resurgence of abstract art in New York at the end of the War. I could not tell whether this was a delayed reaction to that phase of the School of Paris I had long thought dead and respectfully commemorated by exercises in the academies and by presentations of the sequence of styles in the museums. Or was it a belated discovery of Klee and Kandinsky? Or was it an actual resurrection? It has been a vigorous movement with gifted, knowing, and productive participants who have stood unawed by Paris, even though they forget (or perhaps because they do) that the canvas they paint on was stretched for them there a generation ago. These men find they cannot stay abstract forever and the "figurative" reappears on 57th Street just in time to move uptown to the new art district in the Seventies. I was ahead of them in not surrendering my interest in figurative art and now I will probably lag in my devotion to an apparently abstract form. I am still interested in making portrait drawings rather close to nature, showing character with a somewhat romantic interpretation. I find no inconsistency between this and drawing up a "Flag Waving Machine" in explicit mechanical detail and then building it into precise, kinetic existence. Though it represents nothing, a machine is not an abstraction. It lives and moves and has being in space. It is not the projection onto a surface that a painting must be. Part of the role of a painting is to struggle back, through illusion, toward the spatial world from which it was projected. One finds this straining out of the picture plane in every art of every

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time; it almost succeeded in the Renaissance. It is like man's paradoxical struggle to get back to the heaven whence he came. Sculpture has not been bothered by this dilemma of dimensions. It is significant that, except for cubism, the sculptor has always reflected the ideas of a new epoch before the painter has. Gabo says that the image need not be an "image of . . ." He is a sculptor. The painter cannot avoid dealing in suggestions of space and implying, even in the most abstract terms, a world of which his painting is a commemoration or illustration or map. A machine is not a projection of anything. The crankshaft exists in its own right; it is the image. It is many other things, too. The paradox of the machine is that the projection from it—the mechanical drawing or the blue print—exists before the machine does. The concreteness of machines is heartening. They do not depend on a rush of feeling or embellishment of surface or nervousness of execution or tragic renunciation of all that interferes with "process." Yet they can, without being "images of . . . evoke and suggest and comment. They can be figurative in the sense of suggesting living forms. They can suggest a range of poetic thoughts in addition to delight in the forms and movement themselves, just as the ballet does. I find myself unembarrassed by this double layer of expression: abstractness and a continuing interest in portraying the world I live in, especially people. If I were to live in another time I might be a portrait painter. I sometimes think that while making my machines I am waiting for the world to digest and assimilate modern art and prepare itself for an art that portrays, reveals, dramatizes, records, inspires, and even preaches deep values in human

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action without being decorative, "illustrative," photographic, didactic, sentimental, or academic. I should like to live in a world that could be described by artists without their feeling they were betraying themselves. I am convinced that in the end art is not for the artists, but for their fellow men, as it was for the cave painters, the Mochica potters, the Japanese printmakers and the Haida woodcarvers. Does the privacy of our art mean that we are in artistic hiding waiting for a better day? I can imagine a time when we will use what we have learned from abstract art and devote ourselves to painting nature according to our perception of it. I have just been listening to the striking of a bell. The measured sound is carried unevenly on a blustery November wind. In a moment of reverie I thought I was hearing again the distant call from a fourteenth-century church tower across an English countryside. Now I remember that it is just a locomotive in the freight yards downtown. But the sounds are uncannily alike. I must live with the locomotive and the freight yards. The bell on the great iron machine is sweet because of memories from a past time. I am lucky to be able to bracket it with the other bell ringing across the meadow from Iffley. I must live with one but I need not reject the other. I can make my abstract machines and still think of my Constable and my Corot. I want to live in my own time and make things as contemporary as the weather report. But I also want to enjoy my inheritance and whatever other riches travel or the camera may bring me. I will drill and bend and file and solder but I will think of the African maskmaker or the faces of Van der Weyden. I do not worry that I cannot choose to live in a place

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or an age where the artist's role is clear, where his service to society recognized, his skills defined, his techniques and message harmonized, and where the values he works with are so implicit that no word such as art need be invented to argue about them. As I get older I concern myself less with any imaginary "artist" status. I no longer know what it means or what it would be to achieve it. I doubt if anybody else knows either. Perhaps what I make is art. If not it is something else equally interesting to me. V I have no aesthetic creed—though I love surface and texture and the quality of paint and certain shapes, color combinations, and ways of drawing a line, these are not relevant to my purpose. I am not making beauty nor am I trying to make a contact print of a state of mind. My tools work either successfully or not at all. If a drill is the wrong size or a hole crooked or a soldered joint insecure I know it and can fix it. If a saw blade is dull I can change it for a better one. If I lack the skill to do something I want to do I know it, and I learn how to, or give up the idea. It is clear. It involves recognizable mastery over the tool and material. Who is "master" over paint or the drawn line? We use this term for painters but it is a mystical label. I know when I have finished a piece. I have a plan, drawn or not, and even if I keep altering the plan it always contains a concept of completion. For me the fragment is meaningless, the "emotive fragment" a joke. When the parts are shaped, the pivots sharpened and polished, the polychrome applied, the balance adjusted, I am through. There is nothing further to be done. But who knows when

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a painting is finished. One of the mysterious things to an art student is to be told halfway through a painting "It looks wonderful as it is. Don't give it another stroke or you'll ruin it." What's hard is that the student probably would ruin it (according to the current aesthetic) but wouldn't know it. His teacher knows it but can't say why. This uncertainty about completion remains in every modern artist. Among the "avant-garde" artists for whom "arrangement" is anathema, completion must be equally so; "process" would be interrupted by completion. Paintings do leave their studios; what anxiety and frustration must accompany such a surrender! I can be anxious about whether a machine will work but I know whether it has worked. I can enjoy completion. Finis coronat opus. My medium is so removed from nature and, really, from "art" that even the most unschooled public does not raise questions of verisimilitude. Imitation of nature would be so difficult in my métier and look so awful (the automaton with waving arms outside a gas station? ) that I am spared the whole question. If there is a hint of nature, as in my "Prophet," the idea of resemblance is so remote that the viewer often insists on the subject rather than showing impatience at the lack of it. Even when I suggest human involvement as in the "Flag Waving Machines," or imply figures as in "Cocktail Party," there is also a level of response (which I suppose is aesthetic whether I admit it or not) to delicacy of balance, complexity of movement, defiance of gravity, organization of shapes, periods of oscillation—to the so-called "design factors"—which is immediate and relatively effortless. If I did not aim beyond these factors it would be a meager expression and would deserve the comments I have made on abstract art. But I welcome this response

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to the abstract just the same. So does my dealer, who says she is glad to have a couple of my things around to break the ice and provide an excuse for conversation. VI There is not much that anyone can tell about himself. Every autobiography is an invention, and probably the more interesting for it. The invention may reveal more than the history. Artists, who spend a lifetime on their visual statement, tell less perhaps than others. Though I like to read the classics of painters' prose, such as the letters of Van Gogh, the journal of Delacroix, the notebooks of Leonardo, the correspondence and tales of Gauguin, they create as much mystery as they dispel. Cezanne, unshaken after fifty years as the keystone of the structure of modern art, wrote letters which sketch in something of the man but almost nothing of his massive art. Sometimes the artist, no matter how skilled a writer, does not describe what he thinks he does. Leonardo's instructions on how to paint a deluge become, as he writes, his own poem on the end of the world. But I would not join those who say that a painter should not write—that his work will say it all, that if he writes it he won't paint it, that if it can be said in words there is no need to say it in paint, that a good artist need not, or ought not to command language. I find this silly, confused, and defensive. I see no good reason why an artist should not be verbal or why a man with verbal gifts should not be a painter or sculptor. Many have been— indeed the list is so long that it is the exception for an artist not to be able to express himself well in words. For a time there was a comfortable legend that Van Gogh and

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Cezanne were uncouth and unlettered children of nature who were articulate only with the brush; they were, in fact, well read, keenly verbal, educated men. Today we are supposedly being battered by a wave of anti-intellectualism. This defensive attack started among artists long before it appeared in politics. It was expected to be axiomatic that art would flow from the innocent mind; that education and command of the mother tongue would somehow emasculate the artist; that a bohemianism of the mind was the artist's natural environment. If the artist were a teacher and talked about art it was likely he was not making it. It was a striking parallel to the "know-nothing" chauvinism of the last century which has reappeared in such virulence today. Ironically most of the anti-intellectual artists are intellectuals and very verbal. I have heard attacks on the "artist-teacher" in skillfully turned phrases by men who proved themselves very effective teachers. The fear of verbal expression is a sign that we have not quite come of age in the visual arts. Fear of words admits the power of them. What robust artist will stop painting because he talks? One might even be tempted to measure the strength of the artist, not by his verbal skill, but by his unconcern about its dangers. I know the contest in almost every college art department between defensive studio teachers and art historians. I doubt the effectiveness of teachers who will not talk. Every one of us started with language as his first expressive instrument. The least articulate of us has spent almost all his life using language to convey ideas and, no matter what his command of another medium, still employs language as his major instrument. He would do better to use it well than badly. Many artists have used it well.

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So, I don't think I have betrayed my art by talking about it. It has taken time. But I have not lost the ideas for more machines that I had when I sat down to write. Much of this account was thought out as I worked in the studio. The labor of writing often diverted my mind back to my machines; I will now go to work on them.

JEAN-PAUL

SARTRE

The tall, slender figures, which at first glance seem little more than armatures, have become a visual synonym for Alberto Giacometti. Fainting and drawing were the first media of expression for him and, since 1914, when he completed his first sculpture, Giacometti has worked in these art forms. Drawing helped him to bring to his sculpture the quality of real movement and not merely the illusion of movement. Giacometti's friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, here writes about the Swiss painter and sculptor.

THE PAINTINGS OF GIACOMETTI

"A number of nude women, seen at the Sphinx, I being seated at the back of the room. The distance separating us (the floor gleaming and apparently impassable in spite of my desire to cross it) impressed me as much as did the women" [from a letter to Matisse, November, 1950]. Result: four inaccessible figurines poised on a ground swell which is nothing but a vertical floor. He did them as he saw them, distant. Yet we have four spindling girls of a looming presence, rising from the ground and about to plunge on the painter all together, like the lid of a box. "I saw them often, particularly one evening in a little room, rue de l'Echaude, quite close and threatening." Distance, to his eyes, far from being an accident, is part of the inmost nature of the object. Those trollops at

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twenty meters—twenty impassable meters—he has caught forever in the light of his unrealizable desire. His workroom is an archipelago, a confusion of varying remotenesses. Over against the wall the Mother-Goddess sticks close as an obsession; if I withdraw she advances—she is nearest when I am farthest. This statuette at my feet is a passer-by glimpsed in the rear-view mirror of a car, just disappearing from sight. No matter how I approach, the figure keeps its distance. These solitudes rebuff the visitor with all the impassable length of a hall, a lawn, a clearing that he has not dared to cross; they testify to the strange paralysis that overtakes Giacometti at the sight of his fellow-man. Not that he is a misanthrope: this numbness is the effect of an astonishment mingled with dread, frequently with admiration, sometimes with respect. He is distant, so much is true; but, after all, man created distance, which has no meaning except in a human space; it separates Hero from Leander and Marathon from Athens but not one pebble from another. I came to understand what that meant one April evening in 1941. I had spent two months in a prison camp—which is to say in a sardine can—and had had the experience of absolute proximity: the frontier of my Lebensraum had been my skin: day and night I had felt against me the warmth of another shoulder or thigh. That didn't bother me: the others were still myself. That first evening, a stranger in my home town, not having got in touch with my former friends yet, I ventured into a café. At once I was afraid, or almost afraid. I couldn't understand how those squat, hulking buildings could contain such deserts. I was lost. The scattered customers seemed farther off than the stars; each one had the right to a large portion of bench, to a whole marble table, and to touch them I should have had

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to cross "the gleaming floor" which separated me from them. If they seemed inaccessible to me, those men so much at their ease, all aglow in their mantle of rarefied gas, that was because I no longer had the right to put my hand on their shoulder or thigh or to call them "dear old chap." I had rediscovered bourgeois society, had to learn all over again to live "at a respectful distance," and my sudden agoraphobia betrayed my vague regret for the unanimistic life from which I had just been weaned forever. So it is for Giacometti; with him distance is not a voluntary isolation, or even a withdrawal; it is exigency, ceremony, awareness of difficulties. It is the product—as he has said himself—of powers of attraction and forces of repulsion. If he cannot get over them, those few yards of gleaming floor which separate him from the nude women, that is because timidity or poverty nail him to his chair; but if he is conscious of the extent to which distance is untraversable, that is because he wishes to touch these luxurious morsels of flesh. He repudiates promiscuity, casual contact; but that is because he desires friendship, love. He dares not take because he is afraid of being taken. His figurines are solitary; but if you put them together in any way whatsoever their solitude unites them and they suddenly compose a little magic society. "Looking at the figures which, to clear the table, had been deposited in haphazard fashion on the floor, I noticed that they made up two groups which seemed to correspond to what I was looking for. I mounted the two groups on bases without the slightest change. . . ." [From a letter to Matisse, November, 1950.] An exhibition of Giacometti is a whole race of people. He has sculptured men crossing a square without seeing one another; they meet, irremediably alone, and yet they are together;

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they are about to lose one another forever but they would not lose one another if they had not sought one another. He has defined his universe better than I could when he wrote of one of his groups that it reminded him of a "corner of a forest watched over for a period of years, where the trees, bare-trunked and slender, always looked like people halted in their movement and speaking with one another." And what is this encircling distance, then —distance which only the spoken word can cross—but that negative notion, the void? Ironic, suspicious, ceremonious and tender, Giacometti sees the void everywhere. Not everywhere, you will protest. There are objects in contact. But that's just it, Giacometti is sure of nothing, not even of that; for whole weeks together he has been entranced by the legs of a chair: they did not touch the floor. Between things, between men, the bridges are down; the void creeps in everywhere, every creature secretes its own void. Giacometti became a sculptor because he is obsessed by the void. Apropos of a statuette he writes: "Myself, hurrying along a street in the rain." Sculptors rarely do their own busts; if they attempt a "portrait of the artist" they look at themselves from the outside, in a mirror: they are prophets of objectivity. But imagine a lyric sculptor: what he wants to express is his inner feeling, that boundless void which grips him and keeps him shelterless, his abandonment in the storm. Giacometti is a sculptor because he bears his void as a snail does his shell, because he wants to take stock of it in all its aspects and all its dimensions. And sometimes he gets along quite well with the miniature exile which he carries everywhere—and sometimes he hates it cordially. A friend comes to live with him. Happy at first, Giacometti soon becomes worried. "In the morning I

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open my eyes: he had his trousers and his jacket on my void." But at other times Giacometti hugs walls, leans on partitions: the void about him forebodes falling, earthslides, avalanches. Come what may, he must witness to it. Is sculpture enough? Kneading the plaster, he creates the void starting from the plenum. The figure issuing from his hands is "at ten paces, twenty paces," and whatever you do it stays there. The statue itself determines the distance from which it must be viewed, as court etiquette prescribes the distance from which one addresses the king. The real gives rise to the no man s land that surrounds it. One of Giacometti's figures is the artist himself producing his little local nothingness. But all these tenuous absences, as much ours as our names and our shadows, are not enough to make a world. There is also the Void, the universal distance from everything to everything. The street is empty in the sunlight: and in this void an individual suddenly appears. Sculpture creates the void beginning with the plenum: can it also show the plenum rising in the midst of a preceding void? This question Giacometti has tried to answer time and again. His composition "The Cage" is the answer to his desire to abolish the base and have "a limited space in which to realize a head and figure." For the whole problem is there: the void will be anterior to the beings that people it, will be immemorial, if first contained within walls. This "Cage" is "a room that I saw—I even saw curtains behind the woman . . ." Another time, he makes "a figurine in a box between two boxes that are houses." In short, he gives his personages a frame: in relation to us they keep an imaginary distance, but they inhabit a closed space which imposes its own distance on them in a prefabricated void which they do not manage tofilland which

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they submit to rather than create. And what is this framed and peopled void if not a picture? Lyrical as a sculptor, Giacometti becomes objective when he paints: he tries to catch the features of Annette and Diego as they appear in an empty room, in his barren studio. I have endeavored to show elsewhere that he came to sculpture like a painter, since he treated a plaster figurine as if it were a human figure in a picture: he confers on his statuettes an imaginary and fixed distance. He was the first to conceive the idea of sculpturing man as one sees him, that is to say at a distance. On his plaster figures he confers an absolute distance such as the painter gives to those who people his pictures. Inversely, I may say that he comes to painting like a sculptor inasmuch as he would have us accept as a true void the imaginary space limited by the frame. The seated woman whom he has just painted —he would like us to perceive her through depths of nothingness; he would like the canvas to be as still water and his human figures to be seen in the picture as Rimbaud saw a drawing room in a lake—in transparency. Sculpturing as others paint, painting as others sculpture, is he a painter? Is he a sculptor? Neither one nor the other, but one and the other. Painter and sculptor because the epoch does not permit him to be sculptor and architect: a sculptor to restore to each his encircling solitude, a painter in order to put men and things back into the world, that is to say the great universal Void, he sometimes models what he had first wished to paint. For example, Nine Figures (1950): "I had very much wanted to paint them, last spring." But, at other times, he knows that only sculpture (or, in other cases, painting) permits him to "realize his impressions." At all events, these two activities are inseparable and complementary : they enable him to treat

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the problem of his relations with others in all its aspects, depending on whether the distance comes from them, from him or from the universe. How to paint the Void? Before Giacometti no one seems to have tried it. For five hundred years pictures have been full to bursting: all creation has been crammed in. Giacometti begins by banishing people from his canvases: his brother Diego, alone, lost in a shed, that's enough. Still this figure must be distinguished from what surrounds it. Ordinarily this is done by emphasizing outlines. But a line is produced by the intersection of two surfaces: and the void cannot be considered a surface. Still less a volume. The container is separated from the contained by a line, but the void is not a container. Would you say that Diego "stands out" against the partition behind him? No: the "form-background" relation exists only for relatively flat surfaces; unless he leans back against it, the far-off partition cannot "serve as background" for Diego; the truth is that he has nothing to do with it. Or rather he does: since man and object are in the same picture, they necessarily provide the basis for certain expedient relationships (tones, values, proportions) that lend the canvas its unity. But these correspondences are simultaneously canceled out by the nothingness that intervenes between them. No: Diego doesn't stand out against the gray background of a wall; he is there and the wall is there and that's all. Nothing hems him in, nothing bears him up, nothing contains him: he appears all alone in the immense frame of the void. Before each of his pictures Giacometti takes us back to the moment of creation ex nihilo: each one of them poses afresh the ancient metaphysical query, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" And yet there is something: there

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is that obstinate apparition, unjustifiable and superfluous. The painted human figure is obsessive because it is presented in the guise of an inquiring apparition. But how to fix it on canvas without defining it with a line of some kind? Won't it burst in the void like a fish from the abyssal depths brought up to the surface of the water? Not at all: the line represents an arrested flight, marks a balance between exterior and interior, tightens round the form that the object adopts under the pressure of external forces; it is a symbol of inertia, of passivity. But Giacometti does not regard finiteness as a necessary limitation: the cohesion of the real, its plenitude and its conditioned nature are only a single and identical effect of its inner power of affirmation. The "apparitions" are affirmed and limited as they define themselves. Like those strange curves which mathematicians study and which are at once enveloping and enveloped, the object is its own envelope. One day, when he had undertaken to draw me, Giacometti expressed his astonishment. "What density," he said, what lines of force!" And I was even more surprised than he, since I imagine I have a rather flabby face, like anyone else's. But the fact is that he saw each feature as a centripetal force. The face turns back on itself, is a loop that closes. Look at it from various angles: you will find no contour, only fullness. The line is a beginning of negation, the passage from being to non-being. Yet Giacometti maintains that the real is pure affirmation. There is being, and then, suddenly, there is no more: from being to non-being no transition is conceivable. Notice how the multiple strokes he traces are within the form that he describes, how they represent intimate relationships of the being with itself, the fold of a jacket, the wrinkle of a face, the prominence of a muscle, the di-

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rection of a movement. All these lines are centripetal: their aim is to pull together, they compel the eye to follow them and always bring it back to the center of the face; one would think that the face is retracting under the influence of an astringent; in a few minutes it will be no larger than a fist, like one of Jivahro's heads. The limit of the body is nowhere indicated, however: sometimes the heavy fleshy mass ends vaguely, surreptitiously, in an indistinct brown nimbus, somewhere beneath the tangle of lines of force—and sometimes it literally does not end: the contour of the arm or hip is lost in a dazzle of vanishing lines. Perforce and without warning we witness a brusque dematerialization. Here is a man with one leg crossed over the other. As long as I kept my eyes on his face I was certain that he had feet—even thought I saw them. But if I look at them they peter out, dwindle away in a luminous haze—I no longer know where the void begins and the body ends. And don't think that we have here one of those disintegrations by which Masson has attempted to give objects a sort of ubiquitousness by diffusing them all over the canvas. If Giacometti has left this shoe without a limit that is not because he believes it to be so but because he counts on us to give it one. Actually, the shoes are there, heavy and dense. To see them, all I need to do is to look not quite squarely at them. If we wish to understand this technique we have only to examine the sketches that Giacometti sometimes makes of his sculptures. Four women on a pedestal: good. Now look back at the drawing: here is the head and neck, in bold strokes, the nothing—and still nothing—then an open curve around a point: the belly and the navel; here is a stump of thigh, and then two vertical strokes and, lower down, two more. That's all. A whole woman. What

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have we done? We have made use of our knowledge to reestablish continuity, have used our eyes to join together these disjecta membra; we have seen shoulder and arms on the white paper; we have seen them because we recognized the head and belly. And these members were there, indeed, even though not indicated by lines. In the same way we sometimes conceive lucid and complete thoughts which are not given to us in words. Between the two extremities, the body is a moving current. We are confronted with the pure real, invisible tension of white paper. But the void? Is it not, likewise, represented by the whiteness of the sheet? Precisely so: Giacometti denies the inertia of matter just as he denies the inertia of pure nothingness; the void is fullness gone slack, sprawled out; fullness is the void given orientation. The real is a lightning flash. Have you noticed the profusion of white lines that striate the torsos and faces? The Diego is not solidly sewn together: it is just a basting, as dressmakers say. Or could it be that Giacometti wants "to write luminously on a black background"? Almost. It is no longer a question of separating plenum from void but rather of painting fullness itself. Now fullness is at once unity and diversity: how to differentiate without dividing it? Black lines are dangerous: with them comes the danger of scratching out what is there, splitting it. Use them for encircling an eye, hemming a mouth, and we may think that there arefistulasof void at the heart of reality. These white scorings are here to serve as markings without being conspicuous; they guide the eye, determine its movements and melt beneath the gaze. We know about Arcimboldi's success with his heaps of vegetables, his piled-up fish. Why is it that we find those fakes so attractive? Could it

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not be that the technique has been familiar to us for a long time? Suppose our painters were all Arcimboldis, each in his own way. True, they probably wouldn't deign to compose a human head out of a pumpkin, tomatoes and radishes. But don't they put together faces every day out of a pair of eyes, a nose, two ears and thirty-two teeth? What is the difference, really? Take a sphere of pink meat, carve two holes in it, stick a glazed marble in each, model a nasal appendage and plant it, like a false nose, under the ocular globes, bore a third hole and fit it out with white pebbles—doesn't this amount to replacing the indissoluble unity of a face with an assortment of miscellaneous objects? The void slips in everywhere, between the eyes and lids, between the lips, in the holes of the nose. A head becomes in its turn an archipelago. You say that this strange assemblage is in keeping with reality, that the oculist can root the eye out of its socket and the dentist extract the teeth? Perhaps. But what is to be painted? That which is? That which we see? And what do we see? That chestnut tree beneath my window—some have made it out a great quivering ball, all one piece; and others have painted those leaves one by one, with their veins. Do I see a leafy mass or a multitude? Leaves or foliage? One and the other, surely; neither quite one nor the other; and I keep coming from one to the other. Those leaves—no, I don't see them completely; I think I'm going to grasp them and then I get lost; when I am in a position to take hold of the foliage it disintegrates. In short, I see a swarming cohesion, a reversed dispersal. Now go and paint all that! And yet Giacometti wants to paint what he sees, exactly as he sees it. He wants his figures, at the heart of the void whence they spring, to move and move again ceaselessly on his immobile canvas, from the con-

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tinuous to the discontinuous. He wants the head to be at once isolated—since it is sovereign—and to be taken back by the body, to be no more than a periscope of the belly in the sense that we say that Europe is a peninsula of Asia. Eyes, nose and mouth he would have as leaves in a mass of foliage, distinct and fused all together. This he manages to do: it is his chief success. How? By refusing to be more precise than perception. There is no question of painting vaguely; quite the contrary, he suggests a complete precision of being beneath the imprecision of knowing. In themselves or for others with better vision, the angels, these faces conform rigorously to the principle of individuation; they are determined down to the smallest detail. We are aware of this from the very first glance; moreover, we recognize Diego and Annette immediately. This would be enough to absolve Giacometti from the reproach of subjectivism, if there were any need to do so. At the same time, however, we cannot look at the canvas without a certain uneasiness; we feel moved, in spite of ourselves, to ask for a flashlight or simply a candle. Is it a fog, the fading light, or are our eyes just getting tired? Is Diego raising or lowering his eyelids? Is he dozing? Is he dreaming? Is he spying on us? These questions can, of course, be asked at a daub show in front of some miserable portrait so fuzzy that all answers are possible and none required. But that clumsy sort of indefiniteness has nothing in common with the calculated indefiniteness of Giacometti. Indeed, would it not be better to use the term supradetermination? I turn back toward Diego and find him, from one instant to the next, sleeping, observing, gazing at the sky, staring at me. All this is true, all this is evident: but if I lower my head a little, if I shift the direction of my gaze, the evidence vanishes

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and other evidence takes its place. If, tired of the struggle, I want to hold to one view, there is nothing for it but to go away quickly. And the impression will remain precarious and probable. Thus when I discover a face in the fire, in an ink splotch, in the arabesque of a curtain, the suddenly revealed shape imposes itself upon me, but while I cannot see it otherwise than as I do, I know that others will see it differently. But the face in the fire has no verity: what disturbs and fascinates us at the same time about the pictures of Giacometti is that there is a truth and that we are sure of it. It is there, at hand, however little I search for it. But my vision blurs and my eyes tire: I give up. As nearly as I begin to understand what happens, Giacometti possesses us because he has inverted the data of the problem. Here is an Ingres picture: if I look at the tip of the odalisque's nose the rest of the face becomes hazy, a sort of pinkish butter touched with delicate red by the lips. If I look at the lips now, they will emerge from the shadow, moist, half open, and the nose will disappear, consumed by the indifferentiation of the background: this doesn't matter—I know I can summon it up at will, and that reassures me. Just the opposite is true with Giacometti: for a detail to seem clear and reassuring it is necessary and sufficient that I not make it thè explicit object of my attention; what inspires confidence is the fact that I peer but of the corner of my eye. Diego's eyes-—the longer I observe them the less I am able to make them out. But I divine cheeks which droop a bit, a queer sort of smile at the corner of the lips. If my unlucky taste for certitude draws my gaze down to the mouth, everything escapes me immediately. How is it? Hard? Bitter? Ironical? Frank? Pinched? Thé eyes, on the other hand, which have almost passed out of my field

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of vision, I know now that they are half-closed. And nothing prevents me from continuing to turn, obsessed by this ghostly countenance which is formed, lost and formed again continually behind me. The admirable thing is that one believes in it. As in hallucinations: at first they brush by you, and you turn around: there's nothing. But on the other side of you, now . . . These extraordinary figures, so perfectly immaterial that they often become transparent, so totally, so fully real that they assert themselves like a punch of a fist and are unforgettable, are they appearances or disappearances? Both together. They seem so diaphanous, sometimes, that one no longer even thinks about their expression: we pinch ourselves to be sure they really exist. If we persist in watching them the whole picture comes to life: a somber sea rolls over and submerges them; nothing remains but a surface smudged with soot; and then the wave withdraws and we see them again, white and naked, shining beneath the waters. But when they reappear they do so violently, like those stifled cries which rise to the summit of a mountain and which you know, when you hear them, have somewhere been great imploring cries or shouts of pain. This game of appearance and disappearance, flight and provocation, give them a certain captious air. They remind me of Galathea who fled from her lover beneath the willows and who desired at the same time that he should see her. Coquettes, yes, lovely ones because they are all action, and sinister because of the void that surrounds them, these creatures of nothingness attain fullness of existence because they elude and mystify us. A conjuror has three hundred accomplices every evening: the spectators themselves and their second natures. He fastens a wooden arm in a fine

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red sleeve on his shoulder. The public calls for two arms, in sleeves of the same material, sees two arms, two sleeves, and is content. Meanwhile a real arm, wrapped in black fabric, invisible, strays off in search of a rabbit, a playing card, an explosive cigarette. Giacometti's art is akin to that of the prestidigitator; we are his dupes and his accomplices. Without our avidity, our thoughtless haste, the traditional errors of our senses and the contradictions of our perception he could not succeed in making his portraits live. He works by inference, according to what he sees, but above all according to what he thinks we will see. His intention is not to present us with an image but to produce simulacra which, while standing for what they really are, arouse in us the feelings and attitudes that a meeting with real men ordinarily inspires. At the Grevin Museum we may become irritated or frightened when we have as custodian a wax mannequin. Nothing is easier than to work up fine jokes on this theme. But Giacometti doesn't particularly like jokes. Except one. A single one to which he has dedicated his life. He has known for a long time that artists work in the domain of the imaginary and that we create only optical illusions; he knows that "monsters imitated by art" will never awaken other than factitious terrors in onlookers. He does not abandon hope, however: some day he will show us a picture of Diego very like the others in appearance. We will be forewarned, will know that it is only a fantasy, a vain illusion, prisoner of its frame. And yet, on that day, we will experience a shock, just a little shock in front of the mute canvas. The same kind of shock that we have when we come home late and a stranger advances toward us in the dark; then Giacometti will know that with his pictures he has called forth real emotions and that his simulacra have had for a few

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moments, without ceasing to be illusory, true powers. I wish him all success, and soon, in this memorable pleasantry. If he doesn't bring it off, it will be because no one can. No one, in any case, is able to come closer. "Les Peintures de Giacometti," by Jean-Paul Sartre, originally published in Les Tempes Modernes (June, 1954). Translated by Warren Ramsey.

JACK

SHADBOLT

A native and resident of Vancouver Jack Shadbolt studied art in France and England. The work of Graham Sutherland has influenced the development of Shadbolt's evocative style. He has taught for years at the Vancouver City School of Art where he is considered the principal figure in contemporary Canadian art both as a creative artist and teacher.

P I C T U R E I N PROCESS

During the years immediately following the war I was preoccupied with the "state of man." Anxious to convey potent social meaning through my painting, I began to explore an area of tense, symbolic subject matter. My painting became involved in heavy dramatics and lacked lyrical resolution. Since I could not willfully undo my earlier tendencies, I decided to try the indirect approach. I abandoned the idea of having any predetermined theme hoping that, with a completely open mind and open sensitivity, true painterly meaning would ensue. I made no effort to be nonobjective, I merely hoped that by proceeding in a completely relaxed manner the creative form within me would reveal itself, using me as an instrument of expression. This was a long, devastating period, often humiliating, but it taught me much about painting and living. I learned that content is not taken by force. In more ways than one

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I came to see the dim outlines of a meaningful synthesis in this open approach. Perhaps my dilemma during this period was not entirely unique. At last the day came (and I sometimes wonder whether to bless or curse it) when the implications of "open form" grew clear to me. Allowing the picture to "generate itself," letting the natural qualities of materials suggest the nature of the forms, trying to hold back the image suggestions, awaiting the emergence of the "good gestalt"— these have left me such a huge obligation in the selection of precise overtones that I find myself at a standstill before each canvas. It is almost an unbearable strain to forego wrapping up the meaning of an object within its own contours and fixing it as a working-out point. When I reach this frustrated state I long for the old conceptual approach to painting where the subject was fixed and the painter could get on with building the pieces, knowing they would fit together later. Yet I know I cannot turn back. In some deep way, I, too, am sick of our over-rational world of predetermined concepts. My detestation of mass behavior patterns has made me shun responses that are too predictable. I feel, with others, that our fluid approach to vast reaches of knowledge has made fixed theories of very little value because there may be a hundred exceptions we do not know about. We must leave ideas open and, as artists, we must leave objects free to the give and take of reciprocal interaction with their surroundings. Thus, if the picture is to be true for us it must generate from its own plastic elements and from the associative forces that permeate the artist's consciousness. This gives me courage to believe that my true obligation is not to repudiate my teeming mind but to extend its receptivity toward a conscious use of this new flux-form,

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to become as sensitive as a high-fidelity instrument to the emotive overtones in which reside the deeper meanings of the music. If the artist has such a highly developed sense for the plastic-sensuous developments of the picture-inprocess and for the possibilities of combining these into meaningful relationships, would it not be possible for him to accommodate multifarious associations into a larger psychological dimension for the work? Might not this very process restore the highest capacities for intuition—man's greatest treasure? As I say this to myself, I am at once aware of the dangers of proliferation, sentimental association, esoteric incoherence, and even morbid obsession. But if art is the measure of man, then character, control, and authority need never be lacking. Since the collapse of the mystery of orthodox symbolism we cherish the enigma—whether we admit it or not— and we need it, whether we find it in the purity of structure or in the richness of evocation. That art is of greatest meaning for us which will satisfy on both counts. The easy evocation, tentative and unwilling to declare its outline, can readily destroy the architectural conviction of a picture. At the same time, architectural purism is not complex enough in the accommodation of overtones to answer our symbolic needs. Structure will disappear unless we can put it on a new psychological level, considering it a strategic framework in which all the evocative units can be united toward one symbolic design that will contain the mystery. Yet, if structure is of greatest meaning there is no denying that this evocative, rather than descriptive, role for our forms is also of greatest importance. It demands hieroglyphic equivalents rather than closed, representational

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entities and thus throws a tremendous burden on the evolving of meaningful shorthand. For me, an object that is a merely stylized, decorative configuration does not go deep enough. Its meaning cannot be peeled down into subconscious layers of emotive connections. Everywhere we see great facility with new pictographic depiction, but there are few signs as yet of a mature language which can create the hieroglyph of what once was—the significant remnant charged with memories, striking provocative permutations of enigma, always potent with new suggestions in the very process of becoming. I have never been gifted at pictorial shorthand. The brief, first statement alone never seems to say enough about the objects. I always have to realize them fully and recover the shorthand later by the triple process of heightening certain ideographic markings, modifying parts of the contours into passage with their adjacent surroundings, and eroding the contours inward as I compress the negative spaces between the objects. This has helped me in my new approach. I have grown to realize, along with many others, how calligraphy once freed from the literal definition of objects has, as never before, except perhaps in Chinese art, taken on such richness and variety of implication. Today, there is a broader aspect of shorthand alive for us—the pictorial metaphor; to describe one thing in terms of another, to make an image stand for a double meaning, itelf, and a figurative meaning that can, at the same time, infer other overlays. A leaf may become a pennant; a bird sitting in rocks may look like a rock. Picasso can make three glasses on a table suggest three figures in conversation, or knives and forks in a drawer

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suggest a dread octopus image. The idea has often been an inadvertent component of art or has been used in direct symbolism, but to exploit fluid overtones, so they suggest that things are always more than they seem, is a recent possibility. As an adjunct to this, I have been aware of a tendency, shared with others, to use space in a more intriguing way: a color area may be background in one part of the picture yet slip around as part of a foreground context in another part—an equivocal device Paul Klee used with whimsical keenness. Another idea I find fruitful is a duality of identities, where parts of one image may serve as parts of another. It is all too apparent that to overindulge these devices is to court triviality. However, I find I must risk this in a serious bid for those tingling meanings obtained by deliberately keeping forms at the demonic edge where they can be flesh, fish, or fowl yet are never quite, still unequivocal in their mystery, awaiting the spectator's extension into his own connotative experience. By this I do not condone false effects of mysteriousness, tentative definition, or hiding forms in false mist. But there is a slightly hallucinatory state, as in a waking dream, where normal scale eludes, where everything is vividly clear but the meaning lies just beyond momentary comprehension. This state, where forms are presences waiting to speak their meaning, greatly appeals to me. The fact that form is enigmatic does not, however, necessitate that its statement be so. I sense an orchestration of varying physical means, sharp definition, blurred suggestion, electrified or muted color, provocative texture, varying depth definitions, as expressive agencies within one complex idiom: but it must be complex enough to encompass the philo-

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sophic truth which haunts me—that all things belong to all things. In the sense that all things ultimately must be seen in terms of man, the renewed anthropomorphic suggestion at which I have hinted poses one of the larger obligations of any form which pretends to scope. Although we cannot define man directly, we can say much about him by implication. To help us there are two layers of overtones vividly alive today: the historic (to say that history belongs to him) and the atavistic (to say that he belongs to the past). In the "museum without walls" of our informed world every nuance from Neanderthal to Chinese, from primitive to Gothic, from Renaissance to post-Cubist seems to be hovering over the white canvas, waiting to perch on any form the moment it materializes. To force these referential elements into control the artist would have to be either a Grand Master of the Eclectic, such as Picasso can be, or have a personal symbology sufficiently strong to dominate them. Perhaps for the artist of the near future there may be a truly recondite form that will use these references much as T. S. Eliot has used literary ones in poetry. There is evidence that we long for some dawn-of-theworld ritual communion to offset our sophisticated complexity. We see it in our wish to show the canvas as matter in the rough state of formation, in our exploration of time-weathered effects and textured surfaces suggesting the reality of nature, in our creation of ancient-seeming calligraphies reminiscent of rock-scourings or runic inscriptions. We seek forms and themes of ritualistic or cabalistic mystery, cross sections showing fossil remains or cell-growth suggestions. These atavistic seekings lead

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us to prefer erosion as a technique. Whether erosion gives us the nostalgic cave-womb or the enigmatically marked impervious wall of the canvas, its use expresses the desire to be at one with primordial nature. For me these are pregnant matters: so that standing before this white rectangle of infinite possibilities, this year, 1955, I am likely to be shocked into numbness by the responsibilities which are inherent. I am a reservoir swelled at rim-inch with the intolerable pressure of new knowledge, of infinite conflicting suggestings, awaiting the one simple symbol for dam-burst. I know my problem and I think I am right in suspecting that it is shared by others. I am an intellectual artist with a heavy dose of expressionism in my nature. I want fusion at the intuitive level of painting and, simultaneously, at the top level of content awareness. I am highly developed at both levels, but only rarely these days can I unite the two in simultaneous flow. It could be that my idiom will emerge out of the natural building up and scraping down of objects, in the emergence and destruction of irrelevant images and the changing and re-positioning of forms to accommodate the structure. Today I am a grunt-and-groaner with a studio full of canvases so overloaded with suggestions that their main theme, which I never quite knew, has disintegrated. So they confront me, asking to the point of distraction which direction to move to find one coherent way out. I have found an interim cure: a more rapid medium, such as watercolor or ink, that allows me to develop the whole picture so fast that it can all arrive under one spell. The resulting coherence and intensity reassures me, yet I still crave the implications of a larger, sustained work. In the search for these I have hit three useful phases that

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have helped me to handle this persistence of multiple overtones. When new associations come flooding in, instead of trying to incorporate them at the expense of the work in progress, I have learned to spill them over onto another picture. I jot them down rapidly on another canvas to relieve myself of their urgency. I have found I can keep a whole series of pictures going at once, switching among them, keeping each autonomous. Their very existence in series seems to give each work an extra portent of meaning. And I have found that a unifying theme for the whole series is demanded—thus I came to the idea of a cycle. To me, a nature cycle—phases of seed growth, flowering, withering and dying of plants—is an apt paraphrase of the human cycle and has enough indirect symbolic suggestion to make me feel I am still dealing with the "state of man." I have no intention of again falling into the too-obvious symbolic morass in this area, hence I try to keep painting and to use the theme idea only as a screen for sifting out the confused overtones. I find the very absorption with nature helps me to feel one mood at a time; such as the dry gold of autumn leaves, the dark earth of winter waiting, the crisp white of frost, the green sunlit burgeoning of spring. Under their spell one mood is more easily assimilated into one form-suggestion that allows me to improvise freely in its evocation. Knowing that other pictures are taking care of other aspects of the theme I do not have to labor my forms to hold too much. I can afford looser statement, however slight, reassured that it is contributive to the total. So I relax, content to explore one idea in one picture. I can let the theme swell into dramatic or symbolic reality or fade into mere lyrical

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remembrance. Saturated by one color idea only, suggested by its role in the larger scheme, I can drop in my theme suggestions as the accidental shapes evolve. The process is at once spontaneous and controlled. More recently I have explored the possibility of symbolizing the life cycle in more formal terms, such as in a triptych with panels on birth, flowering, and dying. The triptych concept still has a great appeal for me, though I have been reluctant to close in too rigidly on hieratic symbols. Having experienced melodrama, I prefer a loose thematic statement. The merest suggestion of an idea, even after prolonged working around in a canvas, still seems so potent. It is the half-remembered reference that has the greatest mystery for me—so much so that I feel I cannot again take the head-on approach to the direct symbol. Perhaps we need recourse to a broad, sustaining theme with concrete reference to life if we are to draw our tentative art into social focus in our own needed terms of formative equivalents rather than descriptive realities. In this era of overwrought suggestibility the painter has merely to thrust a form into the air when, before it is fairly exposed, there come from all sides, like bats, this multitude to which I have alluded frequently: esoteric, associative, and eclectic overtones clinging and squeaking for attention, nearly smothering the original form. There must be some way of controlling this proliferation; for me the presence of the preliminary idea enables me to prefigure and presensitize forms so that they will retain their relevance under structural stress and will attract only those passing overtones which amplify their contextual richness but do not confuse their identities. Within the theme

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I can visualize a whole framework giving each form simultaneously its psychological flavor, its physical nature, and its color polarity. Actually, by seeing my theme break down into phases I have been able to isolate each phase with its theme color, thus giving color a whole new role in my work as a creative agent, much as it is used in the theater to set the key for action, to symbolize characters, to provide visual surprise and clear, abstract counterpoint to the involvement of the plot and, above all, to so drench the senses that they are quivering for the portent of mysterious meanings. For me, the language of translation of these ideas is always abstract. I try to "get inside" my theme so completely that I can recreate from inner identification an abstract paraphrase of nature. The process is a matter of wrapt excitement, as though I were making a new world of my own out of the fragmentary ingredients of remembrance. For example, let me instance my concern with autumn leaves: once I have a full comprehension of them as emotive tokens suspended in an intricate spaceframe against the sky, nostalgic souvenirs of past summer, defiant banners against the all-withering frost, twisting and turning flanges that smash the sun's gold into smouldering embers, they are now quite denaturalized in their frenzied, heraldic role. In this state the idea of leaves becomes the very abstraction of battle remnants— reminders of a lost cause—of things glorious in youth, battered by life, and doomed but defiant in age. They cause me to reflect on the bitterness of life: its perpetual struggle, its possible but vain heroisms. My tree may remind me now of all lost causes so that its branches may flourish with many references from mediaeval chivalric endeavor

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to sadistic present butchery. Accordingly, the whole tree may stand as a glorious rocket-burst of fragments telling the triumph of age or as a cruel torture-wrack in which are entrapped the frightful engrams of slaughter. Similarly in my Field Grass themes, deep among the golden stems, or red stems, or dried-straw stems, or green stems may be reenacted the silent struggle of life—the lust, rapine, brutal murder, frustrated sadism, depredation, sterile withering—or in positive moods, the joyful acrobatics of new youth—the protagonists being part insect, part bird, part animal, but never quite. This, then, is the raw material which must be restated in the most unexpected parallels. The literal battle becomes the plastic battle, physical movement becomes form thrust and counterthrust; triumph becomes blazing color, sharp contrast, and explosive space pressure. Release becomes expanding space, lifting movement; frustration becomes strangled form; suspense becomes static tension; joyfulness becomes rhythmic arabesque; power becomes monumentality. Yet into each physical conditioning is insinuated the appropriate emotive suggestion. Out of these form possibilities is built the language of paraphrase; and out of the paraphrase meaning is built the equation of structure. In all, recourse to thematic generation, far from being a conceptual hindrance to me, has provided me with a workable, controlling unity, yet it involves me with no sentimental attachments that I cannot break at will. I am only too aware that I am repeating something every artist knows—he always conceives his progressive works as part of a larger context—though to rediscover this as a conscious truth at a time when it is intellectual anathema even to consider a conceptual process is a great

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liberation. We can be so free as to be unable to function. Having learned to evolve a framework, I am far from having to renounce the disturbing new independences of color, calligraphy, and plastic-sensuous progressions, I can resolve their superb, unprecedented equations within the assurance of a total, if flexible, configuration. Out of desperation I thus have armed myself to wrestle with relativity, to follow the fluid form, to let the picture reveal its meaning to me. It takes a fiendish discipline that I freely curse. In pursuing it I have had to use these transparent devices I have described. In reality, I do not yet know what I am painting; yet, if you ask me at any moment, I can tell you precisely.

W. E U G E N E

SMITH

Of his own work, W. Eugene Smith says: "I could dream of being an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this I am a journalist—a photographic journalist. In result, I am constantly torn between the attitude of the conscientious journalist—who is a recorder of, an interpreter of, facts—and of the creative artist who often is necessarily at poetic odds with the literal facts." Smith has just completed a photographic profile of Philadelphia. Among his most memorable series of pictures are those of a Spanish village and those made at Lambaréné while on a visit to Schweitzer.

WALK T O PARADISE The children in the photograph are my children, and the day I made this photographic effort, I was not sure I would be capable of ever photographing again. There had been the war—it seems a long time ago now, that war called World, Volume II—and on my thirteenth Pacific invasion shell fragments ended my photographic coverage of it. Two painful, helpless years followed my multiple wounding, all this time I had to stifle my restless spirit into a state of impassive, noncreative suspension, while the doctors, by their many operations, slowly tried to repair me. But now, this day, I would endeavor

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to refute two years of negation. On this day, for the first time since my injuries, I would try again to make the camera work for me, would try to force my body to control the mechanics of the camera; and, as well, I would try to command my creative spirit out of its exile. Urgently, something compelled that this first photograph must not be a failure—pray God that I could so much as physically force a roll of film into the camera! I was determined that this first photograph must sing of more than being a technical accomplishment. Determined that it would speak of a gentle moment of spirited purity in contrast to the depraved savagery I had raged against with my war photographs—my last photographs. I was almost desperate in this determination, in my insistence that for some reason this first exposure must have a special quality. I have never quite understood why it had to be so, why it had to be the first and not the second; why, if not accomplished today, it could not be accomplished next week; yet that day I challenged myself to do it, against my nerves, against my reason. Was it to prove that I could discipline myself against the odds? Was it pride, or perhaps a foolish egotism over the measure of my skill? Or was it simply that I feared I might never again attain the imaginative power, the physical flexibility so necessary to my work; and worse, that I might then shrivel into a dull, twisted burden upon my family and the world? Whatever the reason—probably more complex than one—I felt without labeling it as such, that it was to be a day of spiritual decision. It was a spring day, late in the spring, and it was a warm day, not hot, but a warm day of lilt without drag. I noticed it only in its being warm enough to soothe aching

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parts of my partially mended body, and in it being a day not to add chill tremble to the climax necessarily approaching within me. Somehow, without really disclosing my plans, I managed to keep the two younger children, Pat and Juanita, at home with me, while maneuvering my wife, mother, and eldest daughter, Marissa, out of the house. I kept only the younger children with me, for I believed they would comprehend least, the drama taking place. As the car pulled out of the driveway I stared through the window after it, my vision blurred by the thin curtains. How quiet a powerful conflict can be! Still staring through the curtains, now at nothing, I pondered a moment. And I thought of how fiction so frequently depended upon thunder's curdle thrust and shriek asunder as proffering full insight into a human drama. And, as well, I thought in gloomy awareness of my own character deficiencies, and of the capacities of other individuals to subdue through sheer spiritual triumph—or guts—far more grievous, fate-given burdens than any I had ever quailed before. Thinking of others, of their troubles, and of their courage, helped me not at all, removed no weight of depression, although it may have prevented any tendency to self-pity. Yet, how strange, how contradictory: here in the quiet of my home, with two beloved children peacefully playing in an adjoining room, with music the only and welcome intruding sound (for at the moment the children were silent); how strange that in this kindly setting I should be living an emotional and physical crisis more personally terrifying in its potency than any I had ever encountered, in a life far from tranquil—and this, hinged on the mere making of a photograph.

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Turning from the window, and from memories, I moved directly to the closet. Why all this emotional chaos over the trivial business of a grown man walking to a closet, taking a camera from it, and going out with his children to make a photograph? It was an unimportant nothing —yet upon it, this menial action, balanced the direction many lives would take. And there were selfish reasons, I must admit. Photography was my communicative medium, my creative medium, my crusading medium, and I loved it, was dedicated to it. Photography shorn from me, or I so handicapped that I would demean my own past standards, if this were to be I could not, . . . well, without it being any comparison of the stature of the talents, and if it is remembered that an artist of mediocrity can burn with as intense a need and yearning as can a great talent; then it can be understood that any danger of my losing photography was to a degree comparable to the tortured suffering that the threat of deafness brought to Beethoven. The artist without his medium is a rather lost soul. After bringing a camera out from its corner on a closet shelf, I tried the shutter a few times to see if it were still working. Taking a roll of film I struggled to tear open the cardboard container, and then struggled to open the camefa and insert the roll. This, at the very beginning, almost proved my undoing, for as I fought to give my mangled left hand a strength and a control it did not have, and to which I tried to add by twisting my whole body in awkward leverage behind it, the pain and the nerves and the fear and the inadequate fumbling left me trembling, sweating, and coldly hunched in cramp. The taste of this passion mingled with the ugly taste of infection serum that drained constántly from my head injuries, flow-

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ing down inside my throat, and on the outside down my cheeks and across my lips. My nerves harshly screamed to my mind to fling the camera down, to shirk the damn trial, to run out of the place. I held quiet, holding in, holding on; the children in the next room were laughing. I whispered out, silently, to myself, and I let the quieting strength of the music rest me another moment. Finally the camera was loaded. We walked along, my children—and I. We were in two different worlds, for the children were exultant in exploring their new world, and I was desperately trying to regain my powers from a past world. As we walked I tried grasping the focusing barrel of the camera with my contorted left hand, going through all the motions except the actual taking of the photograph. Each time I bent my head forward to focus, the infection drainage would splash into the camera, obscuring the clarity of the image on the ground glass. The children were chattering, excitedly rushing off into side paths, or off where there were no paths; rushing wherever either would make a discovery. One, intrigued, would call to the other, or rush to grasp the other by the hand to guide the way to the new excitement. I walked a little way behind, repeatedly flexing the reactions and the movements needed in making a photograph. The children remained unaware of my struggle to control the wracking turbulence of my mind as I pushed against these physical and mental handicaps that were hampering my photographic speech. My will power, so close to an escape from control, was held to leash only by the most forceful application of discipline's strong determination. Still, and regardless of the conflict that raged within me, there was no change in my determination, and of my

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intentions for that first photograph. These woods with these children prancing through them in happiness. . . . as against war photographs I had made of a terrified mother and her child wheeling in bewilderment behind a shell-broken tree—tattered, filthy, starving, their bodies heavily scratched and insect bitten. Trapped in a cave by the war, they now were flushed from it by threats, by promises, by grenades and smoke bombs. They burst out through the opening, stumbling, dazed, choking, and nearly blind from the fumes, tried to lurch and claw their way past the still warm corpse of a man, and another of a boy. Trying for an escape when there was no escape. They were not shot, as had been the man and boy, but were herded into a miserably inadequate stockade. It was diseased and stinking. Anguish for them seared my soul, and again reminded me forcefully, even as I photographed, that these haunted, scavenging animals, now caged, were before all else human beings, that we knew not their personal characteristics of good or bad, that we were enemies because governments had decreed us enemies. . . . . . . By decree, know thy enemies. Hate well, and as directed. Question not the validity of the truth as dispensed through official pronouncement, through censors. And of the censors who rig the slanted impact of deeds, words, and photographs—ask not of their deletions, nor whether those deletions perhaps deform the truth. Ask not why they so often prevent, or destroy, things like photographs that reveal nothing other than humanity, revealed in unfaked emotional honesty—photographs that show no numbers of a military force, no mechanical secret of weapon, no strategic terrain. Right, truth, hate, and the help of God are established by decree, protected by censors for

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the purity of the cause. Each time there is a cause—and all causes, to all censors, to all governments are noble —we are harangued in righteous and idealistic words, although those who speak may not believe the words they stand upon. Is a righteous crusade for freedom, for justice, for human rights too flimsy for a show of compassion, for an evaluation of an enemy as having any of the decencies? Is an effort to know and to understand the enemy—and the circumstances that brought him to being an enemy—a weakening and detrimental blow to the straight, narrow, and just intent? Must truth be filtered, processed, trimmed, and packaged with embellishments, then presented as the whole truth, the unquestionable truth? Must it take twisted words and missing photographs to make secure our national security? Or, should right be made to stand with truth; or sink, found out as wrong? For are we never wrong, slightly, occasionally, in our face to the world—except the party of the other part, intramurally during local and national elections? Must the accidentals of birthplace, of citizenship compel the classifications and the frontiers of hate; must we force the shape of morality and ethics to the expediency of each world crisis? Are we, a minority, regardless of our being a nation's majority, so always sure that our God is ever willing to lend us His cross as the hilt of a crusading sword? Would He back jailing of conscientious objectors and others who dissent? Is mankind ever to have a controlling structure capable of allowing a justice of complete moral and ethical integrity to extend to a government for all the living, sparing the innocent? And to make impossible ever again such scenes as those tortured photographs I made of the lone survivor of a patrol, jabbering his madness, pounding the air, while

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unrelenting bombardment and sniper's cymbals scored his staggering dance of incoherency. His madness swearing, as a foul oath, as a prayer, against man's persistence in the diabolical. Screaming and gesticulating a near wordless gibberish that we knew too clearly was exhorting us to go to the others of the patrol, out there where now no one could go and live—out there where his mind had been left, with those who were never to return. The medic jabbed him with morphine to ease his pain and to quiet him before we, too, cracked into insanity. The medic worked calmly, methodically, encouragingly, among the falling men until his supplies were gone, his real usefulness at an end—then he too sat down among the wounded, his mind suddenly, quietly uncomprehending other than with tears that quietly sobbed of his further uselessness. . . . and still, with pompous words proclaiming the highminded intent, they sit around the conference tables passing judgments as to which are the humane tools of war, and which examples of man's ingenuity should be considered for outlawing—the ethics of murder, pass the cocktails . . . and tell it to the young replacement I photographed! In his first action he had been quickly hit, and was now lying on a stretcher in front of me. The ethical weapons clobbered the terrain around us. There was a bandage over his eyes, blood was now caked around his nostrils, his lips. The blood had sprayed the length of him and behind him as he ran, after his wounding and until he dropped; it now was mixed and hardened with the muck of Okinawa from his boots to the head wound from which it had come—and, as he lay there he touched the tips of his fingers together, began moving his lips as if in prayer. The last I saw of him was as daylight fled, removing as it left the courage of its light, and in the dusk

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I could see two men running and creeping with the recent replacement between them, skulking their way along the base of the shallow ridge and into the underbrush and toward the taller trees; and still they were not safe. I think the boy on the stretcher was already dead. These things I photographed with hating wrath that I had such subjects, and against the crime. The belief, the try, a camera and some film: the fragile weapons of my good intentions. With these I fought war. My camera, my intentions stopped no man from falling, nor did they help him after he had fallen. Yet, all that I could offer of value, whatever that value might be to the world, were my photographs. Of what parched worth were the photographs to the man whose eyes followed me? He who had just lost two arms, a leg, most of another foot, and was now lying there still conscious. Glory, glory, glory, glory, the sands of Iwo Jima, and a flag being raised on Suribachi for the world to remember it by, and for a nation to symbolize it by; let brass bands precede the political speeches. Photographs be damned, they could bind no wound. Yet, pipe the small voice, for photographs can cause an emotional reaction, they can show, and remind. I could not prevent the wounding of a man, yet the image of his suffering might help to sow compassion, to soften hatreds, even in hardened minds, and to strike up other hatreds that were not directed against man, but against what is done to man. If I could photograph powerfully enough —I reasoned—I might, just might, help a little to change this. If my photographs could grab the viewer by the heart, making the enormity of the terribleness of war lodge heavily, they might also prod the conscience and cause him to think. The photographs might cause the

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viewer to think beyond righteous chips on nationalistic or political shoulders; and beyond racial or religious gripes, which usually fade when understanding is allowed, or is gained, or is applied. I had to try to make the viewer think of what war actually is, and what it is not a solution of, and to help make the viewer realize above pride, out of morality, out of practicality, that it must stop. That man must search and learn and create a new ethics and a new governing mechanics to control both the righteous, and the wrongs, and the man-deviled greeds. In highest achievement, I could do no more than strike another call, for there is not within me the magnitude of brain to guide the way—other than of a beginning; and idealism is not enough. Yes, my attempt; for even when man knows he will fail, there are times he must continue, for he has never done his share. The war was over. Thè cold war had not yet so completely shuffled the cards of tensions, actions, propaganda, and allies, that those who were "inhuman beasts" a year or two before, were now good, proper believing gentlemen—and on our side; although further development of the instruments of war had been progressing rather satisfactorily for those who think such progress a satisfaction. And, as I followed my children through the underbrush and the tall trees—what joy of discovery was everywhere theirs—and as I watched I knew again that in spite of all of it, and in spite of every war, and of every setback, that today, now, I wished to speak out a sonnet for life and of the worth of continuing, and in living it. Out of my own pain and despair I had to prove, even to myself, that I could speak the belief in the future! Not by the making of a photograph contrived of pleasantry and symbolism, as is an insincere smile, but through the under-

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standing and the interpretation of a moment arising from the honest, pleasurable thrill of living the children were experiencing. Now, for the first time, I began to feel a little nearer to calm, my intensity was turning to the pursuit of the photograph of the children, rather than intertwined with my inner conflicts. I began to watch the children more intently, paying greater attention to studying their actions against the settings. Screening the variables, anticipating the juxtapositions of action, of feeling, of emphasis that would best show the rhythm of form and content in a complex interrelationship. And, still, to have it simple in its optical cohesiveness, direct in its message, warm in its meaning. It was a good day on which to try. A beautiful, warm spring day to cradle a man's efforts to reclaim himself. The children were scampering every which direction. I let them lead where they would, doing my best not to become lost from them; trying to follow without disrupting their thinking and actions—as if I were not there. They approached a clearing roughly arched by the trees, and I became acutely sensitive to the lines forming the scene and to the bright shower of light pouring into the opening and spilling down the path toward us. Pat saw something in the clearing, he grasped Juanita by the hand and they hurried forward. I dropped a little farther behind the engrossed children, then stopped. Painfully I struggled—almost into panic—with the mechanical iniquities of the camera . . . I composed the setting as I labored . . . tried to, and did ignore the sudden violence of pain that real effort shot again and again through my hand, up my arm, and into my spine . . . swallowing, sucking, gagging, trying to pull the ugly tasting serum inside, into

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my mouth and throat, and away from dripping down on the camera where it would obscure the clarity of the image . . . preparing, testing, checking the approaching merger of the subject factors . . . tensing tighter and tighter the delicate pressure on the shutter release, trying to anticipate in time to defeat my reaction lag . . . and, as the children stepped in space, to complete my foreseen composition, I pressed the camera release to retain the image of that instant—to hold secure on film the vision of this minute fraction of time floating within eternity. A printable reproduction of a mental realization. The reaction was immediate. I knew the photograph, though not perfect, and however unimportant to the world, had been held. Shock waves of feeling released through me, breaking damply out of my flesh. Mist hazed my eyes, I began to tremble; nearly sick, I turned away that my children who had continued on might not turn and discover I was crying—crying out from the agony of my relief. After a few seconds I slowly followed on, prepared to maneuver my back between the children and my face, until I felt capable of meeting their eyes. I was aware that mentally, spiritually, even physically, I had taken a first good stride away from those past two wasted and stifled years.

EDUARDO

TORROJA

One of Spain's most honored and accomplished contemporary architectural engineers, Torroja has pioneered in the use of reinforced and prestressed concrete. The grandstand of the New Hippodrome in Madrid is but one of his spectacular engineering feats. The concrete roof is cantilevered for a span of forty-three feet, the hyperbolic shells varying in thickness from two inches on the outer edge to sixteen feet at the point where the roof joins the wall.

NOTES ON STRUCTURAL EXPRESSION By what process is a good structural design finally evolved? Although I have been asked this question many times, I have never known what to reply and I never shall. The laws that guide our thoughts toward the conception of a new solution remain unknown to us. Undoubtedly our imagination is constrained, guided, and attracted by a complex pattern of knowledge, feeling, ideas, and desires previously experienced. But even though certain results of personal experience can be passed on to others, the nature of the experience itself cannot be fully communicated. Many concepts, previously unrecognized, are brought to consciousness and clarified by introspection. To order them into a harmonic system; to give each its just, relative

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value; to combine and balance them—without neglecting any—is an intricate and complex task. Theory, alone, seldom furnishes sufficient proof of the soundness or efficiency of the structural forms and proportions conceived for a design. These forms and proportions spring, primarily, from an intuitive vision drawn from a nucleus of all the phenomena we have studied and experienced in life. Calculations are no more than tools for determining whether the forms and dimensions of a structure are adequate to make that structure safe under specified loading conditions. Calculations serve only to ensure that the dimensions of a structure are safe. All the rest cannot be judged by deductive methods. Some calculations can be used to solve problems of economy: to determine, for example, which of two possible solutions is least expensive. The rest of the solution remains predominantly in the realms of subjective thinking and individual opinion and these are always subject to criticism and controversial judgment. Therefore, structural design is concerned not only with science and techniques, but also with art, common sense, sentiment, aptitude, and joy in creating pleasing outlines. Complex and abstruse mathematical calculations alone are not sufficient to lead to the conception of a structure or to guide the hand in tracing its outline; an intimate and intuitive comprehension of the working form is also needed. The architect should so familiarize himself with the structure that he feels part of it. He should achieve a sincere Einfühlung of the process of resistance (demonstrated by deformation), which essentially, is always united with the process of stress. To express it in more

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concise language: for the architect to comprehend a structure he must have an intuitive knowledge of the character of its resistance and of its constituent materials. When discussing the beauty of a structure it is difficult to avoid recognizing those errors of design that originate from the partial and distorted vision of the designer. The defects of a structural design generally stem from an incomplete vision of the problem, lack of judgment, or inadequate appreciation of one or several factors. On the other hand, the public's aesthetic evaluation of a building is seldom considered in relation to its basic structural design. Sometimes this basic structure is visible or constitutes the whole work, in which case it should be aesthetically good. Sometimes it is hidden, but even then it is seldom that the aesthetic value of the whole work is not influenced by the resistant forms of the internal structure. This is true of the most perfect and appealing work of Nature: unquestionably, in my opinion, the female form, whose outer beauty is greatly influenced by the perfection of the skeleton, a functional structure that is unattractive in detail but one that does enhance the poetry of the whole by its own indirect means of expression. The skeleton of the human body has not been pushed with forceps into the empty cavities between the various organs. It is something far more harmonious and reasonable. The functional purpose and the artistic and strength requirements of a structure must be integrated from the initial conception of the project. The artist should not be required at the last moment to give an artistic appearance to what is already completed; similarly, the technician's task should not be limited solely to devising means of maintaining the structure. Artistic sensibility is, then,

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as indispensable to the structural designer as technical skill, otherwise the creations of his imagination will remain in the air, like Papini's satirical Gog, who carved statues in smoke; their greatest charms were due to their transient inconsistency. "Beauty is truth" the poet said, and many infer from this that the primary essence of beauty is the perfect correlation between the real nature of the work and its apparent form. There is little doubt that in this age it is considered desirable for the outward appearance of a structure to distort the true functional and resistant phenomena hidden within. This thesis may have a timeless, essential element of truth, to which we should like to cling, but, as in everything, it is bad to exaggerate. Various factors intervene, and the middle path is the way of virtue. Never before has the load-bearing structure been so entirely independent of the whole work as in modern constructional practice. Specialization—the virtue and vice of our age—has invaded construction methods. The wall of a building may require different materials for its load-bearing frame, for its interior sound insulation, and for the surface in contact with the external environment. Yet, we shall not be liars if only this last function is revealed to the world—it is not always reprehensible to hide the whole truth. It would be a lie if the visible external expression of the load-bearing structure were purposely given a form incompatible with the laws of stability and strength, or (at the very least), inconsistent with the visible outer material. It would be false to truth to cover a reinforced concrete beam with stone slabs, so shaped as to give the impression that the transom was actually a stone structure. But it would be a gross lie if the joints between the slabs did not correspond to those

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of a load-bearing stone transom. And worse, if the transom, imitating an arch, rested on simple columns, obviously incapable of withstanding the side thrust of a stone arch. In such cases it is not the falsehood in itself that makes us indignant, but rather that an attempt has been made to deceive or to abuse our innocence. It is the artist's attempt to convey the impression that a certain state of stresses is acting on a structure—when it is intrinsically and extrinsically impossible—that is aesthetically repugnant to observers who discover the trick. It must be realized that although truthful statement is one attribute to strive for, it is not, or it has not always been, regarded as an indispensable one. To include truth as part of the aesthetic problem will further limit the possible solutions. Moreover, if the aim is also to do away with superfluous addition and ornamental frivolity, the artist's imaginative flight is curtailed. His usual resources of correcting and camouflaging the essential form of the structure are denied to him. Thus final success is even more difficult to achieve because of—or perhaps despite—more advanced techniques. To realize that this has not always been so, we need only turn to the great works of the past. They illustrate how neither truth nor sincerity was pushed to the point of requiring that a work, to be beautiful, should adapt itself strictly to the optimum dimensions dictated by the requirement for strength. Because of its particular shape the cupola of St. Peter's in Rome was unable to withstand, by virtue of its stonework alone, the tensile forces acting upon its parallel layers with the adopted directrix. Hence it was necessary initially to fit it with iron rings to bind the stonework; later these rings had to be reinforced. Since

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the fittings are not visible, nor is it likely that their existence is conceived of by the spectator, it cannot be said that the external design is a good or exact impression of the loaded structure. The fact that St. Peter's cupola is buttressed along the meridian haunches, sometimes plainly evident to the observer, does not tell us anything about the internal outline of the cupola. (The buttresses do not detract from the beauty of the'cupola.) Michelangelo knew beforehand that the shape of the cupola was a structurally weak point, but he did not hesitate to adhere to his design. The present trend seems to be toward an architectural style that aesthetically expresses the functional strength of the design. This is logical, for the strength properties of structures were never better known than today. More than ever before, we know how to exploit the properties of available materials. Hence, there are today greater opportunities to fuse the artistic and structural qualities of a work. This is especially true in those works which, because of their size and function, are entirely structural. Functionality is emphasized by avoiding all purely ornamental touches. Beauty is sought in the simple and spontaneous grace of the basic outline, in the proportion of the masses, and in the rhythm of the form. It can truly be said that today, for the first time in history, the art of structure has achieved an independent personality, so that its own intimate aesthetic quality can be appreciated. Hence, we can legitimately speak of a structural art as a fact manifested through the technical genius that permeates our contemporary social environment. The thirst for functional expression refers not only to statical and load-bearing functions. In architecture it is

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desirable that spaces and volumes (using the strange language of artists, in which space is the three-dimensional extension as seen from the interior, and volume the plastic extension viewed from the outside) express, or at least correspond to, the true purpose of each part, or to the aggregate of all parts. It is desirable that a comprehensive glance at the exterior will reveal what is contained within, includingthe purpose of the principal functional characteristics. Other eras have achieved this unwittingly, perhaps because their problems were less complex, or perhaps because ideals typical of the epoch were more deeply rooted in the social environment and in the spirit of the artist. The appropriate form of expression thus emerged spontaneously in the course of creative work. The fact remains that in our time this correlation between form and function is considered a virtue, and other symbolic ambitions are arrested, if not terminated. As regards the functional expressiveness of the structure as such (the expression of statical equilibrium and strength), one consequence, and also a proof that the artist now seeks after the very root of aesthetic quality, is his disdain of ornament. It is now considered that the structure should be beautiful in itself; no additions or trimmings are necessary. The elimination of these extraneous elements is not justified merely on the grounds of economy, although that is an increasingly important factor. Rather, it is part of an intimate desire to attain a complete solution to the total aesthetic problem. The artist does not wish to resort to these aids that are considered, if not bastard, at least not in keeping with contemporary good taste. Structures such as suspension bridges, by themselves, as simple structures, can provoke in man all the conscious

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and unconscious reflexes and reactions associated with artistic emotion. Until recently attempts to induce such reactions have not been feasible. Hence, designers have thrown themselves with abandon into the exploitation of the fresh charm of these new forms, disdaining other wellworn elements, even if their potentialities have not been exhausted. It may well be that we shall regress. It would not be the first time, in the ebb and flow of history, that superfluous things once again regain a sway previously lost. For it is the superfluous thing that we voluntarily offer. No one demands or requires it of us. It is our generous offering to the sheer joy of living. Yet it is also true, most profoundly so, that in the attainment of the purest aesthetic emotion (as in so many other things in life) simplicity is a virtue. To achieve success, with a minimum of resources, often requires a far keener artistic sense and a greater effort than if we have the help of superfluous and incidental aids. Whether this is an exaggerated attitude or not, today, structural truth is so madly worshiped that mere truth is not enough. We like to appreciate it in its integral and exclusive nakedness. To those who love intensely, everything but the loved object is superfluous; only in it is perfection found. Hence, beauty is now sought within a minimum of essential elements. The motto of our age is the Delphic inscription "Nothing unnecessary." If any ornamental theme is permitted, then it is clearly separated and contrasted with the surrounding austere simplicity, thus emphasizing the clear, sincere, unpretentious nature of the ornament, within the whole. Decoration even seeks, in a spirit that is definitely antibaroque, to minimize its own significance. It is difficult to resolve the conflict between artistic

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treatment and structural requirements of an architectural work—a conflict that is typical of, though not unique to, monumental works. We might suppose that aesthetically perfect designs would be constructed with materials of greater aesthetic and strength aptitude than the customary ones, for the use of reinforced stone, stonework resistant to tensile forces, is both feasible and sincere. Since only the external surface is visible, we might assume that the observer would be satisfied to imagine a different thickness to correct apparent lack of stability. The subject of unseen thickness is a fundamental one in construction. It might be said that it constitutes a fourth "dimension" in the interplay of volumes enclosed by the apparent enveloping surfaces. "It is this quality of depth that alone can give life to architecture," said Frank Lloyd Wright. The designer must be continually reminded of the necessity of making it easy for the observer to sense and to feel these thicknesses. The work cannot be appreciated without the fourth "dimension," essential to the very nature and beauty of the whole. Similarly, the designer must never forget that in construction it is not only what the sight encompasses that is seen, but also its extension in space. Perhaps it may not be amiss to suggest that our capacity to develop the aesthetic quality of structural harmony, in terms of different materials and its functional requirements, is as undeveloped in our time as orchestration and counterpoint were in the sixteenth century. The reason is possibly the spiritual divorce of our specialized minds. The goal of great structural engineering feats today is to emphasize the triumph and power of modern technique in the use of the materials at our disposal. An impression of power, or strength, with a simultaneous impression

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of lightness, gracefulness, and simplicity is often desired. We try to convey an impression that a bridge, which spans a great distance, will produce the same impression of flowing strength as that suggested by an athlete, who jumps without apparent effort or labored technique. Inevitably positivism, which has invaded everything with its unfortunate consequences, has also dominated the art of building. Even so, the sense of beauty has not been lost, and if we know how to interpret it, we shall learn to value this era of transition in which humanity struggles, so often mistakenly, to reach another stage in its evolution—a stage in which its most deeply felt desires shall triumph and shall find an appropriate expression in new forms and techniques of construction. When humanity can rest in its peregrinations, when it can recover that peace of mind essential for refinement of artistic feeling, when it finds leisure to repeat and elaborate its basic types, and when the present period of anxious, uncontrolled originality is over, these contemporary tendencies and ideas will mature. There is no essential reason why works will not be created as perfect as those of the classical era. For, indeed, the problems and possibilities of this age are greater than they have ever been. Translated by Jaroslav Polivka from a forthcoming book by Torroja.

CESARE

ZAVATTINI

The leading exponent of neorealism in Italian cinematography, Zavattini is both a writer and a scenarist. Among his great scenarios are Miracle at Milan, Bicycle Thief, Shoe Shine, and Umberto D. With the well-known actor-director Vittorio de Sica he has tremendously influenced the aesthetics of the Italian as well as the European cinema. He has occasionally published installments of a journal in the periodical Cinema Nuova from which the following excerpt is translated. Here are his impressions of a trip through France, Belgium, and Holland to collect material for a projected film on the life of Vincent Van Gogh. Of neorealism in the cinema Zavattini says: "I firmly believe that the world continues to fare badly because people do not know reality: and the most worthwhile task before us today is to work toward resolving as best we can the problem of understanding reality." ENCOUNTER WITH VAN

GOGH March 1, 1953

On the thirtieth of this month, one hundred years ago, Van Gogh was born at Groot-Zundert. I was in that little village on December 3, 1951.1 arrived in a Cadillac with the film producer Paul Graetz and his wife, Janine, at about sundown. There was a street with a red sun in the background, which I thought I had seen in Van Gogh's paintings at the Kroller-Miiller Museum. "Where is Van Gogh's house?" we asked. A woman who owned a variety

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store said that it had been destroyed. Perhaps the priest knew something more about it, she said. The priest was eighty-three years old, knew nothing, and sent us to a Mr. Hubert who, he thought, had information about Van Gogh. Kunst Hubert was a journalist, correspondent for an Amsterdam daily paper, if I understood him correctly; his daughter made a drawing of flowers while he talked to us about Van Gogh. "No," he said, "the house is still there and also the church where his father, Pastor John [Willem] used to preach." Hubert's boy took us to see the church. There was a slight rain; it was getting dark. He explained, while we were walking, that there are religious conflicts, just as elsewhere in Holland; the Catholics don't like Van Gogh very much; there's no street named after him, and the village council has been discussing it for about thirty years. Often tourists came through, mostly Americans, who ask about Van Gogh, and there's not even a picture postcard referring to him. Our guide lighted a match: there was the tiny cemetery, a dozen graves, next to the church. The Protestants are a small minority in GrootZundert and are becoming fewer and fewer. He struck another match and illuminated the stone on one of the graves. I read: "Vincent Van Gogh, 1853." "This Vincent was born before Vincent, he died right away," he explained. [This Vincent was still born, March 30, 1852.] He took us to a café for a vermouth (Vermouth Ansaldo, an Italian brand I didn't know). There the coat racks were made of bull horns; on the walls hung four ugly prints of Dutch landscapes. I had arrived in Amsterdam by airplane on November 28 at one o'clock in the afternoon. . . . At six in the evening I knocked (actually Graetz

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knocked) at the door of Van Gogh's nephew, in Laren. A green ivy leaf was painted on the small door. A man in his sixties let us in, lean, with white hair and a pinkish face, the son of Theo, the one of the letters, the one over whose cradle Vincent and Theo burst into tears, and Vincent said, "He has the infinite in his eyes." We passed through two or three rooms, small and low with plain wooden walls, and I searched the walls, ready for another emotional shock; but there were only modest pictures, not by Van Gogh. Suddenly, in the last room were the "Yellow House at Aries," and the "Potato Eaters." He introduced us to his family, and I saw paintings leaning against the wall, without frames, a corner of one of them was sticking out, and it was part of a sunflower. Graetz asked about the sale of the pictures after Theo's death. The nephew said his mother had sold some forty, and that also about a hundred drawings were sold on a cart in Breda for ten cents each. They invited us to a good Dutch dinner (I think we had the dinner the second time, on December 2) but without bread, what a trial; we talked about Catholics and Calvinists. In the nephew's opinion, our film should start with a Sunday in church; people were serious, important, at that time, the clergy ruled Dutch life. Who are more severe, the Catholics or the Protestants? He said the Catholics are more severe because the Calvinists had said: "Oh, the Catholics are not very strict." So now the Catholics want to outdo them. In Vincent's days, he said, the sons of pastors were known "as very wicked men." He said the Nazis had also wanted to do a film on Van Gogh, they made him proposals: it was going to start with Nazi generals and admirals who climbed an infinite row of steps, on top of which was the Van Gogh Museum, founded by the Nazis.

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He hates the Germans, who killed his son; he doesn't buy things made in Germany, he doesn't like the Italians —their allies at that time. But this I found out later, from friends. He has never sold a painting or a drawing by Vincent—only one small one, during the war, because he had to—and he owns two or three billion's worth of them; he will donate all of them to museums. He lives by his own work, and nobody dares suggest to him that he'd like to buy a painting. He made his wedding trip in a tandem to Nuenen, where the Van Goghs lived for a long time. A six-year-old niece came in to say goodnight, she wore little pink pajamas, the aunt started unexpectedly to play the piano, and the little girl danced gracefully. This lasted two minutes, then they all said "gud nacht" and the little girl kept saying "gud nacht" again and again as she withdrew. The aunt said the child and her classmates had danced for the Queen. "There's lots of dancing in Laren." On the mantel stood a small Van Gogh: a branch of cherry or almond in a vase, with a red stripe across the background. "Characters like Vincent are not rare in Holland," said the nephew, "characters that don't succeed in getting along with others. They are very individualistic here." He showed us the neat originals of Vincent's letters to Theo, and I saw the last one, before the suicide, two pages and a quarter, on graph paper. There was a letter, with some figuring on top, and the note, in pencil, in which he asks Theo to meet him at the Louvre when he arrived in Paris. There was the letter from Roulin, in which he speaks of the occasion on which he accompanied him to Saint-Remy: "See you up there, he told me." There were no objects belonging to Van Gogh, except a bronze vase, which he painted all over with redflowers.I tapped it. I saw a small

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album full of drawings never seen before, there was one that looked like the barely adumbrated head of a horse; on the same page a second drawing showed the same head stretched way out, a third drawing was even more elongated, ending up as an eel; at least, that's how I remember it. We heard off and on from the bedroom the voice of the little girl calling: "Dar." I didn't know what it meant. They all answered "dar," three or four times, without ever getting tired of it. I met the daughter of Vincent's nephew, and one son, another one studies in Paris. The daughter is the only one who studies art; she was pale with large and clear eyes. Two days later I went for a walk through Amsterdam with Van Gogh's nephew, he and I by ourselves. He wore a short overcoat, it was snowing a little, it was the eve of St. Nicholas Day. I had never seen so many children in the streets, so gay and free as though they knew that as grown-ups here in Holland they have to be more serious than elsewhere. For the same reason, perhaps, the grownups are so lenient with the children. I saw one who suddenly stopped, stood on his head, all by himself for two or three minutes, then got up and walked away without so much as looking at me. Van Gogh's nephew told me many things. I walked next to him and thought who, among my friends, would imagine that at this moment I was talking with Theo's son. Life in Holland, he said, was very hard when Vincent was born, little coal, no gas, only peat, and transportation by water. Vincent's father, neither too severe nor too lenient, he was middle of the road. He thought that in Vincent's case one can speak of masochism. However, it was not true, he said, that he cut his ear off at Aries, it was only

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a small piece of the ear. We dropped in at his office to see whether there was mail, then he took me to the Industry Club, which looks out over the square. There we stayed quietly to chat for an hour. He said that he couldn't think of the film as being without Van Gogh, a film about Van Gogh without Van Gogh. I told him that so far it was the story of the two brothers that convinced me, the story of their relationship would be the pivot. He said "Yes, but . . . and I no longer had the courage to insist. He said that he was going to publish a book on Vincent, on which he had been working for many years, in it he will say sincerely all he knows. I asked him who among the living had some connection with Vincent. "Cousin Kaj has a daughter," he said, "I met her once." Cousin Kaj, the one in Etten, the adored one, outlived him by many years, she also knew that fame began to seek out the dead man, but she had become a very happy wife. The son of Gachet, our friend, was also alive, and the son of Tersteeg, who helped Vincent, he said, but Vincent detested him. We took the streetcar to see the harbor. I was looking at this Van Gogh who said, "Tomorrow I have to take my automobile license test." I was so busy looking at him that I didn't look at the harbor. His uncle died of deprivation—he said this was exaggerated, and he showed me, in the city museum, the painting with Vincent's shoes. "They are not that worn, after all," he said. Perhaps he suffered at the thought that we might reproach Theo, his father, for not having done all he could. In my opinion, he did do all he could. The next day we went to Nuenen, where the Van Goghs lived so many years; we arrived at two in the afternoon and left at six. There, too, were ugly pictures in the restaurant. But there was the house, the presbytery, of

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which he made drawings. In the square there was a little monument to Vincent, a kind of rock with a sun engraved on it. In Vincent's house lived a Philips engineer. He, too, painted. There was the orchard and, at a distance, an open space as far as the cemetery. Where the dog now was, Vincent used to work. In the restaurant they told us that Vincent had a son in Nuenen. Someone offered to take us to the son. Others said he wasn't his son. The age would be right, sixty-five years; Vincent was supposed to have had him by a country woman, a loose woman. We arrived by car at a place half a mile from the village. "There he is," said the young man from Nuenen. A path led from the main street to a threshing floor, some peasants were yawning in the mud. There he was. He was dressed in blue linen, pipe in mouth, and he wore a kind of cap that had earmuffs. The young man called him, he came slowly toward us, they had told us that he had no idea whether or not he is Van Gogh's son: his name was Nelis de Groot, he was dry, tall, his hair was still dark, and one eye squinted a little. The young man took him aside and talked to him, and he answered in one-syllable words, his glance far away. "He says," said the young man, "he doesn't want to hear about those stories." From a shack came his wife, and she also said that her husband didn't want to hear about those stories. A dog welcomed me by jumping up on me and making me dirty. They kept on yawning, so we left. We arrived at the cemetery in the midst of a pasture and found with difficulty the abandoned grave of Vincent's father. Here, I watched the ravens rising from a field and a cart filled with black potatoes passing by, really nothing was missing. However, I was moved much more strongly when, a little later, I walked into the asylum

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for the aged at Nuenen. The mayor had not received us; there was an old man of eighty-eight there who had known Van Gogh and had had a close look at him. He said Vincent was good. He said that the story about Nelis de Groot was true; that some people accused Van Gogh of having made the woman pregnant, but Van Gogh went to the Catholic priest and protested. The old man talked in a jerky, agitated fashion, and every once in a while made a little belch. His name was Hansen van der Velden. He recalled that Vincent paid twenty-five cents a nest to the boys who climbed up the trees to take the nests that he made drawings of. Graetz offered him money, but he said he was going to die in a few months and didn't want it. Outside, we met another old man who said Van Gogh drew him when he was two years old. Some other time I will describe the rest of this trip: I saw Scheveningen, then the Borinage, Auvers-sur-Oise, Aries, Saint-Remy. The Borinage was covered with snow. At Wasmes, where the baker Denis used to live, we knocked and nobody answered. So I walked to the back of the house while Graetz kept on knocking because the neighbors said that Denis had a nephew, and, finally, there appeared a tall man in his forties with an axe in his hand. I was alarmed, but he smiled, Graetz arrived, and we went into the house. He showed us where the oven used to be and Vincent's room. His name was Jean Richer, and his house was number 221 on Wilson Street, with a plaque unveiled by the deputy Pierard. In his wallet he had worn pieces of newspaper with photographs of his uncle, the baker, when they dedicated the plaque. He lived on his veteran's pension and was so poor that he said he could never buy a newspaper. There was a little girl

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there, too, his daughter, who drew pictures in her composition book. His uncle died twenty years ago, his aunt before that. We gave a lift in our car to a police official —the border ran along here, as at Groot-Zundert—, and he said that in the Borinage there were so many Italian miners that they lowered prices, but the miners were well paid, much better than the police, he said, some even make 5,000 francs a day, they don't pay for light and heat; but he admitted that at thirty they were through. At Auvers-sur-Oise I saw three things, Gachet's son, the cemetery, and the room where Vincent died. The cemetery lies on a hill, in the midst of wheat fields and surrounded by a wall from which the bullets of an airplane have torn off the stucco. There was nobody around, not even the keeper; we forced the small gate, and below lay Auvers under the evening mists. What will I prove by seeing the graves, I thought, hoping I might not find them at once. But we found them right away, one next to the other, Vincent and Theo, covered with ivy, close to the surrounding wall. I took off my beret, but it was so cold that after a second of hesitation I put it back on. A little later we walked into the Café Ravoux, almost opposite the town hall that Vincent painted with flags. The owner was playing billiards and wanted first to make a carom, in the meantime we looked at the walls of the café covered with humorous scenes in sepia from the good old days; there was also a copy, made by a boy, of Van Gogh's selfportrait with his ear cut off. Grudgingly, the owner took us up the stairs, and we were in the room in which Vincent died: a bed, a small cupboard covered by a dirty curtain, many cigarette butts on the floor, and pieces of eyebrow pencil and lipstick on

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the wash basin. A white Russian woman about fifty— peroxide bleached hair, somewhat puffy face—lived there; she worked as a maid in the café. She smiled as we met her. Intimidated by the boss, we stayed only briefly, I was about to tear off a piece of newspaper, which must date from half a century ago, from underneath the wall cover. Vincent certainly heard the noise of the billiard balls when he was dying. He walked up the stairs pretending that nothing was wrong with him, but actually he had shot himself a quarter of an hour earlier. On the bed in his blood Gachet's son saw him, this oldster who offered us a red Martini at his home and said: "La douce France." He greatly resembles his father, with wrinkles all around his face like a rock under water, but he looks less sad. Everything was clean and orderly, pots, bronzes, beer mugs, on the mantel, on the walls, on the ceiling. Without Theo, he said, there would be no Vincent. There was a painting on the wall representing a railway accident, it was by his father. He told us the story of the hand in the pocket; that is, Vincent had the gun with him for some time, and when he quarreled with Dr. Gachet about the painting by Guillaumin—he reproached him for not yet having framed it fittingly—he put his hand in his pocket to pull the gun out. "Ah," I said, "the piano." It was Miss Gachet's piano; he confirmed it, Vincent did a portrait of her at the piano. I asked who painted the three pictures over the door. He said he painted them himself. He lived alone, his sister was dead, it pained him that people like Artaud wrote mean things against his father. "They really were great friends," he said. "But Vincent was not right in his head," he said, "from boyhood he never slept in a bed but on the floor; he had a mania

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for hurting himself." This little old man had seen Van Gogh die, and he was drinking with me, and I am from Luzzara. I had the feeling that this trip is the film on Van Gogh, but we must hurry, before old Hannes dies and they whitewash the room of the Ravoux; I should also call on the daughter of Vincent's sister, she is sixty-five and apparently lives in Marseille. Vincent's sister "got into trouble," as they say, but Vincent was very fond of her and wrote to her: love, love ever more, that's what counts. Graetz told me that when Jean Aurenche went to Gachet, Jr., the door was opened by Gachet's sister—very old, dressed in black, Aurenche said he had come about the film, and the old woman said: "Make films about the living, not about the dead!" I went to Aries with Aurenche on the 16th. We arrived at dawn, and the coachman drove us to a square and did not want to tell us which was better the Hotel Northern or the Pine. We urged him in vain, so we went to the Pine, and in the lobby, there was a vulgar painting with old damask on the frame and a lamp that lighted it. There was a guestbook for famous people and I saw the signatures and comments of Baldwin, Mistinguette, Sessue Hayakawa. I read it all, but never, absolutely never, Van Gogh's name, nobody ever mentioned him. The sun came out, and we went to the Rhone where a boat passed us, the "Mont Blanc," the one that Van Gogh saw, it made an enormous noise; and I thought I was dreaming because a few yards away there was also the drawbridge, without lifting mechanism, the bridge of the washerwomen, with the emerald sky. I went up to the captain and got confirmation that the "Mont Blanc" was Van Gogh's "Mont Blanc"; by then she had disappeared in the other arm of the river, but the noise still reached us.

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I walked through the streets of brothels destroyed in the war; some pieces of walls were still standing, with here and there a window with iron gratings. The house where Vincent entertained Gauguin was also down by a bomb. Then we went to Saint-Remy and took the route that Vincent traveled in the coach, sitting between Roulin and Pastor Sally. The gate opened. The doctor, Leroy, let us look up the register of 1889. Before Van Gogh, a traveling salesman was admitted; the day of Van Gogh's discharge it said, next to his name, written in fine, big letters, "Cured." The wife made coffee for us while the daughter was ironing. They talked familiarly about Van Gogh. Only madwomen are there now; the wing where Vincent stayed has been torn down. Leroy said it was a question of intermittent psychosis. He said that Theo drank and died of a kidney ailment, which I didn't know. We could see the blue alpilles and the olive trees with their ancient murmur. The next morning I left Aries for Italy; through the station blew the mistral that used to shake Van Gogh's easel. "Incontro con Van Gogh," by Cesare Zavattini, originally published in Cinema Nuovo, Vol. II, No. 7 (March 15, 1953), 167-168, 188. Translated by Rudolf Arnheim.