Signac invented the corn-colored sun.
The woman who explains the pictures leads the culture and education officials behind her.
To look at them, you’d say a magnet was attracting a duck.
Ozenfant worked out something surprising by using red chalk and slate-grey squirrels on a black slate background and modulating the forms of glass blowing and fragile laboratory equipment.
You would also be greeted by Picasso’s dark-blue Jew and Pissarro’s raspberry-grey boulevards, flowing like the wheels of an immense lottery with their little boxes of hansom cabs, their fishing-pole-whips pitched on their shoulders, and the shreds of splashed brain on the kiosks and chestnut trees.
But perhaps you’ve had enough?
Generalization is already waiting, bored, at the door.
To anyone recuperating from the harmless plague of naïve realism I would recommend the following method of looking at pictures.
Under no circumstances go in as if into a chapel. Don’t be thrilled or chilled, and don’t get glued to the canvas . . .
With a stroller’s stride, as on a boulevard—straight on!
Cut through the large heat waves of the space of oil painting.
Calmly, without getting excited—the way Tatar children bathe their horses in Alushta—lower your eye into what will be for it a new material environment—and remember that the eye is a noble, but stubborn, animal.
Standing before a picture to which the body heat of your vision has still not adjusted itself, for which the crystalline lens has not yet found the single suitable accommodation, is exactly like singing a serenade in a fur coat behind a double set of windows.
When that equilibrium has been attained, and only then, begin the second stage of restoring the picture, the washing of it, removing its old peel, its outer and most recent barbaric layer, the stage that links it, as it does every work of art, to a sunny, solid reality.
With its extremely subtle acidic reactions, the eye, an organ that possesses its own acoustics, augmenting the value of the image, exaggerating its own achievements to a degree that offends the senses and then making a great fuss over it, raises the picture to its own level; for painting is much more a matter of internal secretion than of apperception, that is, of external perceiving.
The material of painting is organized in such a way that nobody altogether loses, and that is its distinction from nature. But the probability of a lottery is inversely proportional to its feasibility.
And it is only here that the third and final stage of entering a picture begins—confronting the intention behind it.
And that traveler, the eye, presents his ambassadorial credentials to the consciousness. And then a cold agreement is reached between the viewer and the picture, something rather like a state secret.
From the embassy of painting I went out into the street.
Right after having left the Frenchmen, the light seemed to me the phase of a waning eclipse, while the sun itself was wrapped in silver foil.
At the entrance of the cooperative stood a mother with her son. The boy was emaciated, respectful. Both were in mourning. The woman was sticking a bunch of radishes into her reticule.
The end of the street, as if crushed by a pair of binoculars, swerved off into a squinting lump; and all of this—distant and deceptive [lipovyi]15—was stuffed into a string bag.
AROUND THE NATURALISTS
Lamarck fought sword in hand for the honor of living nature. Do you think he reconciled himself to evolution as easily as did the scientific barbarians of the nineteenth century? But I think embarrassment for nature burnt the swarthy cheeks of Lamarck. He could not forgive nature for a trifle called the variability of species.
Forward! Aux armes! Let us wash ourselves clean of the dishonor of evolution.
Reading the taxonomists (Linnaeus, Buffon, Pallas) has a soothing effect on the disposition, straightens out the eye, and communicates to the soul a mineral quartz tranquillity.
Russia as depicted by that remarkable naturalist Pallas: peasant women distill the dye “mariona” from a mixture of birchleaves and alum; the bark of the linden tree peels off on its own to become bast, to be woven into shoes and baskets; the peasants use a thick petroleum as medicinal oil; the Chuvash girls jingle with trinkets in their tresses.
Whoever does not love Haydn, Gluck, and Mozart will never understand a thing in Pallas.
He transformed the corporeal roundness and graciousness of German music to the Russian plains. With the white hands of a Konzertmeister he collects Russian mushrooms. Damp chamoisskin, decayed velvet, but when you break it open, it’s a pure, deep blue.
Let us speak of the physiology of reading. It is a rich, inexhaustible, and, it would seem, forbidden theme. Out of everything material, of all physical bodies, a book is the object that inspires man with the greatest confidence. A book established on a reading stand is like a canvas stretched on a frame.
When we are completely rapt in the activity of reading, we mainly admire our generic properties, we feel a kind of exaltation at the classification of our own various stages.
But if Linnaeus, Buffon, and Pallas colored my mature years, it is the whale I thank for having awakened in me a childish astonishment at science.
In the zoological museum: drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . Practically nothing in the way of empirical experience.
Time to turn off that tap!
Enough!
I have concluded a truce with Darwin and placed him on my imaginary bookstand next to Dickens. If they should happen to dine together, Mr. Pickwick would join them as a third. One can’t help being taken by Darwin’s good nature. He is an unintentional humorist. The humor of situation is habitual to him, accompanies him wherever he goes.
But is good nature a method of creative cognition, a worthy means of life-probing?
In Lamarck’s reversed, descending movement down the ladder of living creatures, there is a greatness worthy of Dante. The lower forms of organic existence are the hell of humanity.
The long grey antennae of this butterfly had a bristly structure and looked just like the little branches on a French academician’s collar or like the silver palm fronds placed on a coffin. The powerful thorax is shaped like a little boat. The slight head is like a kitten’s.
Its wings with their big eyes were made of the fine old silk of an admiral who had been both at Cesme and Trafalgar.
And suddenly I caught myself wildly desiring to have a look at nature through the painted eyes of that monster.
Lamarck feels the gaps between species. He hears the pauses and the syncopation in the evolutionary series.
Lamarck wept his eyes out over his magnifying glass. In natural science he is the only Shakespearean figure.
Look—that blushing, semirespectable old man goes running down the staircase of living creatures like a young man who has just been treated kindly at an audience with a government minister or made happy by his mistress.
No one, not even the most inveterate mechanist, regards the growth of an organism as resulting from the variability of the external environment. That would be entirely too presumptuous. The environment merely invites the organism to grow. Its functions are expressed in a certain benevolence which is gradually and continually canceled by the severity that holds the living body together and finally rewards it with death.
So, for the environment, the organism is probability, desire, and expectancy. For the organism, the environment is a force that invites. Not so much a surrounding cover as a challenge.
When the conductor draws a theme out of the orchestra with his baton, he is not the physical cause of the sound. The sound is already there in the score of the symphony, in the spontaneous collusion of the performers, in the crowdedness of the auditorium, and in the structure of the musical instruments.