ART CHRONICLE
93
break of such a war call for a certain auditing of accounts? The recent .,
(Qnns of the so-called realist schools, which for me embraced both im–
pressionism and cubism, seemed to have lost their vitality. It was then
that that characteristic which so many had treated disdainfully and lazily
as
'literature' began to come to the surface.
"On my return to Paris in 1922, I was agreeably surprised to find
a new artistic group of young men, the surrealists, rehabilitating to some
degree that term of abuse in the period before the war, 'literary painting.'
What had previously been regarded as a weakness was now encouraged.
Some did go to the extreme of giving their work a frankly symbolic
character, others adopted a baldly literary approach. Bu·t the regrettable
part was that the art of this period offered so much less evidence of
V
natural talent and technical mastery than the heroic period before 1914.
"As
I was not yet fully acquainted with surrealist art in 1922, I
had the impression of rediscovering in it what I myself had felt at once
darkly and concretely between the years 1908 and 1914. But why, thought
I, is it necessary to proclaim this would-be automatism? Fantastic or
illogical as the construction of my pictures may seem, I would be alarmed
to think I had conceived them through an admixture of automatism.
If
I
put Death in the street and the violinist on the roof in my 190S picture,
or if, in another painting of 1911,
Moi et le Village,
I had placed a little
cow with a milk-maid in the head of a big cow, I did not do it by
'automatism.'
"Even if by automatism one has succeeded in composing some good
v
pictures or in writing some good poems, that does not justify us in setting
it up as a _method. Every thing in art ought to reply to every movement
in
our blood, to all our being, even our unconscious. But every one'
who has painted trees with blue shadows cannot be called an impres–
sionist. For my part, I have slept well without Freud. I confess I have
v
not read a single one of his books; I surely will not do it now. I am /
afraid that as conscious method, automatism engenders automatism.
And if I am correct in feeling that the technical mastery of the 'realist
period' is now on the decline, then surely the automatism of surrealism
is
being stripped rather naked.''
jAMEs joHNSON SwEENEY
II
Painters' Objects
The study of the beautiful is a duel in which
the artist cries out in terror before he
1
is
vanquished.-Baudelaire
We know there is something odd, we might almost say
unnatural,
about the conception of
abstract art.
... We have accepted its existence
