ART CHRONICLE
85
the development I had won in the exercise of this freedom before the
spectacle of nature from the very moment of my setting forth.
"A return to nature, however, is an almost necessary recipe for the
verification of what one has accomplished during his trip. In my own
case I became a cubist. Shortly afterwards I found myself no longer
a fanatical cubist. But what I learned from my freedom shows in my
work even today.
"But when I say 'freedom
vis-a-vis
nature' I do not mean the free–
dom we find in the paintings of children, the mentally unbalanced, or
the so-called 'modern primitives.' These are not free; they are cut off
from some of the richest assets of the heritage of art. Of course I do not
speak here of frauds. But there is a wide vogue today for the work of
children and sincere naive painters. Perhaps this interest in them and
so many other things associated with early stages of culture is an indi–
cation of the opening of a new cultural cycle. But
if
work such as that
of 'modern primitives' has its interest as a sign of the times, it has no
value as art of the times, that is to say, as a contribution to the Great
Stream. Just as in the case of children's paintings, we have a lesson to
leam from their sensibility, but not from their achievement. Even Rous–
seau, le Douanier, falls into that class. He was the most gifted of them,
but nothing more in the way of expression."
Sweeney :
"But what of your own interests in primitive art and
antiquities?"
L ipchitz :
"I distinguish in myself two men: a collector and a
workman.
If
the collector likes a work of art that need not influence the
workman; nor should the workman's resistance to earlier works of art
interfere with the collector's interests.
"As a workman I feel I must keep before me that ideal of the great
river which is always being added to and always changing and can never
be arrested. And it is individual creative freedom which alone feeds it.
Another characteristic sign of the tendency to regression which colors
our age is the current talk of collective production. I am frankly against
it. I am a partisan of the individual. Not that I would not like to see
studios of artists working together, but I do not feel that their products
would reach a high level of value ·in our days. We are no longer in the
Middle Ages. On the other hand, I find every individual manifestation
in art of an inestimable value. Each individual brings elements which
are his own and which contribute to the enrichment of all. This is why
I am a sworn enemy of every effort in our days to regiment art. We
must let the main current flow without direction.
"But if I am against collective art, it is the collective production of
the individual works of art, not against such a collective expression as
might be embodied in the ideal architectural conception. Architecture
was once considered the greatest of the arts. Why? Certainly not on
account of the bleak, stripped cubicles produced by the European func-
