MODERN PAINTING
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emerges clearly from their words and their doctrine, in fine, from their
great discovery.
'
For they have made a discovery. They have found nothing less than"
the secret of painting. However, they promptly proved themselves un–
equal to their discovery. Therefore, we must conclude that they were
not altogether worthy (or was it the intoxication of discovery that carried
them away?) . Juan Gris, for one, aptly observed that there was no
classical work which did not hide a scrupulously elaborated calculation
of design, relief and golden sectors. But Juan Gris himself was not
always able to disguise his own calculations. Delaunay rightly pointed
out that a beautiful painting always murmurs some cosmic rhythm; but
Delaunay does not whisper his rhythms at all; he utters them aloud;
truth to tell, he shouts them. Fernand Leger justly supposes that a
canvas is necessarily filled with delicate allusions to spheres and cubes;
but Fernand Leger, though he has color sense, does not, on the other
hand, have the gift of delicate allusion. By means of diagrams and plans,
Andre Lhote has admirably established the fact that the great landscape
composition of Rubens or of Breughel suggests a whole gearing of cylin–
ders and cones on a helicoidal background. I willingly admit that. But
I fear that the canvasses of Andre Lhote sometimes resemble theorems
rather than suggestions. In short, painters between 1900 and 1920 discov–
ered that good painting had always had its secret implications. And they
hastened, these painters, to shout them from the house-tops. They did
not see fit to guard their secret and to cherish it. And for this reason
their work looks so unfinished.
For, if I may say so, an allusion that one explains no longer has
the charm of an allusion. A secret that one shouts from the house-tops
obviously no longer has the virtue of a secret.
If
cones and cylinders give
Rubens such charm, it may be quite simply because they are cones and
cylinders; but above all, their effectiveness may rest in the fact that no
one recognizes them as such. And I do not have to go very far to find
the proof: for the angles, the spirals and even the mobile planes which
Matila Ghyka, Powers or Funck-Heller so shrewdly substitute for the
Holy Family or for the "Arm Chair Madonna" are far from offering
the faintest beginning of charm. It is certainly curious to find the curve
of the Medievals in the Madonnas of Gleizes. But in the Medievals,
the curve made a splendid rainbow whereas in Gleizes it is only a poor
little curve. That is the danger of indiscretion.
I have heard it said that painters need not concern themselves with
clear reasoning, that that is not their function, but rather that they
should bring the logicians and the men of intellect to acknowledge all
that transcends human intelligence and human reason. Most assuredly!
