236
PA RT
I S
A N REV I E.W
But the fault goes deeper; and what I reproach painters with is not so
much that they created the fault, as that they have not been able to
shield us from it.
It
is mine, it is yours; it is the fault of a whole era
unfit for mystery to the point of refusing to recognize it where it is
manifest or,
if
I may say so, where it is flagrantly obvious.
I am not even thinking of a State which dispenses integral education
(whether in the field of ethics or poetry), organizes leisure (when
leisure, by its very nature, must elude regimentation), makes legal status
a matter of such consequence that even cows and ducks must have their
classification; which demands a declaration of our diseases (even if they
be secret ones), and evidently has no other ideal than to constrain us
to live and to love in little glass houses. I do not think about it because
it is not my business. The Fine Arts are under discussion here, and
another example will be even more striking; specifically the example
of houses.
It is quite true that the modem houses-those of Le Corbusier for
example-are pleasant and beautiful; that they are filled with light
and air; that one feels pleasure sitting at the window watching people
pass by; listening (through the walls) to the neighbors' fights, raising
gold fish. In short, they are excellent living machines; and the latest
model, it seems, even offers a system of screws and pulleys whereby the
house can be turned with the sun. Truly there is but one thing missing.
A single thing, so small that it has been possible to overlook it: a dark
and hidden corner, preferably a dirty one, where the tenant can on
occasion withdraw and think of nothing. For man is so made that he
has in himself that which sometimes rejects the sun or the neighbors,
and vomits out the State, nature, all logic and common sense....
Did I say that indiscretion was the defect of painting today? In
any case that is its danger. It is a danger that the old masters seem to
have known little of; it gives to the best among the modems, as soon
as they have been able to avoid it, some new and undefinable grandeur
and weight. For in times past, it was enough for a
painte~
to possess a
secret. Today he must have something even rarer, doubtless more diffi–
cult, and which in other times related to metaphysics or religion; yet, so
vital that if it is absent, his means seem meager, his design artificial, his
colors thin, his very subject paltry and mean. . . . This is what I want
to call the sense of the hidden. It is the sense which is so obviously
lacking in Ingres or David and which Goya possesses; which is lacking
in Degas or Bonnard and present in Braque and Rouault. In failing to
take this sense of the hidden into consideration, aesthetic treatises become
frivolous books.
(Translated by Mary Guggenheim)
