P.A RT
I S
A N RE
V I EW
"Little by little I turned from dependence on hallucinations to
forms suggested by physical elements, but still quite apart from realism.
In 1933, for example, I used to tear newspapers into rough shapes and
paste them on cardboards. Day after day I would accumulate such
shapes. After the collages were finished they served me as points of
departure for paintings. I did not copy the collages. I merely let them
suggest shapes to me. . . .
"Between the years 1938 and 1940 I once again became interested
in realism. Perhaps the interest began as early as 1937 in 'Still Life With
Old Shoe.' Perhaps the events of the day, particularly the drama of
the war in Spain, made me feel that I ought
to
soak myself in reality. I
used to go every day to the Grande Chaumiere to work from a model.
At the time I felt a need to control things by reality.
"This realistic discipline gave me the strength to take a fresh
stride-much as the discipline of cubism had given me the courage
earlier....
"At Varengeville-sur-Mer, in 1939, began a new stage in my work
which had its source in music and nature. It was about the time that
the war broke out. I felt a deep desire to escape. I closed myself within
myself purposely. The night, music, and the stars began to play a major
role in suggesting my paintings. Music had always appealed to me, and
now music in this period began to take the role poetry had played in
the early twenties-especially Bach and Mozart when I went back to
Majorca upon the fall of France.
"Also the material of my painting began to take a new importance.
In water colors I would roughen the surface of the paper by rubbing it.
Painting over this roughened surface produced
~urious
chance shapes.
Perhaps my self-imposed isolation from my colleagues led me to turn
for suggestions to the materials of my art. First to the rough surfacP.s of
the heavy burlap series of 1939; then to ceramics-
"Nowadays I rarely start a picture from an hallucination as I
did in the twenties, or, as later, from collages. What is most interesting
to me today is the material I am working with. It supplies the shock
which suggests the form just as cracks in a wall suggested shapes to
Leonardo.
"For this reason I always work on several canvases at once. I start
a canvas without a thought of what it may eventually become. I put
it aside after the first fire has abated. I may not look at it again for
months. Then I take it out and work at it coldly like an artisan, guided
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