834
PARTISAN REVIEW
This explains the hodge-podge that, in spite of misleading inter–
pretations, is inscribed on the muddy banner of so-called
cubism.
Together with volumes that seem to accord major emphasis to the
rotundity of bodies, Picasso, in his most typical and scandalous pic–
tures, breaks up the closed form of an object and, in pure Euclidian
planes, exhibits their fragments-an eye-brow, a mustache, a nose–
without any purpose other than to serve as a symbolic cipher for
ideas.
This equivocal cubism is only a special manner within contem–
porary expressionism. In the impression, we reached the minimum of
exterior objectivity. A new shift in the point of view was possible
only if, leaping behind the retina- a tenuous frontier between the
external and internal- painting completely reversed its function and,
instead of putting us within what is outside, endeavored to pour out
upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented objects. Note how,
by a simple .advance of the point of view along the same trajectory
it has followed from the beginning, it arrives at an inverse result. The
eyes, instead of absorbing things, are converted into projectors of pri–
vate flora and fauna. Before, the real world drained off into them;
now, they are reservoirs of irreality.
It is possible that present-day art has little aesthetic value; but
he who sees in it only a caprice may be very sure indeed that he has
not understood either the new art or the old. Evolution has conducted
painting-and art in general-inexorably, fatally, to what it is today.
XIV
The guiding law of the great variations in painting is one
of disturbing simplicity. First things are painted; then, sensations;
finally, ideas. This means that in the beginning the artist's attention
was fixed on external reality; then, on the subjective; finally, on the
intrasubjective. These three stages are three points on a straight line.
Now, Occidental philosophy has followed an identical route,
and this coincidence makes our law even more disturbing.
Let us annotate briefly this strange parallelism.
The painter begins by asking himself what elements of the
universe ought to be translated on to canvas, that is, what class of
phenomena .are pictorially essential. The philosopher, for his part,
asks what class of objects is fundamental. A philosophical system is an
