REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS
167
Since an interview ought to be clear, I am going to use a
symbol, at the risk of being somewhat blunt. My answer is, Michel–
angelo. A great deal has been said about the dehumanization of art
and the return to barbarity. Assuredly, the savage
arts
have made
their entrance into our domain. But if we draw up a list of the
painters who owe their resurrection to our last fifty years, we find
among them El Greco, Vermeer, Piero della Francesca, Dumesnil
de La Tour. It isn't only the fetish that we have revived, but one
of the greatest styles of the Occident as well.
The universe created by Cezanne is not a universe of fetishes.
What is more, even though the influence of Michelangelo and
Rembrandt is nil in painting today, both still exist for us as high
cultural values. What our resuscitated painters have in common, to
some extent, with the figures of Chartres, Rembrandt and Michel–
angelo, what the two last-named expressed in the highest degree,
has no equivalent, either in America or in the Soviet Union. And
whether we call it the will to transcendence or by some other name,
we know exactly what they stand for as soon as we think of them.
A word of warning. I am not saying that I want our painters
to make pseudo-Rembrandts and our sculptors pseudo-Michelangelos!
The values we are talking about here obviously are only expressed
by a series of metamorphoses. The successor to the sculptors of
Chartres is Rembrandt, and I don't know any more than you do
who may be the successor to Rembrandt. The only one who does,
perhaps, is the artist himself.
Let us sum up: under the heading of culture, I see nothing
that might be opposed to Europe which has already outdistanced
it. I am not suggesting that we live on our Michelangelo capital.
I am saying that the heroic and tragic resonance of Europe is not
dead and that Europe's role is to conquer a new incarnation.
Recently it was said that there were no "cultures" but only
one single civilization that would perpetuate itself by progressing
from its origin.
2
This is word-juggling. Even if there were but one
civilization, Egyptian culture would not be Chinese culture.
It is clear that the question of our civilization has been raised,
but it seems obvious to me that to look upon it the way we look
upon all vanished cultures (Egyptian or Roman, for example) is
2 Refers to a statement made by lIya Ehrenbourg.
