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PARTISAN REVIEW
jects in space, and colors. Fusion, the later phase, is that in which
the colors fuse into one ground-tone and the elements that were previ–
ously treated individually and contrastingly are subordinated to the
structural totality, often becoming elusive and intangible-and now
Brinckmann speaks of "the abandonment of a state of tension in
favor of a higher freedom." Wherever the word "freedom" crops up
it all becomes obscure, and at this point I have difficulty in following
him.
However, Brinckmann has made an extremely fascinating analy–
sis of several painters who painted a subject first in their youth and
then again in old age. He places the periods of change in the struc–
ture of productivity in the thirty-fifth and sixtieth years, and in this
claims to be following Freud. Brinckmann is, furthermore, the only
writer who, still following Freud, touches on the relationship between
sexuality and artistic productivity. Although this problem is at this
moment and at this point rather a digression, I should like to mention
it. Such a relationship does undoubtedly exist, although it is extremely
obscure. Everyone knows there are a great many artists of the first
rank who are homoerotic and in whose work this divergence from
normal sexuality does not become apparent. Take four of the greatest
minds in
all
Western culture, say Plato, Michelangelo, Shakespeare
and Goethe: two were notoriously homosexual, one may have been,
and only Goethe seems to have been free from abnormality. And
then on the other hand there is the asexual type of genius: you may
remember Adolf Menzel's celebrated testament, from which it ap–
pears that in
all
his ninety years of life he never once had intercourse
with a woman. We still know nothing about the link between the
lessening of the sexual urge and the falling off of creativeness. We all
know that at the age of seventy-five Goethe fell in love with Ulrike
and wanted to marry her. Or there is the almost grotesque situation
that Gide describes in his journals: in Tunis, at the age of seventy–
two, he fell in love with a fifteen-year-old Arab boy, and he describes
the rapturous nights that reminded him of the fairest years of his
youth. There is something positively embarrassing about his enrap–
tured confession that when he first saw the boy, who was a servant
in his hotel, he was so overcome by his exquisiteness and shyness that
he did not dare to speak to him. Gide at seventy-two in a Gretchen
situation! The problem is interesting, but there is as yet no way of
