CZESLAW MILOSZ
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laconicisms, abbreviations, and concern for new discoveries in present–
ing the proportions of observed material. To put it metaphorically: if the
description of a blade of grass has become problematic, is there room
left for a panorama including people, animals, the rising and the setting
of the sun? This condition, however, feels like an unbearable constric–
tion of the terrain of poetry, and efforts at escaping from the chalk cir–
cle are a fundamental feature of the period in which we are now living.
It's the same in painting, with all due respect for the differences
between these two branches of art. Picasso's exhibition in London,
which allowed us to become acquainted with the work he did during the
war, can serve as an example. We can admire this wartime Picasso who
remains distant from classicism, who still operates with the most blatant
deformation, or we can criticize him in the name of social and aesthetic
puritanism, which does not permit placing a platter of herring on a
woman's head instead of a hat. Still, we must take into consideration the
intensity of the passion that speaks to us from those canvases. Irony, dis–
gust, mockery, rage are too clearly present, their intention of screaming
out a cry of protest through form and color is too evident for us not to
notice. This is an effort to expand the possibilities of the painter's
tongue, to sing a new Sophoclean tragedy in the language of Hottentots.
Last winter I spent a great deal of time in Feliks Topolski's London
studio. Looking at his albums of drawings, "Great Britain in War" and
"Russia in War," and also at his canvases in which masses of people of
all races cluster together, propelled by the rhythm of the events that vis–
ited five continents, I thought that painting's road back to emotions and
human passions is profoundly justified and that artists again have
before them the prospect of hope, which had apparently vanished.
Let us not deceive ourselves. This is a period of temptations. Plenty
of fluent, patriotic, ideological poems whose words ring out, whisper,
and stupefy are bound to appear. No doubt there are already painters
who, citing murky conversations about realism, are prepared to remind
us, to represent, to immortalize. Let us leave those whitewashed graves
of theirs to their proper fate. A true resolution of this issue will take
place among people who understand that more than poetry's enrich–
ment with assonance separates us from Romanticism and that one can
no longer paint as if Cezanne had never existed.
Some revolutions, despite their use of slogans aimed against the past,
are truer to the past than might be imagined, considering the way they
swear that they are beginning anew. The so-called poetic avant-garde
has created out of the poet a creature with a head covered with mathe–
maticallumps, with exceptionally large lenses for its eyes, and suffering
