Alchemizing Exile: Part Three

Artist’s note: The “Transplanted” series focuses on narratives of me cohabiting, visiting, or waiting for famous artists. By inserting myself into the painting, I point out the irony of living with an artist’s work and subjecting myself to their influence, while, at the same time, it is I who determine how much space is between us, as I appropriate what the artist may have been reluctant to give. I use historical research to choose vistas or scenes of domestic life from the artists’ eras, into which I subtly insert myself. “Who are you,” an artist might say. “I am Alexandra, your friend and confidant. I have primed your canvas and got your palate ready. You were just about to say?”

Writer’s note: This is one of a series of experiments in which the words are those of a well-known artist but the juxtaposition of statements is my own. I allow myself to edit: to cut, to retranslate, to paraphrase, and change tenses. I use a diagonal slash— / —to mark the end of every quote. Where there’s a paragraph break, I don’t use the diagonal slash at the end of the last sentence, but the break marks the start of the next quote. Ideally a transition should generate a spark, a small explosion, of the type you find in a good haiku. I don’t want to pay tribute; I want to probe the artist’s psyche. With this raw material, I want to reimagine their period and to generate new structures.

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Pablo Picasso, In His Own Words

Two boys arrived yesterday with a pebble they said was the head of a dog and I pointed out that it was really a typewriter./ Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up./ You should have an idea of what it is you want to do, but it should be a vague idea./ When we love a woman, we don’t start measuring her limbs./ Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of birds? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But where art is concerned people think they must understand.

It’s my misfortune—and probably my delight—to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don’t go with a basket of fruit!/ Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich. But when I am alone with myself, I haven’t the “courage” to consider myself an artist, in the ancient sense of that word./ If only we could be in the position of those men who did the drawings at Lascaux and Altimira!/ I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money./ It isn’t necessary to paint a man with a gun. An apple can be just as revolutionary.

In the old days, pictures advanced toward their completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions: I make a picture, then I destroy it./ A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes, as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives only through the person who is looking at it.

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who—thanks to their art and intelligence—transform a yellow spot into the sun./ I’m always doing things I’ve never done before, that’s how I get to do them./ Give me a museum and I’ll fill it./ I can paint fake Picassos as well as anybody.

Art is something subversive. It’s something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order./ Why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. Is he that way because he wants to be? No, he can’t be any other way./ I don’t work from nature, I work like nature./ God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style; He just goes on trying other things.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web./ Never copy yourself, always copy someone else./ All that we dream can be real./ When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine./ Nothing can be done without solitude. I’ve created my own solitude which nobody suspects./ Titian, Rembrandt, and Goya were the great painters. I am only a public clown.

If only people would realize above all that an artist works from necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can’t explain them./ When I enter the studio, I leave my body at the door the way the Moslems leave their shoes when they enter the mosque./ It is important to remember that great things have no fear of time. We’ve got to let go of the idea that what we want to manifest has to be done on our time schedule.

Art is a blindman’s profession./ That inspiration comes does not depend on me. The only thing I can do is make sure it catches me working./ It takes a long time to become young./ All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superfluous things. I expend mine only on one./ Sex and art are the same thing./ Lord, protect me from what I want!/ Every positive value has its price in negative terms. The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima./ You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on. 

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Henri Matisse, In His Own Words

1

I see with horror that the “Salon Automne” is looming, for I haven’t got, and won’t have, all I meant to be able to show there. The big still life—“Harmony in Red”—has taken up so much of my time./ I tell myself one can’t hope to be fast as well as good./ The artist must see all things as if he had never seen them before. Until his death, he must see as he did when he was a child./ Ever since we humans have existed, we have given ourselves over to too little joy. That alone, my friends, is our original sin. How could I believe in any God who isn’t interested in learning how to dance?/ We should view ourselves with the same curiosity with which we’d study a new species of plant, with the same amazement with which we’d view the Milky Way, because we too are linked to the whole cosmos.

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul./ I might be satisfied for a few moments with a painting finished at one sitting. but I would soon get bored. Instead, I prefer to continue adding and subtracting and reimagining and editing so that I can later recognize the painting as the hard won work of my mind./ To grasp a work in this way doesn’t mean that it won’t push back. The painting might not want to be owned./ The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art. “Hello History, may I introduce these signs.” / Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue.

From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it wants to eat./ The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning that leaps from the mystery of the object. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature—the shock./ Rules have no existence outside of individuals: otherwise a good professor would be as great a genius as Racine./ You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. The urge has to be within you, as urge for alcohol is for an alcoholic or the urge for sex for a lover.

Do I believe in God? Yes, when I’m working, when I feel myself to be helped by someone who causes me to do things, things that go beyond my capabilities. However, I can’t acknowledge him because it’s if I were to watch a magician whose sleights of hand elude me. I don’t like being fooled./ When I came in here to work this morning, I had no emotion, so I took a horseback ride. When I returned I felt like painting and had all the emotion I wanted./ An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, a prisoner of style, a prisoner of his friend’s opinions, a prisoner of success./ This is why journeys are useful; they enlarge the space that is around us./ This is why I took trips from Paris to Corsica, to Saint-Tropez, to Collioure, and finally, when I’d had enough of the War to End All Wars, when I couldn’t bear to look, to Nice./ I am made of all that I have seen.

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which lies hidden in reality./ As Delacroix like to say,“Exactitude is not truth.”/To paint an autumn landscape, I will not try to remember what colors are supposed to suit this season, I’ll only be prompted by the sensation the season gives me. The icy clarity of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the shift to a minor key among the tones of the of the leaves. The sensation itself may vary: the autumn may be soft and warm like a summer that doesn’t want to end or cool with a gray sky and lemon-yellow trees that warn of an early winter.

At each stage I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next sitting, if I find that there is a weakness in the whole, I make my way back into the picture by means of this very weakness—I re-enter through the breach—and I reconceive the whole. Thus the elements once more become fluid./ I’ve always tried to hide my efforts. Why should anyone waste their time with figuring out my emotions? Whatever my doubts, however difficult the labor, I want my works to have the light joyousness of spring./ I’ve been no more than a medium, as it were.

2

I didn’t expect to recover from my second operation. My cancer is in remission. Since I did recover, though, I consider that I’m living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift, and I make sure to take it that way. I accept the gift gratefully without looking much beyond it. I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise in the morning, of being able to work a little bit./ I’m forced to transpose until finally my picture may seem completely changed. After successive modifications, see how the red has succeeded the green as the dominant color./ A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful./ Six feet of red were just enough for “The Red Studio” but far too much for my patron, Sergei Schukin./ Then a moment comes when all the parts have found their definite relationships. From then on, it would be impossible for me to add a stroke without having to repaint the painting entirely.

Is a detail useful to the picture? If not, it is harmful, just like a third leg. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety: any superfluous detail would replace some other key detail in the mind of the observer./ It has bothered me all my life that I don’t paint like everyone else./ Time extracts various values from a painter’s work. When these values are exhausted, the world view is used up and most pictures are forgotten.

In our daily lives, everything we see is distorted by our habits. This may be more so in an age like ours, when cinema posters and magazines present us with a flood of ready-made images, which are to the human eye what Pavlov’s bells are to the minds of dogs./ A certain blue enters the soul./ Love wants to rise, not to be held down. He who loves flies, runs, rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back from jumping into space./ Painting must be used for something other than painting./ For me, it’s all in the conception. I must therefore have a clear vision of the whole from the beginning./ When a painting is finished, it’s like a new born child, and the artist must take time to catch his breath, to drift back to that small moment of conception, to wonder at what he’s done.

 I don’t repudiate any of my paintings; no, but there isn’t one of them I wouldn’t want to redo. My destination is always the same; I work out different routes to get there./ I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black./ There’s nothing clinically wrong with me, only an emotional imbalance—I pass too quickly from the wildest enthusiasm to the deepest despair./ Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the war an artist wages with his medium. Which one is going to win?/ Never ruin a good painting with the truth.

A composer—I think Berlioz—once said: In art, reality begins where one’s grasp on reality is lost. I could not agree—with some reservations—more. What remains is then an energy, one that seems to come from nowhere, one that grows all the stronger for being constrained, controlled, and compressed./ It’s therefore necessary to present oneself with the greatest humility: white, pure, and candid, with a mind as empty as that of a communicant approaching the Lord’s Table./ A picture must possess a real power to generate light. For a long time now I’ve been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light./ There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.

Tomorrow, Sunday, at 4 o’clock, a visit from Picasso. As I’m expecting to see him tomorrow, my mind is at work. I’m doing this propaganda show at the Victoria and Albert Museum with him. I can imagine the room with my pictures on one side, and his on the other. It’s as if I were going to cohabit with an epileptic./ I don’t paint things. I only paint the differences between things./ I wouldn’t mind turning into a vermillion goldfish.