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2. Destruction of a plastic spaceRomanticism with impressionismWhat they learned before eighteen years, they believed resulting of the experiment.All what comes to their ears later, they hold it for theory and speculation.Einstein.

It was often said that the goal of all the painters independent of the end of XIXecentury had been to destroy Renaissance. I believe that it is not without interest toseek the reasons for which the plastic space of Renaissance ceased, in a givenmoment, to satisfy the intentions of the painters.It is not possible; I believe to have shown it, to consider that the plastic space of Renaissance rests on the handling of a system of representation corresponding to astable data of the human experiment. It is an illusion to regard research of Quattrocento as founded on the voluntary approach of a mode of privileged figurationof Nature. The inventors of the perspective representation of space are creatures of illusion and not the imitators, more or less warned, reality.

The new one space is a mixture of geometry and figuration of one symbolic systemwhere it’s to see technical with the service of individual and collective beliefs. I donot think to deny only today still the system illusionist of Renaissance which does notsatisfy certain convenient intellectual practices for the spirit. All the men can,undoubtedly, being brought to see seemingly meeting at the horizon the two lines of

pavements of a street which moves away; one can consider that the awakening of thisillusion is very convenient to guide our current estimate of the distances and of thesituations; but it is significant to note that it is the projection of a sensation chosenwithin a geometrical framework - it is spoken to say intellectual

who supposes a certain sum of acquired knowledge and that with the surplus the men,all the men, can also be led to see like a real significant obviousness of the riding

prospects, for example, or series of images juxtaposed and superimposed on theEgyptian woman, according to another system of integration of their feelings in their given individual and social structures. By studying the birth of the plastic space of Renaissance; one tried to make clear to this truth which it was about the constructionof a complete system of expression illustrated corresponding in one certain technicallevel, intellectual and social of civilization. I do not believe less of the world to havethus plasters merits of the art and of civilization of the Renaissance: I am, in

particular, convinced that, for the first time since the Greeks, one then attends thedevelopment of a system based on a rational vision of the universe, which is certainly

rather significant. But it seems to me that this excludes, precisely, any idea of asubstantial representation of things: the plastic space of Renaissance is only theexpression perfectly happy of the figure of the world for a given group of men.This posed; one can perfectly imagine the possibility to see changing the mode of representation of space according to a major transformation of the training technicalor theoretical, at the same time as of beliefs and of mobiles of action of a society. If a

plastic space translates the general conduits and the mathematical designs, physical,geographical of a company, it is even necessary that it changes when the companychanges sufficiently so that all the evidences intellectual and morals which madetransparent, during a certain time, the universe are reversed. One can pose, in theory,that the companies enter and leave all the same their plastic spaces which they are

materially established in geographical or scientific spaces particular. What wecurrently see being held under our eyes, it is the venture of a society which, equipped



with a new technical and intellectual material, tend to leave of a space or the men had been driven with ease since the Renaissance.It is necessary some, of the remainder, taking into account the same theory which ishere developed, that the men of Renaissance entered on a level of artificial space anyloan to receive them and to be used to them as communication and means of

expression between them and their successors, in their turn, abruptly left there, when,following a long preparation, it already was, again, some individuals of powerfulspirit to formulate the principle of new individual and social experiments of action.110In addition, the speculation first of Renaissance was founded on the evaluationmeasured of the diaphanous elements of the universe; it was based, moreover, on anew evaluation of the relationship between the objects; it implied one inquire into theexternal world considered as a positive reality distinct from the man and god, andcalled Nature. Fifty years later, one was satisfied with a very different research,limited by a certain number of restrictive assumptions. It was admitted that new spacehad the figure of a cube; that all the creepage distances gathered in a single point

located with the interior of table and corresponding to a single point of view of thehuman eye; it was admitted that the representation of the objects by coloured valueshad to coincide with the representation by the line, this was at the rather poor prices of easy ways of trade like the clearly obscure one. The compromise, the temperament,which was introduced between the line and the colour, was based, it is too forgotten,on the handling of this double arbitrary convention of the single source of light – absolutely unrealistic- and of the reduction, also unrealistic, of the sight with the

perspective monocular. Other observations would also lead to show that the plasticsystem of Renaissance developed gradually, a presence of each new difficulty, by asummary simplification which has stripped each time the vision of its primitiverichness.I will point out only one proof of it: one admits - according to expression verycharacteristic of mathematicians - that the difference in point of view under which onediscovers the object that one copies and the figure that one gives of it simultaneouslyon the fabric is negligible - although neither the depth nor the extent of the field of vision are identical, nor the angle under which one considers the object in nature andon the fabric. The best proof of the role that played, more and more, of similar assumptions is given by the fact that, towards the end of the period that we study, of the observant artists like Constable and Corot were taken between the desire torepresent nature as they saw it and as they felt it and that to give with the public of the representations enough readable, i.e. rather conventional. The representation of the

space of Renaissance butt finally on the problem of «finished" and of the draft. It isenough, like recently observed it M. Lionello Venturi, to confront a outline of Corotwith table fact to be assured of the existence of this conflict.During the first fifty years of Quattrocento, one thus not saw widening the newknowledge of the universe but being worked out a system according to the

philosophical and social ideologies of the time. One saw constituting a double designof linear and coloured representation,111

a double network of signs was organized inside the cube of ideal representation,which will become so familiar with men that they will choose it little, with little at the

same time as tallies of representation of their dramatically spectacles and of their global vision, at this point which they will end up believing that it corresponds to the "



true " figure of the world. Intersected imaginary lines, rather similar to ideal ranges of music or better to the lines which, in, textbook, make sensitive - with spirits entirelydirected in this direction by all pedagogy - the relations of the meter with thedecimetres or the cubic centimetres, will constitute one of the bases of the systemwhen the spirit of research makes place with the spirit of authority. The other element

will be provided by systematization plays of the light drawn from a single source.Contrary to the academic doctrines, one will not hold any account of the naturallights, but one will lay down a gold rule to the use and the scale of the workshops.One will succeed thus, towards the beginning of XVIe century, with a stillscenographic design more than Euclidean and especially realistic of space and onewill inculcate it with all the more force that the development of the dramatic ideaswill be done largely according to the visual frameworks. Nothing undoubtedly not toremain solidified. From time to time, Tintoret, Gréco, Rembrandt, Vélasquez willopen new horizons with the dream of the generations. If it is in fact that this rigid lawof the cubic structure of the universe and the conciliation of unit network of the linear and coloured signs dominated not only art but the thought of the men during four

hundred years, many elements are, all the same, gradually come to incorporate itself in it, through which appeared varied feelings and inventions. It is not a question toallot a monstrous unit with Western art it is not a question since Renaissance, after having supported that this Renaissance was the slow work of generations. But if it isfalse to admit the idea of miraculous Renaissance due to discovered or the revival of a great secrecy, one must accept on the other hand the notion of the appearance,towards the beginning of Quattrocento, from an exceptionally fertile principle andnine in the history of arts and of thought; that of the fast restrictions of application thathim one imposed poor the comprehension of the masses; that finally of the deepening

by number use generations of the virtual possibilities of a method of apprehensionand of figuration of the world which resulted from an attitude of the human spirit infront of the universe and in the company and not of the conquest of an instrument of control valid forever for the representation, by the man of all times , of a visionrealistic of the world.It is understood easily, of the kind, that, lasting of the generations, the112men could be satisfied of a certain total figuration of space, all in by alwaysintroducing new additional elements there. It was broader than they reached each timeof positive and left a margin to their research. Each time could add or to cut off something, of the system without its bases being reversed. It is in fact that Davidcould express modern ideas in a language close to that of Raphael. It is not in vain

that the last form of the classic art was the pre-Raphaelitism, in Ingres as well as atRossetti. During a long period the men lived a space plastic, historical, geographicaland imaginative subjected to some fundamental laws. They could change the legends,to stress such or such part left the technique or of the tradition, they accepted rulesthat the limitations of the geometry of Euclid, on the one hand, the stability of theeconomic and social structures, on the other hand, imposed on the development of their rationality. It is certain that at a certain time, this system, which rested on a

balance between the actions and the ideas, was broken. The artists left, with theremainder of the company, old plastic space. I would like to examine here by whichstages and up to what point they succeeded in posing new bases positive andimaginative with an art of the future.

The beginning of the XIX century saw occurring one of the greatest rehandlings of theimagery which occurred since Renaissance. There is all called on this subject and it is





scenes. The art and the romantic life will not prove any need to reject the ancientspace. Corot will go to the hen- house114when he wants to populate nymphs his landscapes, rectified in its workshop andinserted in the traditional co-ordinates of the vision cubic, segregate of a small

number of Nets plans and carefully preserving of the temperament between the imagein value and the image in features.The romanticism more proceeded by enriching the fields of the sensitivity andimagination that by blaming the relations between the perception and the traditionalrepresentation of the things. In 1855, the occasion of large Exposition is retrospectiveof the contemporary art, Paul de Saint- Victor wrote. < The gods from go away of themodern painting, the gods and the heroes… The great types of the Christian art,Christ, Vierge, Sainte Famille, seem exhausted by four centuries of picturesquecombinations. The Greek mythology, resuscitated by Renaissance, is with end of thisnew life. The large Pan is died! And it is in fact that the first thing that shift themodern society left the French Revolution, and at the same time the technical

revolution and the industrial exit of the discoveries of the science of XVIIIe century,it is the plastic vocabulary.The symbolic signs on which one had agreed during generations lose of their clearness, a new culture; a new pedagogy is worked out. The first fissure introduced

by the evolution of the company and the technique appears in the painting; it does not put yet causes of the figurative system; it is by the crisis of the subject that thetransformation starts. The memory of the personal fights of this time still influencesthe present the usually traced table of the history of art at the beginning of the XIXcentury.Romanticism, realism, one created beings of reason which induce us to over-estimatequite formal oppositions of doctrines and to be unaware of the true lines of cleavageof the generations. The heroes of literary and artistic realism, Flaubert and Courbet,hold, by many regards, with the romanticism which they prolong more than theydisavow it. It is necessary disarming it naivety of M. John Rewald to admit, whilespeaking about the program of Courbet in 1855, that he is a revolutionist because heintends to interpret the ideas, the aspects of his time, in terms of his own attitude. Allrepresentative arts, all alive arts, always, translated into terms which they wantedoriginal ideas and aspects of their time. The difference starts on the chapter of averagethe techniques and significant.Towards the end of the romantic period, the artists divide themselves in two clans:"Idealists", like Couture, who seek the secrecy of art in the recourse to the greatest

impersonality because they believe in the existence of Beauty absolute, permanent,which one can, through science and of meditation, to approach of more or less near;and the romantics which

115Believe that it is in the expression of the dashes of passion and the "horizonssentimental", to speak the language of Flaubert, which the source of genius resides.One could not insist too much on the importance of these battles of the subject whichactually starts as of the medium of XVlIle century. At this time, the services of the

buildings of Roi, already perceiving a crisis who’s Paul de Saint-Victor will donothing but note, one century later, the end, decide to claim with the painters of the

tables representing of the "historical subjects". It is there an episode of the crisiswhich produces, about same time, Henriade and the collapse of the traditional





realistic ones, to a certain extent, also believed that the quarrel of the subjectdominated all the others. But those which seemed to have form the second realisticgeneration initially - and which has, indeed, makes triumph the program over Courbet- introduced innovations which made possible abruptly a so complete transformationof the relationship between the painter and nature, the painter and the witness, and

who matched of a series of so revolutionary technical inventions, that one can saywell that a page was turned in the history of the plastic languages of the humanity. Iwould like to show the stages and the methods of them.If one admits that it is with the Impressionism that the question of collapse arises of old plastic space, still is necessary it to distinguish. I think a moment to support theidea absurdity that Impressionists were very blow, innovators and nothing other. Theyhave, with117

opposite, walked on painfully, with small blows, with repentances, dummy roads.They were in the whole of the precursors rather than of the realizes.

It is necessary to insist on this point because, recently, one tended to present, from a point of view which seems to me erroneous, the history of their movement. Bookswith great pulling tend to spread contestable and even simplistic opinions, which arelikely to be accredited if one does not warn the workers. That it is about Histoire of Impressionism of Mr. Rewald or History of the modern painting of Mr. Skira, aneven fast examination of the contents will build a researcher easily.The book of Mr. Rewald seems to me especially subject to guarantee. I will quoteonly the case of Bazille dispatched in some sentences and without any critical spirit.To characterize his work finally, the author rests unfortunately for him on a tablewhich is a notorious forgery. In many cases, it does not summarize exactly nor withaccuracy the documents which it uses. Most serious it is the general spirit whichanimates the work. Impressionism would be the history of an artistic movement whichwould have maintained relationships only to the literary movement of time, and stillonly in consequence of the meetings of the evening, in some coffees, of a certainnumber of painters and literary men. The impressionists would have discovered at atime given a new method to represent the universe and it would have been thendiffused internationally. The facts are present absolutely like if Impressionism, were areceipt that remained to discover, like one finds a natural product still unknown innature. All the history of Impressionism such as Mr. Rewald conceives it reduces allthings considered with the account of a series of meetings enter some young peopleworking in Paris towards the same time and with the setting progressive point

between them all of a proceeded technique. One finds the error of optics whichchaired the formation formerly of theses relating to the origins of Renaissance. Evenillusion of the existence of a kind of very ready formula in nature or the human brainand that it is a question of putting at the day. I know well that the author insists muchon the origins of the Impressionism- it is the subject of the mode. But it is able fromthere to explain us as well as the discovery of the impressionists was prepared by their relations with Millet, Boudin, with Jongkind. With following it, while the Monetyoung person combed caricatures, Boudin, as in spite of him, would have transmittedthe receipt to him which would have engaged it in the good way: Nature, to imitatenature.I would less insist if Mr. Rewald did not post the claim, rather strange at a man which

knows Europe well, to have written first History of Impressionism and if it did notannounce History of Post-Impressionism(!).



118I believe very dangerous this way of pose the problem. Mr. Rewald did not writeHistory of Impressionism, it, gathered anecdotes on the life of the impressionist

painters. He is refused to pose the problem of style, it ignored the fact that, all their life, the impressionists - and it is what makes their size - groped and that the

movement of which they were the initiators is not finished a beautiful evening of summer because the last word of a certain method was found, while already their successors passed with the research of the following formula, very ready in the storesof the history. The current tendency and which is not particular with M. Rewald – according to which one endeavours ad infinitum to split up the evolution of thecontemporary art, to recognize there currents and counter-currents, groups and sub-groups appears completely ant historic to me. It tends to substitute the chronicle for the history, to make believe that works are the product of theories faced and incarned

by groups.I do not certainly deny that the theories do not have played their role in a movementlike Impressionism all the same that with in the beginnings of Renaissance. With

certain regards, I will attach more importance than M. Rewald with the role of Duranty or of Edmond Maître – a discovery to be made.The ideology of Impressionism such as it is expressed towards 1880 in the written of Geffroy, held as much place in interpretation than one gave movement than the worksthemselves and mainly compared to the public, which is not negligible. A certaindeviation of research of an artist like Monet in was undoubtedly the consequence andit left certain misunderstandings which limited the range made lucky finds by theartists - absolutely as the theories of Alberti specified and restricts the range of Renaissance there. However, I differ absolutely of opinion with those which see in thetheories the creative source, itself, the centre of interest around of which organize thedevelopments of art. And I do not agree either with those which believe that all thetheories and all works are worth or can, at least, being put on the same plan for

judgements of value more or less exhaustive and equitable. It is inconceivable thatone time nourishes a great number of valid movements from where a kind of

panorama emerges from arts, left average between too marked tendencies. Art is, bydefinition, intransigence and the number of the solutions really positive necessarilyvery limited.I have just seen a book of M. Lionello Venturi, to understand the painting: of Giottoto Chagall who goes precisely opposed to these methods. It is a remarkable small

book. The author takes the exactly opposite party of that which I have just criticized.For him, which

119account only they are the men, discovered through works. Mr. Venturi does not preach, him, the conciliation in one time between the tendencies - or so-called such -various artists, but, in the work of the same artist, like Picasso, between the manners.The book of Mr. Venturi is much more dangerous, if one can say, that others. Initially,

because it is a book marvellously intelligent and which swarms with concreteanalyses, brilliant, subtle, of works of art. More question of classifying cards here;works and the men are there. The matter of the author was to introduce the reader with a reflexion on art and it succeeded there. It will render great services and willundoubtedly reveal, with people who are far from suspecting it, that the works of artare worth of being looked at. Only I fear that, there too, a certain doctrinal attitude

did not make wrong to the historian.



Mr. Venturi, large theorist of the criticism of art, declares that he does not believe in ascience of art. On the basis of the ideas of Benedetto Croce on aesthetics, it affirm thatonly the stable values, they are the transitory personalities of the artists. One will turngently to the heroes of Vasari, with great men of the Jean-Christophe kind? The noblesoul, supposed, of Raphaël or Giotto less imports me than the few tables that one or

the other could produce and who remain, after centuries, "objects" marvellously pleasant and infinitely rich of solutions whose majority, undoubtedly, were notconsciously apprehended by the author. If I refuse to believe in the validity of ahistory of art based on the study of so-called "the movements" which animate ageneration and make it possible to establish more or less compensated averages - fromor currently results unbearable and dangerous eclecticism from the taste -, I do not

believe more than that is to say reasonable not to make state that qualities for thus tosay morals - even when they are baptized aesthetic - individuals.If Picasso or Manet interests us, it is not because they had a finer spirit or moreemotional person that such or such their contemporaries. This account, one wouldtake account of virtualities and it is a little what arrives to Mr. Venturi, apologist of

Pissarro or Marin. One insists on the fact that certain artists preceded and initiated theothers: the vibration of the heart quickly replaces the personality, of which one shouldnot forget, despite everything, which it counts only insofar as it is expressed in anenough external way to be essential, through the generations, with men who do notknow anything any more the mediums where the artists lived. I am directly moved bya goddess crétoise, without being able anything to imagine aesthetic valuesspontaneously where morals which the author took as a starting point. A criticism of art based on the worship of the personalities is in my fragile opinion. It imposesresearch to us120standards taken according to our tastes and of our feelings. I believe, for my part, thatthere is something moreover objective in the work of art, something which can be theobject of a science. The human history is that of the events and not that of theinventions. In the same way the history of arts is that of works and not that of themen. The true goal to reach is to discover, among the mass of the works carried outwith a time given, those which contain principles of expression likely to provide withthe men of the means of being expressed and of tightening of them. One does notmake the history of the languages by saying only Vangelas was a man exquisite or Boileau a misanthropist. To identify the criticism of art, either with the motion studyis that of the personalities which produced the works, it is to withdraw any possibilityonce again with our study to impose among the elements essential to the development

of this «cultural anthropology" which will be, without none doubt, the work of our time.Being particular problem of the transformation by Impressionists of the figuration of space, I for the third time believe possible of demonstration that, in certain numbers of their works, they made possible an evolution of language visual so deep that itreleased the artists and the public of conventions secular and introduced a researchwhich still continues. The range of this transformation does not undoubtedly not less,ultimately, that which, towards the beginning of Quattrocento, made possible thesimultaneous development of a coherent system of signs posed on the plastic screenand of imaginary representations - of what necessarily the elements essential to a newlanguage consist.

It is necessary of it, with the surplus that I think to be able to indicate the hour or thework which marks such a turning! It is not that according to the consequences that the



range of a discovery continues. The companies progress not by the taking possessionof the tools but by the use that they make some. Give the vapour to a Negro tribe; itwill not draw the railroad from it. M. Leroi - Gourhan has remarkably released thislaw which fixes the permanent reports/ratios of the invention and of the loan with thetechnical progress and intellectual of the human groups.

In what concern the origins of art Modern, it seems very significant to me to note thatstudying the work of Impressionists towards l870-1880, one could neither usefullycontinue the research which wants to establish which of them was, at the given time,most advanced, nor to continue to look like also characteristic works of such or suchartist simply because they are left with its hand. It is absurd to assign in block with anindividual a place, a fixed role in the history. There are goods and bad tables.

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History of art is encumbered by the monographs and the catalogues exhaustive. Onedid not seek enough standard works which are truths stakes at the same time of the art

and the intellectual life one time. Because a work is signed Delacroix, Ingres or Monet, it is not necessarily good even significant.The true problem is thus to discover the works which mark out truly the evolution of the visual arts regard as one of the languages permanent of the company, while takingcare not to want to allot has each artist a too strict role in this business. Think of thedifficulties that meet attributions of works, among most famous of Renaissance. theSimonetta of Musée Condé in Chantilly less beautiful, less significative because it isnot known if it is of Pollaiuolo or Piero di Cosimo? Are you constrained in the studyof the Romance frescos or the miniature Carolingian because you do not have anyname of artist? He is essential to also consider that works which had sometimes themost range - and which indeed contains the most beautiful inventions - are notalways the more perfect, or at least the most balanced, i.e. most tempting. I admit verywell that, if one seeks to constitute one day the gallery of masterpieces one time old,one will not lead to the same selection as if one endeavours to discover, according to a

precise field of research, succession of key works. There is not a history of art to finda time for all - it is precisely what one tends to think in student famous movements.The slow work of development of a new plastic language, who continues, I have theabsolute conviction of it, under our eyes, leaves the impressionism or more exactlycertain aspects of the art of Impressionists. It tends, more and more, to replaceuniversally the other figurative systems of space, not according to rational exactitudeof the elements of base, but under the terms of all that the following generations

brought of positive in the use and the modification of the first formulas. It appearscertain to me who a transformation as major as that of Renaissance is in hand, takinginto account the assigned significance jointly by certain artists and a certain publicwith some of the works most adapted to the technical and sentimental concerns of three last generations. It is a question of bringing the proof of it and of better understanding by there what was also Renaissance.Let us note, initially, that it is not in the discovery the more brilliant of theimpressionists that resides the positive lesson that they have data with their successors. One said all on the role played by the analysis of the plays of 122

Light in the impressionism. It is the first aspect to which rare a little benevolentcriticisms of the movement were sensitive data. I fear that one insisted a little too



much, with their continuation, on the literary side of their attempt. One spoke aboutquivering of the air, of impalpable breaths which runs in the atmosphere. It is the lyricaspect, in a word, which was of access seized for the witnesses of goodwill.The fact was for thus to say necessary. It was necessary well that, to appreciate theexpressive value of this original art, some bench mark was taken on a common

ground, about fatally external with the new techniques of which it all was, of access,to prove the possibility. One does not pass without recourse to translations of afamiliar language with another. But it seems to me that time is today passed where itwas only a question of rendering comprehensible the serious one of an effort. Wecan interpret the art of Impressionists in a way freer than those which were in the fightand which were not informed of what was returned possible by their research. Thetrue problem consist to know which influences real the recording the luminousfeelings on the mode of representation of space.One would be tried, at certain moments, to almost reduce it to nothing. With the back,indeed, if one looks closely there, one realizes quickly that the diagram of composition of the majority of the impressionist fabrics is strictly similar to that of a

traditional fabric. Take celebrates it Grenouillère of Monet, one of the first tablesreally luminists of the century (1867). The points of support of the composition grow

blurred under the sowing of the coloured keys which reproduce the tremor of thelight, but, brought back to its general lines, the table always suggests the famousspaces cubic of Renaissance and one always looks at through the famous openwindow of Alberti.The process which consists in setting up the general lines of the subject in accordancewith the traditional formulas will elaborate by Renaissance gave rise to a very greatnumber of impressionist fabrics and apparently to most beautiful. Take the fuzziestfabrics, most suggestive of Monet, Meules, Cathédral, Ponts of London; you willalways note that the general outline of the composition is strictly traditional withregard to framing and the segregation of the plans in-depth. If one guesses thelandscapes most vaporous of Impressionism, it is precisely in function of their respectof the former system of figuration of space. I proposed already to indicate this

phenomenon of name of "grid" impressionist. It would be said that the fabrics thusmade up are consisted the superposition of two images which coincide by some

points, according to the process of the chromatic photographs which superimposewith the masks

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several series of recordings in the absolute respect of a certain number of referencemarks. The system of coloured representation of the universe comes to besuperimposed here on the groundwork provided by a small number of linear elements

borrowed from the reappearing figuration of space.Everyone is repeating, moreover, that Impressionists painted the green and blueshades and that they thus substituted, with the traditional contour of the objects, anetwork distinct from significant signs. They however not the first to have felt theneed for placing around the figures or of certain objects significant spots of colour of qualities, or of positive relations of distance, of depth, essential withcomprehension of the acts and of the places. The men of Renaissance placed draperiesunder their naked or around the objects to build a system of volumes and values

which dug space around their figures. They also knew the partitioning of the fabrics by suppletive coloured surfaces of contour. It is reasoned too much as if the drawing



constituted on their premises the only isolation of works. As of the Quattrocento,however, the fight reads between the two systems of representation of forms for thecolours and for the lines existed, it was seen, at the acutest point; the recourse from asingle source of light not managing not to make automatically coincide the imagecoloured with the linear image. The clearly obscure which provides a temperament

once and for all accepted does not arrive has to remove the problem, and they are theeclectics the same, academicians bolonais who establish in their love of coding, awhole conventional scale of values, where the blue ones, the reds, the greens and theyellows take a significance with the time symbolic system and space given. Such tonemarks the distance, the green, and one will express distance as well by a landscape as

by a pack. Such other mark the rest, blue; such other the movement, red. There is awhole system of reproduction combined of space and the qualities by the colour.When Impressionists introduce, consequently, the principle of the immediaterepresentation of the space and of the objects by the colour, they make only torenovate a system included in teaching that had transmitted to the precedinggenerations.

In the Femmes au Jardin, Monet will pose coloured spots with horse on the characters, but it will not give up drawing these characters. The groundwork report/ratio of thevalues groundwork of the 1ines will be turned over more still than transformed. Therewill be substitution of an easy way for another, by no means fundamentaltransformation of the feelings of space and its representation.The clearly obscure made it possible to solve the problem of not agreementgeometrical of the two representations and illuminist of the objects with the help of one124Compromise: the creation of a zone of shade that, has detriment of the clearness of lines, maintained a balance between the two space figurations by the colours and thelines. Impressionists do not reverse the data of problem: it is the form which yields thestep. The contour of the coloured spot carries on the geometrical ring of the objects.Formerly the colour subjected to contour, with the help of a certain blur, a certainmargin given by the half-light from now on, contour will not be more that one tracesuggested under the limits of the spot of triumphing colour - but it will not be less

present.While Manet supports its boldness of Déjeuner on the grass on a reference to groupsof figures borrowed from Raphael- making to carry all its effort on the subject -,Monet starts by making pay his attention on the relations between the line and itcolour without to start the traditional vision. There is inversion of the techniques and

not inversion of the vision. This impresionism beginning offers a new manner of appearing space, but not a new way of seeing it. It makes possible the integration of new elements of space sensitive, it does not upset the figurative system either that the

psychic distance - condition necessary, we saw it, with the appearance of a newlanguage.It is not to decrease Impressionism only to show how there remains faithful to certaindesigns if deeply enracinées in the imagination of the men, for a certain mental ageand social of their history, that we are not yet completely freed from it. Moreover,modifying the relationship between the various techniques of the space figuration,Impressionism has returned then possible the discovery of new problems. It is

because, precisely, it is not, with the direction where it is usually heard, a movement

isolated which develops gradually, by the successive adhesion of new membersrejoined with a certain number of principles, which it occupy in the history a



considerable place. Left the problem of the subject, of problem of the full air and the problem of the differential notation of the relationships of the light with the linear forms, Impressionists discovered that the true original solutions were located on a

plan different. To tell the truth they rather showed that discovered in the usual senseof the word. Mr. Lionello Venturi was struck formerly by fact that after 1880

Impressionists ceased being agreement between them on the processes and the goalsof painting and it concluded from it that Impressionism was not that one transitorymeeting of ideal. Exaggerating this attitude

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Mr. Rewald announces today his intention to give us, after his history of Impressionism, that of Post-Impressionism which will cover, says us it, the years1886-1906 (death of Cézanne). Preceding, Mr. Skira already let us know that after 1906 we had Fauvism and Expressionism, then, twenty years after, Cubism andSurrealism. Marvellous confidence in the power of the categories and the capacity of

the men to be renewed, every twenty years, their plastic vocabulary, i.e. their estimateof dimensions and the values of the world. I think, on the contrary, that the trulyinnovative movement, whose certain attempts of Impressionists revealed the firstoutline, is still far today to have become aware of its true goals and its final means.Let us not forget that it was necessary one century to pass from Brunelleschi toRaphaël and that Brunelleschi was prepared by one century of speculations a littleanarchist, chew but extraordinarily rich, second half of the XIX century correspondrather, in my opinion, XIVe that to XVIe century, and we await still Piero thenAlberti. Far from seeing in Impressionism a < movement > of short duration, I thussee there the starting point of an investigation which, through capricious plays herethem of the mode and the compromise necessary with the tradition, still continuesunder our eyes. Leaving side the problem of role played in the evolution of artindependent - I prefer this term with that of Impressionism which makes ambiguity -

by the renewal of the ideologies, I will thus seek here only what touches with thedevelopment of the speculations on space. However, if one considers the workscarried out in the thirty last years of the century, it seems to me that the positivesuccesses- which were used thereafter as support with the development of artcontemporary belong to three categories. Some posed the problem of the triangulationof space; the others that of imaginary space; others finally that of space near and theexperiences close intimate depth. None Impressionist do not attach only its name toone or to other with these discoveries, none except perhaps Degas progressed in the

full conscience of the experimental value of its attempts.For a long time one realized of the role played in the painting of the end of the XIXcentury by the triangulation of space. In fact, Impressionists, in this field, were stillsatisfied, at the beginning, to make fragmentary innovations without breaking thetraditional diagram of vision and representation. When Degas composes his famousFemme with the vase, its boldness is of comparable nature that that of Manet inDéjeuner on grass or that of Monet in Femmes with the garden. Very famous Femme126

The vase is work type of all one series of désarticulations of cubic of Alberti, whosupposes preserved the idea even of this cube. It is about irregularity of page-setting

rather than of rupture. We do not exceed the exercise of school.



What is interesting, it is to note how, from this exercise still quasi school and whichdoes not exceed the boldness of the provocations of workshop, one sees releasingoneself from the entirely new problems. Here, initially, Ludovic halévy in the slidesof Opera. Here, already, there is the new one. A half of the surface of table remain for thus to say vacant but, by opposition, one sees, behind the silhouettes of the first plan,

a vacuum, a space much more important that if it in an unspecified way wererecorded. The experiment has prolongations which make it possible to affirm thatDegas had a presentiment of; in this case, the importance of its research, withoutarriving for as much fixing the principles of a new stopped method. Here, indeed, onthe one hand, Foyer of the dance. Here, exploiting principle summarily included inthe preceding sketch, Degas articulates two spaces of extend and of quality verydifferent. It integrates them, by contrast, in a composition nor that; it not makes themcoincide but to be neighbourly, although it preserves for each one of them co-ordinates classical space cubic together with certain deformations which do notexceed in boldness the triangulation of Femme to the vase. At the end of thisexperiment, one will find Café- concert, extraordinary composition where, this time,

the triangulation of cubic space is used as starting point with a speculation on a spacedeprived of contours although of framed and measurable depth. Here, Degas joined,remainder, research of Monet who, by very other ways, has force to reduce on thecontrary the share of the linear diagram, arrives from there, in its last works -

Nymphéas, Ponts -, to also suggest a space without limit and measurement, a spacewith the time intimate and decorative.I showed by a bringing together how this significant space of Degas gave rise tocompletely contemporary research, like those D' Estève. But, simultaneously, thestudies of Degas on space lead to other assumptions. Mary Cassatt shows us how the

brutal division out of full and vacuums surfaces leads without any line to suggest, byoppossition of values the more simple who exist, a depth.At the end of this research one will find Leger. At the end of this research one willfind Leger. But, meanwhile, there will be still Degas, who will exploit, in the nakedextraordinary ones of its old age, not play of surfaces for an extension of the plasticrectangle, but modelled figures under consideration like determinant a heavy volumein the atmosphere. One is here at the same time very close to the concerns of the127

Rebirth and very close to certain of research current of the young painting. It is noted,meanwhile, that Cézanne, him also, in certain studies of landscapes, explored this waywhich was, with departure, one representation bold cubic space of Renaissance and

which introduced, in fact, an experimentation of opened space and sentimentalentirely neglected since four centuries.It is right and necessary to still add that Manet in some of its works, like Fifre, hadone of the first feeling of this space - not open or free since it introduces on thecontrary a kind of suggestion of angle into the content of its fabric, but suggerable bythe mass equilibrated of one appears in the fabric. One sees thus how, throughexperiments not concerted, groping, contradictory, emerges a problem by what the

perception and the figuration of space are jointly renewed, apart from the limits fromtime and personalities which one claims to impose on the history.I am not unaware, with the surplus, all these researches had other elements thatimagination or the reflexion in closed mud of the artists. One studied well the

influence of Japonism on the art of the end of the XIX century. Will I still dare tomake reserves on a standard handbook, the deliver of Mr. Rewald? It is that one finds





other hand that the major effect of the discovery of a possibility of mechanicrecording of the vision led only to develop the will of style at the artists.

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A traditional authority of the artistic vision and even of the object was blamed, photography confirms those which sought of new objects – i.e. of new possiblegroupings of feelings - instead of their giving the impression which rough nature

provided them of it even cutting. Photography was included/understood like bringingconfirmation too the many research of Monet on the dissociation of the forms, thatthose of Degas on the new schematization of contours. Like, moreover , the

photography came to provide a practical process of reproduction and of infinitemultiplication of the documentary images, its contributes has to release the painting of a whole series of constraints comprising forced and has to reject it towards theinterpretation not as well subjective as psychological and analytical of the universe.A little later the discovery of mobile image still came to accentuate this evolution

while insisting on the potential of the "assembly" – of which Gauguin drew frommarvellous parties. Ceasing being the single mode of reproduction, painting, moreand more, turned to the analysis of the methods of perception. It is thus false not to

put in parallel photographic images and works of art, but to deduce from it that theartists, better educated, for the first time, objective conditions of the vision, drew aseries from it from conclusions definitively valid for the objectivity of feelings. Of some skew which one places, one always arrives at this conclusion which the historyof the contemporary art must be not made to underline the capacity widened of theartists to explore the stable structure of a universe – eternal theatre of the ballet of thehuman life to borrow an image from Poussin, prince of academicians and thehumanistic ones with the manner of Trente -, but to emphasize their aptitude to seek the conditions of new style.Like said it with spirit, there are about fifteen years, Walter Benjamin, the discovery

of the photography destroyed the ritual secular of Beaute. But it should be added thatit is not to substitute reality to him. Photography and the modern art jointly open theway with the development of new incantations, the new rites shared from now on

between the fixed images and the animated images, the supposedly mechanicalreproduction and aesthetic stylization. One could not say that the field of art was somenarrowed, it changed only nearest goals. The photograph is one of the elements whocontributed and who contribute still to prepare the conditions objectify appearance of a new language - resting necessarily not on the automatic recording of facts but on the

development of a new scale of values.130

Whatever the importance of the investigation open into the raw data of the directions,it should not thus hide us that deep the originality of modern painting sinceImpressionism, it is that it is based on a research structured dependent of perceptionand comprehension. It is, in particular, of this point of view that one understandsclearly the major bond which links current research with those of Monet and Degas -what enabled me to affirm that with Impressionism we had entered one period of development of new plastic language.The plastic space who was worked out with XV and XVI centuries were subject to the

influence of a whole philosophy at the same time as it rested on the recent data of science of numbers and on the inventory in progress of the spectacles of nature. Men



of this time believed that it had a harmony there either circles, but of the spheres, andthat this harmony was expressed by mathematic reasons. They seized an identity

between the constitution of the sky and the structure of the plastic space, of whichthey did not cease rectifying the co-ordinates, as they developed the teacher trainingof the younger generations and specified moral systems within the framework of an

economy controlled by a small social group holder of the great secrecy of the culture -as formerly the monks Carolingian. They believed in the geometrical figure of theworld and that the Nature was a permanent reality, offered to the man like a spectacleor one field closed for action. To leave at the end of xix century, encouraged by thescience which discovered more complex structures to him of the universe, the societywidened, and made bolder by its same opening, was involved to renew its traditionalrepresentation of space. It is, initially created, with the romantism, of new heroes andof new imaginary frameworks; then, with the realism, it is the catch of everyday life.The society widened is not any more satisfied then of some standard entourages.Masaccio and piero until to Ingres and Delacroix, the world of gods and history hadhardly changed. During of the centuries the world, abruptly widened, had again been

closed again. The fundamental discovery, that which determines to it true rupture, isarrival at the time when, like in Quattrocento, the artists discovered that thewidening of the universe could not sought more a long time in the renewal of thedecoration picturesque, but, on the contrary, in a countered deepening its intimatestructures.One can say that to a phase where the dominant concern had been this of theinventory of the places and gestures of a certain human society in way on the overlandroutes, succeeded a new phase where this who counts especially, it is to bore thesecrecies of life. One realized that it131

more mysterious, it is closest, which the more great space, it is the human spiritand the relations of bodies with the spirit. By there was, again, radically changed thefamous psychic distance, according to which civilizations are distinguished. Thegreatest attraction, they are not any more appearances, the spectacles, they are themechanisms. The man would like to dismount all his toys. He will realize quickly thatits eye, in which he had taken such an amount of confidence, is incompetent to revealnaturally the position of the members of a horse with gallop. The great mysteries diethere natural ceased at once being sets and distances to become die the tails, andclosest; then, finally, those which not relate to the object of the feeling but feelingitself seized, so to speak, at the rough state in the body of perception.

If different one from the other, a Renoir and one Degas find associated here in acommon concern. One seek to discover the modifications which the tightest analysisof the displacements of lines then of masses; the other is more sensitive to thecomplex feelings, poly - sensory according to the new term soon in honour. For oneas for the other, which counts primarily it is the vision brought closer of the world, i.e.an inquisitive vision and who is not satisfied any more feelings. The cubic vision of Renaissance was before a whole vision moved away of world. The modern vision is avision tended towards the discovered of secrecy in the details. It does act any more tolocate of the silhouettes ones compared with others but to establish a bond of directreflexion between a detail and a radiant feeling. This attitude adapts logically of theabstract funds and of the large plans, it substitutes a general purpose space and will

incommensurable with the current vision of the man of Renaissance who was opticaland distant the artist does not give any more with the patron the sight of part of the



ground who dominate; the world of the contemporary artists is a universe filled withfrightening secrecies and which escapes old measurements from dimensions andvalues.For this reason Renoir place finally its Baigneuses, or Degas, its Dancers, in front of an indifferent bottom. The artists approach introspection, organizing space around

fragmentary notations. The feelings of contact at Renoir or at Degas leave of a samefundamental attitude. Who would dare to claim that this so new attitude of theindependent artist is without relationship with the development of science and of the

philosophy has? I do not want to insist here on this point, which does not appear to meany more to be able to be seriously disputed. The true difficulty is in the methodwhich it is appropriate to employ to release these correspondences between thedifferent

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Means of expression of the contemporary man. One risk compromising irremediably

the new science of the plastic languages if one is satisfied to note agreements. Theconciliation is easy in the field of the vague ideas. It is with the analysis that thedifficulty starts. There is no question of being satisfied with an explanation which,more or less, would come down from there to saying that it is the inspiration, thecommon emotion, the psychological and social climate which accounts for coincidences. It is not a question of lyricism, it acts of psychology. It is not questionof mysticism or feeling, but of technique. One does not speak with his heart, but withall the resources of a language. The companies develop under positive conditions andeven their myths can be the subject of rational studies.The development of contemporary art is not explained in function not sentimentalaspirations, but of the intellectual mechanisms of the new man.The average Age believed there that all was in God. No the distance enters the thingssince they were only the demonstration of only one essence. The representationsymbolic system of space by the values - attributes of moral significance - resultsfrom this. Renaissance showed the fight of God and the universe; it was before verydualistic. It goes towards the figuration of a figurative space of a universe where,under the eye of God, but in delicacy with him, move, according to fixed laws, of themen and the objects. The base of representation of the space of Renaissance, it is the

belief in the reality of the laws of the external world.Having given up believing in fixity of the principles fixed by the former generations,the modern times necessarily did not leave space traditional. Transforming – by the

discovery day labourer of new laws which blames the general principles of classicalscience - its material universe; transforming too – for a more tightened analysis of themechanism of the spirit --- its philosophical beliefs; founding new dialectic of thethought and also modifying the conditions day labourers of the action of the man onthe world external like its design of the social distances, it was fatal that the modernsociety left materially this space of Renaissance which corresponded to a certain levelof physical knowledge and hierarchical structure of the company.However it was impossible that, of the day at the following day, the artists discoveredthe new reports/ratios intended to govern, in the more or less near future, the newhuman societies. If, by impossible, some catastrophe had abruptly stopped about1480 the course of the events of the Western world, all the values which are used to us

today to read



133usually the plastic space of Renaissance would never have existed. It was necessaryseveral centuries so that the man and the company are immobilized in a positionwhich holds account, at the same time, of the initiatives and social resistances. Theman is not a body, an eye, placed in front of the spectacle of physical and social

nature. Fortunately, because the objective, precisely, is unable, recording allindifferently, to create the fundamental elements of a style, of a language.Renaissance was not preceded right from the start in the first research of the

precursors. It was only possible. The same applies today. One needs much time to themen to build a system, which always implies a temperament and compromises, andthis system is not really complete, all things considered, which at the time when itceases being valid, because he cannot grow rich any more.It is very difficult for us to judge art of the end of the XIX E century, because we arestill engaged in same research. I believe, however, that one can regard as certain that,about 1860-1880, a small group of artists of the school of Paris that definitivelydestroyed the possibility of reference mark an alive presentation of the universe

conforms to the tradition. They have posed some principles of analysis and newfiguration suitable for evolution, but in conformity with the line of experimentation of the human companies revolted against the privileged holders of the secrecies onwhich their force had been based a long time. Based on an analysis of the light, on the

practice of work in the open air, new school quickly destroyed the tradition of scenographic space plans selective and of the monocular vision of the sets, tosubstitute to him a representation of space by the characteristic detail, a representationwhich supposes the scientific and disrespectful analysis of the life of all days.Impressionists were done a new design of space as much because they gave up thegreat subjects and the material repertory of accessories of Renaissance, that becausethey have process scientific analysis of qualities of the light. They brokesimultaneously, so the social executives and the categories corresponding of thetheoretical representation of world.I believe to have shown how, about the years 1880, conditions necessary to theappearance of a new plastic language that were thus joined together in the work of some artists eager to address themselves to a public curious about innovation - andwhich they more contributed to form that they have found any loan to appreciatethem, which is the fate of all the innovators.But, just as, when at the beginning of Quattrocento a small number 134original spirits had been filled with enthusiasm for the discovery of Nature, without

inventing of only one blow the possibilities of complete expression of a world which, by assumption, was still to be born; thus Impressionists more suggested a new attitudein the presence of the problems of the space, which they did not begin one day withthe other to represent on their fabrics the aspects final of the modern world.We find here to guide us the idea so interesting of following Piaget which when anindividual - or a social group - approaches a new system of expression or a newtechnique, it is found in a position enough similar with this of primitive and of thechild who tests with first language. Having discovered a method which constituted a

progress on its former means of analysis and figuration, it is far from having, on theother hand, in this new field, same virtuosity as in the old one. One thus sees beingopposed necessarily here the two contradictory forces of the automatism and of the

discovery, which do not cease pushing and slowing down simultaneously, at every



moment of their adventure, all the companies, if small are. One discovers only whileinventing, but one transmits the idea only by mechanizing it.It is normal, consequently, that the discovered of Impressionists have, in spite of their undeniable revolutionary character, and according precisely to this character and of the also revolutionary character of - design which they were made of the public

which, itself, was, and is still, in full evolution, it is normal, I say, which thisdiscovered have quickly succeeded with the fixation of commonplaces - at least provisional - which mark the necessary stage of the development of all newlanguage.Whatever the innovation of Impressionism, it is in fact that one cannot say yet thatthere is at this stage of the history of absolute painting destruction of traditional

plastic space and of its representation. Boldnesses have only one fragmentary nature if one considers as a whole the work of this first group of innovative artists of school of Paris. Even when the innovations whose future proved that they had an immenserange are quite apparent, they still combine with traditional systems of figuration.This is true and for Manet and for Monet and for Degas and Renoir, and Bazille.

Monet and Sisley dissolve contours under a network of coloured spots, but they preserve the traditional network of installation of the objects the ones compared to theothers in a cubic space at the selected plans. Degas gives up the low monocular vision, but it projects a long time under bold skews of the fragments of scenographicor riding spaces curiously associated means135

of subtle compromises based on a permanent call to the traditional memory of cuttings.One could not regret it. So that a new idea it can be communicable; it is necessary thatit use certain terms of ancient language. One thought entirely original is recluse and,for definition, incommunicable. The great torment of the innovators is, always, todiscover the means to make admitting a total interpretation of the phenomenaaccording to a new point of view. The stages are an absolute law of progress. Theartists are, as much as the writers, of the teachers. They are bound by the laws whichchair with the constitution in the human groups of the collective memory. One doesnot represent and one reads only what one knows. A small part only of one new visionof the world is immediately transmissible with others.I could not too much insist on what Impressionism is not a closed phenomenon, which

belongs entire to the past. It is exactly as if one claimed to regard as independent theempirical and theoretical speculations of XIVe and the xv century and the

constitution of academism with XVie. My goal is to show how the effort of theinnovators continued, and still continues, in a direction which coincides with the firstoriginal research of the years 1870-1880 without conservation of the transitory

processes. There will be no absolute cut, in the future, between the work of Monetand that of Matisse or Picasso that, for us, between that of Uccello and Pérugin.Before thus showing how the positive development of the new space in thecontemporary company continued, I will show how the destruction of old by theaction commune of a group of artists more or less contemporaries by the age of Impressionists was completed, but come more tardily or more fugitively than themwith creative maturity.By its age, Cézanne is Contemporary, even one of elder of the group.

It formed part of it right from the start. But if he had died about 1880, nobody wouldthink to grant to him, today, the places that he occupies. Far from having the



virtuosity of its followers, it is paralysed by a long sinistrality. It is enough to put in parallel its works former to 1870 with those of Degas or Monet - the case of Renoir and Bazille asking a delicate development - to note, not so much an awkwardnesswhich contradict its studies of workshop, which a hesitation on the true goals of art. Itwill be one day very tasty to join together, for example, the naked ones of 1867:

the Diana the Huntress and Baigneuse with the griffon of Renoir inspired byCourbet, Toilette or Baigneurs de Bazille and outlines of Cézanne: Bathers also,136Murder, Lever, inspired of Delacroix. One would join to it Camille of Monet andFigures in a landscape of Bazil to show on which bases the first attempt of theinnovative artists was based, who then counted Fantin-Latour among them - and onewould establish a curious parallel between the Wagnerian prints of this last and thesoft daydreams of Cézanne. My goal is not to deal with here the problem of themedium very badly definite of where got clear, before 1870, the personality of theinnovative great painters. I note only the delay of Cézanne to express only an original

position.

I would like, in addition, to insist on the fact that, when Cézanne start to be affirmed,one is in the presence of two fundamental problems: that of the unit of its work andthat of the character reassuring or traditional this work.In this that links the unity of the work of Cézanne concerns, the better is to refer to itsown declarations. They are numerous and, grace with excellent critics, we know themwell. It is necessary to return a private individual homage with Maurice Denis bywhom Cézanne and all last the XIX century years are exceptionally well-known.What strikes me; personally, it is that these declarations seem to betray until the end aconflict who justify, and the slow formation of the genius of Cézanne, and theextraordinary results to which it is finally arrived. One finds, on the one hand, under its feather or in its mouth a whole series of declarations which, more or less, areattached to the famous sentence by which it marked, one day, a certain bad mood withregard to Gauguin, which he shows to have walked through the world " his smallfeeling «. But there is, in addition, a whole series of texts which are attached to asentence, not less famous, in which it affirms its intention returning the forms by thecone and by the spheres. Attache, of a part, with the method of the other impressionists, Cézanne bait himself, in a whole started from his work, to asdirectly seize as possible the pure data of the directions and the conscience to thedirection bergsonian of the term. It is attached thus with very vast running of thecontemporary thought, that which brings closer the painters like Monet, of the literarymen like Mallarmé and the poets Symbolists, of the musicians like Debussy. This

current which aims at a development of our intimate experiment, walk on, since the beginning of the century, starting from romantic German like Novalis and Holderlin,while passing by Baudelaire and Wagner, parallel to critical effort of science torenew, by the analysis clarifies spiritual conditions of the life, our knowledge of theuniverse. But there is,137

in addition, a Cézanne anxious to bring back aspects fugitive and individual of theuniverse with stable forms, with a system of general conventions, in order towithdraw the painting with the worship of the pure feeling.On this point everyone agrees. Where the difficulty starts, it is when it is a question of

knowing if, anxious to bring back the objects perceived to the geometrical diagrams,the sphere and the cone, Cézanne the range of its other ambitions does not restrict.



One is celebrating the conciliation which is established in its work between thesensitive experiments of Impressionism and the tradition. When Cézanne endeavoursto introduce Euclidean structure in unquestionable of its works, it throws obviously a

bridge between academic art and research of modern times. But I do not believe, for my part, that it is there, precisely, the alive part of his work nor, of the remainder, that

it either the only way in which it vivified its optical experiments on the light. TrueCézanne is not a reassuring character. That it sometimes introduced, in its largeBaigneuses for example, of the diagrams very close to the academic tradition,agreement. Still would be necessary it to know up to which point there is only that of original in such or such table. One can said, in a sense, that hours of charts suppose acertain traditional cubic space or that Baigneuses reproduce the pyramidalcomposition and symmetrical swinging of the forms of Poussin. But there is another thing in the hours: the construction of volumes, the setting on the same foot of the

bottom and the characters placed on the same plan of interest, same distance psychicfrom the spectator. And all the same in Baigneuses, it is not the regularity of thegroups of trees and the suggestion of a creepage distance towards the distance, but the

fact that the figures cease being treated like human reference marks with the centre of a nature - of a homogeneous space apprehended either according to somesegregatives- deduced from a tangle of artificially selected fields of vision clear -,either according to actions suggested compared to certain rules of life social or legendary, which constitutes the major originality of the speculation. The values of composition and representation are more reversed that in the report/ratio colour of Femmes to the garden forms, of Monet. Nothing thus appears more false to me than todefend Cézanne because it would have introduced conciliation between the traditionand the innovation. Will we take as regulates intangible our aesthetic judgements thelaw of Carrache? So sometimes the conciliation exists, it forms part constraints, whichweigh on the great minds.I am convinced that Cézanne provided a truly positive contribution to thedevelopment of the contemporary art. If it did not solve certain problems138

who tormented, it at least directed its successors towards particular solutions stillcurrently badly integrated in practice current. One could not say who Cézanne

bequeathed a complete vocabulary of signs, with the painters of today, but it is certainthat it is him which transferred the problem from the plan where had leftImpressionists - to explore the world by the quivering analysis of all the feelings -, onthat where it is still placed - to substitute a new system of fixed space relations for old.

The current error is to proclaim, at the same time, which Cézanne is an innovator andto rent it have brought back the tradition. Cézanne is impressionist with departure, itcultivates the small feeling, and it remains, until the end, faithful, to a certain extent,with the ideal of its youth: each time that it modulates, that it notes the value of thecolours degraded on an object with the direction where Impressionism of the first timehad defined it, each time that it takes, all things considered, for starting point of itswork a landscape or an object defined nor according to the old design of space, eachtime if it is wanted that it seeks to modify the notation of feelings recorded accordingto the respect of old cuttings, representative of one action practises accustomed. But itis, on the contrary, innovator each time that it gives up the traditional parcelling out

of the figures changeantes of nature in significant objects of particular or collectiveactions determined, i.e., at the bottom, each time that it establishes new connections



between fragments of his perception experimentations, made abstraction of the uses or legends. Its true originality is not to note known elements differently, nor to bring

back of the acute feelings to former designs practise. It consists in the attribution of aninterest to new parts of optical experiment. Party of an incredible feeling of naturesuch that had it written its predecessors, it arrives, by a difficult choice, to isolate

small number of fragments significant deprived of classified value. It creates a worldwith the fragmentary and organic time, according to some very simple intentions,imposing like law with its work the certainty of a particular truth, - as much

pirandellien that bergsonien.That, sometimes, it introduces certain geometries, undoubtedly: but it is necessary

being attached well to the traditional values to believe that the world of SainteVictoire of 1905 is similar to that of Poussin. Neither appreciation of the distances,nor that of the intermediate plans is identical. The Château black is vaguely cubic,

but it does not have anything to make with the houses which spread out in thetraditional fabrics. It is not any more one house even within the meaning of Poussin or of David. It does not act any more to evoke a residence of

139

countryside inserted in the traditional meshs of the linear prospect, nor either of thegiver for framework with a fictitious action whose direction will appear easily onlywith which read Ovide or Homère, in the colleges humanists. This black Château, itis undoubtedly a casin, but, for Cézanne, it is a known building, which one knowshow one goes there, how it is presented seen closely; it is a building which one likes,that one wishes, that one cannot acquire; the least sign is enough to mean it.Marvellous it is that, this black Château, we also see it and that it plays a role in our imaginations. We locate it in a space at the same time concrete and imaginary. Itrepresents, however, for us also, a allusion with some of our desires or our objects of

pride.There Cézanne created an object, determined compared to a certain civilization.Speak about black Château in Bantou or a contemporary of Laurent de Médicis.Even those which are scandalized by what it «is badly drawn" see it more or less andfeel sorry for it to be so badly treated. They do not enter less the play of Cézanne thatits admirateurs. A sign was born in function, once more, of a technical experiment,together with a human experiment.There were finally transfer and not suppression of the subject. The apples and theonions, Sainte Victoire and Gilet red became elements of significance apart fromany traditional anecdote. The renewal of the subject occurred on the level of the direct

contacts with reality. It , was not enough that Impressionists, after Courbet, representin values and either in lines the actions of the characters of their time, it was necessarythat new absolutely elementary points of recognition are instituted as bases of a newlanguage. And it is quite obvious that it is, on the one hand, the connection with thescience and the new causality of the time, on the other hand, the requirements of thenew public, which imposed its way on the plastic language of modern times.When Bazille paints admirable Terrasse of Méric, it materializes a middle-classdesign of the life and human relations which is still reconciled with the old conditionsof formation intellectual of last and with a traditional estimate of the human values.The war of 1870, the major change which has occurred in the structure of therepublican company imposed to the artists a complete renewal their symbols.

Casseurs of stones are located according to a social claim, in a company hierarchicalagainst them; Atelier of Courbet introduces an " allegory real" to maintain a bond



between elements still considered as providing points of support to a control daylabourer.140Card players are not any more of the men "of the people", the witnesses of a more or less sour or romantic claim; they are considered in themselves, like component the

matter indisputable of the art. The famous discusses in function of the legendary andsocial hierarchies changes thus definitively and disappears.The goal of painting since Cézanne, it is the discovery of the fragments of nature inwhich the interest of the painter with regard to the world is expressed. It does not actany more a social position of the artist, it acts of its position like individual in theuniverse. This new attribution of values with certain aspects of our entourage leads toa definition of new objects, at the same time real and imaginary. The apple will beimperceptible and the handy and flexible mountain with the liking of the artist. With

beginning of Renaissance it acted to draw up new reports/ratios in the men,considered as a kind in Nature, and this Nature, regarded as a stable reality. It is notonly one universe geographical from which Cézanne escapes, but a mental universe in

which the reciprocal functions of the beings and the things are stopped. Art gives upto the anecdote and to the history to be made empiricism and pantheism; it writeshistory of things, apples, fruit dish, mountain; what they mean in fabric of the dailylife love of men for which changes unceasingly also the possibilities of access and of transformation of the matter. In this direction, the contemporary art still less of asocial character that an objective character. It is the art of a new time of mechanization of the forces of the nature, tightening more closely the evolutionhuman that the company which remains delayed.The destruction of the spaces of Renaissance took, with Cézanne, a considerable step.One passed from the critical stage to the stage positive of the action. One is notsatisfied any more to destroy; one starts the substitution for the old space of a newspace. This is in conformity with the nature of the things. One could not conceive theeven temporary disappearance of plastic space. The result of a similar process would

be the vacuum, empty thought, empty of the expression. A company does not leave animaginary and representative space, any of same as a space physical or geographical,mechanical or geometrical given, than to settle simultaneously in another. The placeof Cézanne is characterized by this fact that, up to now, one had criticized thanfounded more; this time appears enough general replacement components to nourish aseries of experiments. One does not alter any more the old system, one outlinesanother of them. Before examining how continues itself under our eyes141

the experiment, I will still show how the lesson of Cézanne was together with twoother great parallel attempts to confer on "new objects" an immediate value of significance.With Van Gogh, the speculation on the space takes a particular character of the fact of his disease. A whole part of its work is dominated by its madness. One can wonder whether there is between the healthy one and the patient only one difference of degree, or on the contrary a difference in nature. The introduction of some element of imbalance - it only to deform the standard feelings, or doesn't it bring does not makean absolutely heterogeneous element which, according to the rule of dimensions,modifies by repercussion all the former system of representation? Up to what point is

the universe of Van Gogh it specific? At which time the disease does introduce it itsdestroying element into the intellectual system and the plastic language of the poor





almost of any system of plastic integration and any ratio, for expressing the distance by the only use of the pure colour. From there, the possibility results of drawing up afixed scale of absolute values, of what one of the virtual elements of a new languageconsists once more. Discovery of Van Gogh - space quality autonomous of thecolours in a pure state - rises today a part considerable of the art of Léger. I will

have the occasion will have to return there. A Rubens, ancestor of Van Gogh, knewthat a red can be the centre of a system colours around who’s a whole composition -witness organizes the famous analysis of Martyr of Liévin saint by Fromentin inMasters of formerly. Nobody had still included/understood in modern times only ayour pure only means, in oneself, certain concept of proximity or from moves awaylies143

in such an absolute way, because it corresponds to the scientific bases of the perception, that there are affinities or incompatibilities between the various colours, or which there are families of tone, heats and cold. What Van Gogh discovered it is a

positive law. Cézanne had shown the possibility of creating objects - signs by thecombined handling of the form and colour, Van Gogh added to the new language anew means of expression.It is known from now on that a colour must be handled not only according to the lawof the complementary - séculairement respected - but in consideration owing to thefact that it has in oneself a value of absolute space significance. Blue moves away andthe yellow brings closer. Such a discovery upset all the technique. It completed to

break the traditional relations between the drawing and the colour. This one does nothave more need to be defined or supplemented by a feature; it has, in itself, all itssignification space. One can build a space complex only by the juxtaposition of coloured spots. It is not necessary any more to cover with small keys a linear groundwork, it was hardly outlined. Impressionism is exceeded.I think that, of the point where we arrived, the position of Gauguin in the discovery of the modern art is determined in a new way. It is wrongly that one gave, in general, of its work a very literary interpretation.Thirty years ago, of the facts which seem to us today striking were still hidden.Witness Maurice Denis, who saw in Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin of «distorting«, disciples of Mr. Ingres, because it could not design that dimensions and the spacesystem of representation of the things were really changed. Let us be him however lenient. We are, compared to the men who completed to destroy Renaissance, in the

position where the contemporaries of Alberti or Cennini compared to the innovators

of Quattrocento were. We discover progressively that they opened to us new fields of thought and expression, but we do not know yet which will be the final form of theworld and the space which we build by assembling their materials.The case of Van Gogh and Gauguin is assimilable with that of brilliant Galois, thismathematician died young person, in 1832, not leaving that some not are summary

behind him. Nevertheless, during more than one half-century, the great minds took asa starting point the fulgurating the principles contained in some elliptic meditations.The visions of Van Gogh would have led only to formless dreams, if other men hadnot been began again the assumption and to vivify it. It is the law of any pedagogy, of 144any formation intellectual, of any language, the law of initiations, the law of progress.

It east interested to specify according to which Gauguin processes has incorporatedthe topic of the colour in a system more or less readable for its contemporaries. The



method is very simple. At his place the colour ambitioning not to represent, to it only,all the values and all the qualities, in particular this of space. it joins; it compromiseswith the drawing. A division is established but it is a very surface sight, however,which made say, sometimes, that it extended dyes it inside the encircle. The famousquarrel with Bernard Emil seems quite vain since it concerns, precisely, the most

transitory aspect and less original of its work, corresponding one time when it gropes.The line, the ring are not used at his place thereafter for maintaining the obviousnessof the object traditional. It is the setting in value one not of the traditional object butof the surface of the fabric and also of certain elements unforeseen selected in reality.The line and the colour simultaneously contribute to express a new interest for fragments detached from reality.I am in complete disagreement, on this point, with criticisms which believe that thesecrecy of Gauguin, it is to have expressed like a visionary – and thanks to processescloser to the incantation than of painting - the mystical concern of the modern heart.I know the entire party well that one can draw from these certain texts of Gauguinitself. And I am very sensitive personally if not at the metaphysical side of concern of

one works, at least with the extraordinary call towards the unknown and towards theimaginary one which it launched, and which was heard. But I believe that it is not theonly sentimental power which makes the size of its work and which constitutes itssecrecy.An art of daydreaming running and undulating like a concern, it is that of Carrière,which ceased misleading most enthusiastic. It is really exaggerated of saying that withGauguin one attends the advent of a style which aims at making visible andsignificant a lyric thought. I really do not believe either only what characterizes our time, it is research and the mystical contemplation of the inexpressible one. We live,on the contrary, in one moment which almost dangerously believes in theeffectiveness of the verb and which handles with much of aggressiveness the variouslanguages it has. There is always metaphysical concern in the world; but, really, I

believe rather, moreover, that, in the form where it tests it, Gauguin is the last of theromantics and not the first of the modern ones. Its written style appears me to providethe proof. It is by sentimentality that the grandson of Flora Tristan holds, him, withthe past, by the expression, it is ours. One cannot, finally,145

To allot, like the fact Mr. Huyghe with Delacroix, the point of departure of doctrinesof Correspondences - comparable wrongly of the remainder, by a some, in Stimmungof the German poets - and to proclaim that Gauguin is, from this point of view, after

Impressionists, after Symbolists, a precursor.I just do not believe to make of Gauguin the man of indefinable and theunconscious one. All the drama of its life it is, on the contrary, its need for incarner and to fix with an admirable precision the confused call that it collects in itsentourage. It also goes far that possible in the way from the formal concretization,giving a body until the spirits, familiar with them and alleviated to a certain extent bytheir sight and their friendship. Its faintness is not solved that by materialization of the

phantoms.It is not true more than Gauguin driven out neither the space of field of art, nor thatspace either identifiable with the field of the matter, Time expressing the opinion. Iam certainly not suspect as regards Correspondences, having devoted formerly more

than one development. But I do not believe in the kindness of virgin natures, nor thatthe colour cannot express the extent - but where of Van Gogh would be the lesson?



Faith never, by itself, produced works; the line, enlized in space, never gave up withcolour or with the dream the privilege of materializes the spirit. Any reason has asuggestive virtue. Mathematicians, which are the spirits which are driven mostnormally in the field of the imaginary one, speak readily about systems whichdetermine places. To be purely abstract, these systems are neither less positive, nor

less rich person of spiritual possibilities. I refuse to identify the heart, or more exactlythe spirit, and confusion.The message of Gauguin, I believe in it of all the force of my conviction, exists. To

borrow to him, in my turn, a term, I will say that it is discovered, in all measurementwhere the matter became rich by the hand of the artist. One is mistaken when it isimagined that Gauguin is satisfied to colour in the limits of a contour; the marvellous

pastes play an immense role in its work, they give the life to painting. Gauguin oftenreconciles, from this point of view, the lesson of Cézanne with that of Van Gogh.However, it is, despite everything, in the field of space that are, to my direction,largest innovations.I do not speak only owing to the fact that Gauguin was the initiator of all the

exoticism of Time modern, the first with us to make leave the limited circle of thelegends of Greco Latin are or the Far East too much truffe of Occidentalism. There issome paradox with exalter the positive lesson that the contemporary art withdrewfrom its frequentation with the cruel or exotic styles146

And with not to return some thanks to Gauguin. The thing is becoming so familiar with our spirit which we have tendency to forget to it the extraordinary jump in theunknown that Gauguin made make at its time. It is because it could not be satisfied todig the problems by deepening them by the meditation and the reflexion as Cézanne -which was almost the man of a landscape - that it’s intended was directed. It ran to theantipodes fault of finding on our premises a food for his genius. Limitation perhaps.But which statement will dare that we did not request after him Negro art, the pre-Columbian, to the Mexican, Celtic, cruel arts that lessons of spiritualism? We askedfor completely precise methods to them to delimit the matter. Gauguin first was theman who widened our horizons not only sentimental but figurative. It occupies fromthis point of view a single place in the history of the transformations of modern space.It is the heroes of the bringing together of civilizations. It thus has, above all,materially broken the executives of the old space. If one can dream today of onecivilization founded on a new humanism, it is certainly not while thinking of vainnostalgias, but has a concrete effort of the man for better seizing the permanent

conditions of its destiny. We became curious and erudite processes, of positivesymbols which determine, through figurative works, the manners and the acts of thesocial groups.When Gauguin wants to represent, with the surplus, the sentimental space of canaqueabandoned, or when he wants to make us foresee the magic of a nature or the visualreport/ratio is different of those which we know - in consequence of the particular mirages with certain remote skies and in consequence of the different situations wherethe beings are placed by the effect of their habits and their beliefs -, it will not belimited to transpose these impressions in the style of the imagery of Renaissance. It isnot a James Tissot! New system of visualization worked out. The qualities of spaceconcretize this time in a partitioning base either on the differential scales of the veduta

- combining the two grids well moderated of the linear prospect and single hearth of light -, but on the new space ambiguity of the support – the fabric - opposed to the



autonomous values of Colour pure. By the colour and the topic, known thedecorative surface widens in three dimensions, and more still in dimensionsimaginary. Suggestion undeniable that all those test which look at Gauguin is the

product not of a miracle of sensitivity, but of a miracle of art. It is not the emotion of Gauguin which did it painter, it is its power

147

to express, i.e. to specify and materialize a certain number of plastically ordered precise details. The modern apologists of the subconscious of Gauguin seem to forgetMaurice Denis and his famous sentence on plastic quality, i.e. space, of a table worthyof this name. From there with saying that Gauguin is only one system of linesdetermining a partitioning of the fabric, there is a step and those which, after him,

believed too much in the virtue of decorative are well returned account.I think thus that the space system of Gauguin is founded, at the same time on a

parcelling out of surfaces of the plastic screen - or if one prefers of the support -; onthe qualities intrinsic of the line cutting the silhouettes or records the densities - and

on this point Gauguin follows the lesson of Degas and joined Seurat and on a use of the colour that creates, in parallel, a complete space system. Gauguin certainly opened

broad ways with the imaginary one, but it is not obvious that this imaginary isdeprived of space qualities. All on the contrary, I am persuaded that Gauguin brought,at the same time, at modern times an intuition of the infinite richness of the world andmeans practise to inventory them. It provided us a method for renewing, beyond thefiguration of the episode the general system of visualization on the motionless plasticscreen of our boldest voyages throughout the immense world of between outline.There are in Gauguin a call and a method to spatialize the feeling. This method ismade many loans of processes in detail, but anybody of other which did not know tohim to associate, with one triangulation new of space with two dimensions, theadditional dimensions of picturesque and of the attributive colour of the sentimentalvalues - see its own descriptions of some of its fabrics like nevermore- and of thedepth while Van Gogh also uses the colour in a representative of the third dimensionand like evocative of a certain quality - joy or sadness - pure feeling, Gauguin asks for the widening of a more imaginary space to him. Double attempt at these two men was

born all the modern speculation on dimensions from the space. It is undoubtedlyGauguin the first which crossed consciously and systematically the ancient limits

posed for the geometry and the geography of Renaissance.I believe to have shown how one could say that at a time given the space of Renaissance had ceased existing, not satisfying more to knowledge nor with the habits

of the nations. It was seen however that a pure and simple destruction of space wasunthinkable and that it never acted but148of substitution slow of a new space to old. It thus appears necessary to me still up towhat point to seek the innovations made conceivable by the brilliant discoveries of theartists of École of Paris towards the end of the XIX century, actually became thestarting point of a language plastic, corresponding to certain needs for thecontemporary company. Because, just as one could consider only the principlesdiscovered by the scientists and the artists at the beginning of Quattrocentonecessarily conditioned the art of Renaissance, thus one could say only the inventionsof Cézanne, of Van Gogh and of Gauguin necessarily provided the bases of a art

nouveau. On the most probable assumption, one will arrive, from here somegenerations, at a plastic language as generally allowed as that which is fixed in the



academies of XVIe century according to stiffening of the civilization, more directedtowards the exploitation of his discoveries than towards the search for new horizons.It will be necessary for that that certain technical merits and social again wereessential of new imposed with the unit of the companies in report/ratio the ones withthe others. We are still far from this stage and this consideration must encourage us

with certain modesty to judge art of our time. But it underlines of it also the extremeimportance. I do not have the intention to develop this question lengthily, reserving itfor other works. It appeared to me, however, as this book would be incomplete, aswell for the intelligence of the process of creation of space by Renaissance as for thatof its destruction, if I did not introduce one interpretation of the space problems of the current hour.

30. Claude Monet. The boulevard of Capucines (1873) This fabric is particularly characteristic of the properly impressionist style.The coloured "touch" is used here to give a representation illusionist of the light to thedetriment of the line; resumption or episode, as I showed, of an old conflict, openedsince Renaissance and that this last had practically solved for the skew of clearlyobscure one. One returns to the recording of the feelings at the expense of thefigurative diagrams and with the dissociation of the two great systems of establishment of forms: by the line and the colour (figures 8 and 9). One feels, allthings considered, the need for a new "temperament >, with the musical direction of the term, but, while waiting, the intransigent solutions are accentuated. However, it isquite obvious that, if the fabric of Monet is finally readable, it is because the sowingof coloured spots is not anarchistic all the same. The spots fit in a figurative order andit is obvious that this order of installation of the forms, identified with volumes,objects like their reciprocal positions in space, the same one is that which implies thesetting in prospect traditional. It is in the sense that I proposed of speech of "roasts"impressionist. It does not act still that new preparing of diagrams of organizationentirely in conformity with unit construction of a space marked out by the objectsspread out according to the pure doctrines of Quattrocento. There is grid because thereis superposition of a system of observation and representation that are not recognizedanymore as absolutely equivalents. Before destroying Renaissance, impressionism

returns to the analysis of fundamental bases of its perception. It renew it, initially, the problems rather than it does not remove them.151

31. Seurat. One Sunday at grande-Jatte(1885). Chicago. Art Institute.In a little different way, the style of Seurat is also preserving vision of Renaissance.Seurat substitutes a system more mechanic of analysis of the light for the sensitiverecording of the feelings. But this analyze is exerted on a vision altogether traditionalof the world. It is not yet the transformation of the vision, it is the notation whichchanges. Seurat, like Impressionists, insisted on the values with the detriment of theline. Moreover, Seurat returns to the vision by the volumes of Piero. Of this entire

manner one remains in the terms of the alternatives of men of Quattrocénto (surfacevisible of Alberti, or volumes in the space of Piero and Masaccio).



152The neo-impressionism (or divisionism) preached by Seurat thus does not exceed thelevel of the receipts of workshop; it did not appear like an alive formula and for cause:it sticks to returned and not to the vision. The framework of the figuration remains,and it is always the impressionist grid, with this aggravation which it is not a question

this time of records, lies sensitive, my is of abstraction. Seurat insisted moreover onthe receipts of setting with the square of Renaissance, in particular on the goldensection. It is not by it pseudo classicism only it counts; but by the fact that it helpedthe following generations with discovering Piero della Francesca and the problem of volumes, of which it owed of the remainder the revelation with men like Renoir andDegas.153

32. Degas. In the slides of the Opera, Ludovic Halévy and Boulanger - Cavé(1880-1882).Pastel and softening. Collection D. Halévy.

Very as much as the luminism, research on the possible dislocation of the graphicdiagram acted to release the vision. And Degas the anxious one is infinitely moreadvanced than Seurat, which believes in the formulas. Already in 1872 in Femme inPotiche, Degas had sought the rupture of the fixed executives by the rejection of thesymmetry or perhaps more exactly by a return to certain formulas quickly given up of Quattrocento. The composition of Degas revealed at the bottom the direction of workslike Saint Sebastien of Mantegna or Naissance of saint Élisabeth of Giotto… Itindicates that none of these works posed free problems and that the XIX centuryreturns to the bases to leave whose had been built the plastic vision of the previouscenturies to inventory them before destroyed.

33. Degas. Mary Cassatt in Musée of the Louvre (J 875-1876). Philadelphie.Collection Mac Illeny.Study for a more pushed composition, where appears by time an oblique bench whichreduces the direction of the study. We leave a setting here to the traditional square,

balances bodies obtained by the partitioning of the fabric, always with the bottomunder the influence of the scenographic cube of Trecento. There is here suggestionwith the time of volume of the figure and the plastic qualities of space. This timeRenaissance is really blamed and one sees that it supposes the belief in the measurableunit of space and the things. It is fundamentally the optical interpretation of the world,

and not very sensitive, with due respect to Mr. Berenson, with the values tactile. Withthe appreciation of plastic qualities, autonomous and concrete of space, one toucheswith the bases and at the end of Renaissance. Here the true break. One directs oneself towards the appreciation and the figuring of a ponderal space, a pure depth.155

34. Degas. Dancers raising a staircase (1880). Paris. Museum of the Louvre.This composition develops the system challenge nor by the first of the two sketches of the preceding board. One passes from a notation to a method. There is geometricalfitting of two spaces differentiated by their scale and their orientation, buthomogeneous and simply committed instead of being jointed (figure 3). At the end

of the cycle of the metamorphoses one finds the fundamental principles and one can



regard as a block a certain series of forms, representative of several states of the samecivilization.

35. Matisse. Girls at the edge of a river (1918).The connection elements between the figures are here, on the contrary, entirely new.

Vision of objects drawn up among objects flat and returned by the process of theexpressive elision. There is, at the same time, creation of new objects andabandonment of the unit of expression. Moreover, the colour plays a capital role: itgives by itself a series complementary to values. There is a new grid: between a visionflat compartmentalized: a vision in spread out plans returned by the colour; a vision insuggested volumes, attached to the traditional vision. At each time of the visioncorresponds one figurative category. One comprend here how the one of thefundamental assumptions of Renaissance had been, on the contrary, the universalityof a certain optical system of measures.157

36. Cézanne. Portrait of mm E Cézanne (J 887). Pellerin Collection.One would like to make sensitive by which series of experiments this abandonmentof a system mental which, at notched joint the variations of the taste, had preserved akind of unit at all the forms of art which had followed one another during severalcenturies, was prepared, technically and intellectually speaking. One of the firstattempts, directly related to the formulas of Degas, is obvious here. It is about adouble attack to the principle of the stability of the axes and conservation of thevertical. The image is registered within the framework of the support, it evokes adetached vision of the practical laws of probability. It is the projection of a mentalimage, not the projection of a spectacle. They are the axis of catch of sight and thesecondary axis of the daydream, not the co-ordinates of the action, which order.158

37. Van Gogh. The chair and the pipe (1888). London. Tate Gallery.The bringing together of these two works shows that it is not a question of animagination, but of the development of a system. One passes of the triangulation of astable space to the triangulation of an apprehensible space by the eye moving, withoutreference immediate to the action. The experiment of theatre contributed to releasethis new vision much. The vision of spectator of the hen house will relay that of witness of floor. One goes towards the formula of the cinematographic camera whichtakes preferably of the oblique sights which strike imagination. But in fact the camera

gave its vision to our time; the filmic vision followed the plastic vision, like thescenographic vision of the traditional theatre formerly followed the speculations of the painters of Quattrocento.

38. Renoir. Place Pigalle(I880) (or Clichy places). Londres. Collection R. A.Butler. Courtauld Institute of Art.This Renoir proves how the optical analysis of the feelings led to discovered of a newspace. This adorable fabric, where Renoir threw all its grace and all the freshness of Paris, is founded on the notion the «depth of field «. I insisted in the text on theimportance of the segregation of the plans in the structure of the plastic space of Renaissance. Here, only the foreground is Net, however the others all are present - in

an obviously molten, but exclusive representation of spreading out Nets of rare detailsof Quattrocento. One moment vision, recorded just as it is, not rebuilt. One sees well



that Renaissance, like the contemporary filmic vision, was an assembly, simplyfounded on other obviousness, other reflexes psycho physiologic. The vision of Renaissance arbitrarily associates details which can be seen with precision only inturn. This fabric locates at the same time Impressionism and Quattrocento in theimmense field of the illusion. It is comment of the concept of reality and the

marvellous one in painting.160

39. Manet. Cats. Etching.I gave like point comparison this admirable Manet based on an apprehension quite as

modern of space and however more respectful that preceding Renoir of the traditional processes. My intention is, indeed, to show that the evolution of the plastic figurationof space is deduced from an interior need for renewal for the figure changing for theworld - which calls quasi fatally the expansion of the experimental forms. One findshere the scenic plan of hardly raised Piero; one finds the segregation of the plans Netsand selected; one finds the fall of space in the second plan (figure 15). But, with that,

vision is new, as much as that of Renoir or Degas. It will be necessary to wait the xxcentury to succeed, as at Matisse (figure 35) with the rupture of continuous figurative.But all the experiments of that natural one returned finally possible. Supported by theexample of japonism, and inspired by the taste of the stressing of the characters (therole of Daumier, inspirer also of Cézanne, is to be underlined like initiator of Expressionism), Manet opens the way, in this work extraordinary, with all therepresentations of the space founded on contrasts of plans coloured or simplyluminous. It leads to Leger and Gischia (cf figures 61 and 70).In fact, by the only playof the values without the colour, it opens a way parallel with that which, by Van Goghand Fauves, constitutes one of the ways of fundamental research of the contemporaryart.163

40. Van Gogh. Young man with the cornflower (1890?)It is impossible, by definition, to reproduce in black and white a work whichmaterializes the possibilities of immediate expression of space by the colours. Itseems to me, however, that, just as it is, this document will make it possible toinclude/understand the comment that it had given in the text of the material roleallotted to the pure colour in the art of Van Gogh:Close to the preceding board, it makes to arise the techniques which made it possibleVan Gogh to carry out the direct recording of coloured space feelings. It acts, at the

same time, of vision and representation. Manet, more traditional colourist, find theexpression revolutionary immediate of space only in the values. Van Gogh has thefirst revelation of the possibility of a total representation of space by the pure colours.The experiment that the artists of fine of XIX E century make space is at the sametime qualitative and constructive. As always one finds initially works fulguratingwhich, at the pure state, provide the scale of the desires of the modern artist. In thesame way, at the beginning of Quattrocento, of Masaccio or Masolino, Uccello or Piero threw a powerful glance on the future. In a direction all Renaissance, with itssame contradictions, is included in their work. However, to pass from the vision to thestyle, one needed generations. The same will apply to substitution to the plastic spaceof Renaissance of a new figurative space of the feelings and ideas of the modern

world.164



41. Cezanne. Castle black (C 1904).To make sensitive this fact that starting from a new vision of dimensions and qualitiesof the external world, the dissociation of the old figurative representation of the spaceis done only slowly, after having given in value all the assumptions on which had

founded the system which collapses, I chose a certain number of works of the end of XIX century which show the multiple tests of pioneers destructors. As I explained inthe text, Cézanne started from a conflict between a coloured and reducing vision of the light and a will of stable geometrical structuring of the forms. Black Castlerepresents, at the bottom, the point of final result of Impressionism. Vision, above all,significant and transitory of the world. Moreover work still applies the system of the"grid" defined in the comment of figure 30. I believe to have, however, shown in thetext the share that the sentimental values in this composition play. The artist stillwishes to communicate his emotion in front of a nature split up in a certain number of objects hardly outlined, but reconstituables according to the traditional data which theword of object implies. There is here, of the remainder, an extraordinary mixture of

vision direct, immediate, and of hallucinatory vision, from where a species resultsfrom dissension between the notation of the reason and the poetic significance of work. The size of Cézanne is to have simultaneously achieved Renaissance andhaving shaken the modern sensitivity.167

42. Manet. Bar at the folies Bergère (1882). London. Coll, Courtauld Institute.Insisting on the share of imaginary in the development of modern space, I believeuseful to bring closer black Castle two famous fabrics which make sensitive the extentof the problems raised by the insertion of the modern dream in traditional space. Thisinsertion plays, in particular, a powerful role in the destruction of the system of spreading out of the segregative plans, related to a concrete vision of the usual object.Work was very well commented on formerly by Paul Jamot, who showed the placeheld by the reflection in the ice, behind the waitress, of the spectacle of the room infestival, if far away from the major feelings of the principal character. The topic of Bar is a psychological topic of analysis in the Maupassant or Goncourt. At the end of the XIX century, when it will be destroyed, as well as to the xv century, when it isworked out, the representation of space is not conceived without figuration symbolicsystem and social.168

43. Gauguin. The loss of the virginity or awakening of spring (1891). Privatecollection.Close to Manet, this Gauguin proves that the new intimate experience that the mandraws from his body - and especially of its spirit - is the deep cause which made nulland void the space of Renaissance. Horizon, is reproduced on a plate ( Piero, figure14), background, nothing of nine, not even the partitioning of space (Uccello, figure13, the hedge), in this barbarian poem of strange and of the lubricity. It is theappreciation of the role played by the various parts of the space - the psychic distance- which breaks traditional coordination. One left initially mentally rather than

plastically the old space.

44. Degas. Study of woman (C 1891). Paris. Museum of the Louvre.I have just spoken about the new experiments which our time made of our body.



All the directions new are already expressed in this splendid study. Vision close,tactile, pictorial, topological space - i.e. correspondent with a non Euclideanappreciation of the positions of the object compared to the observer and in its various

parts. We are in extreme cases of the overshrill analysis of the "primitive data of thedirections". The investigation, if developed since by the philosophers and the

novelists, into the general-purpose feelings was started by the painters at the sametime as by most advanced of the literary men. For the surplus, Degas often discoveredsigns able to translate this tactile vision immediately - distinct from the relief - thatRenaissance had deliberately avoided.

45. Picasso. The painter (1930).Brought closer of the preceding one, this fabric shows the connection which isestablished enters the most disconcerting speculations of the current time and the"realistic" analyses of the preceding generation. It also shows how the pitiless analysisof Degas leaves still of frameworks of representation formal and how, on the contrary,at Picasso, it is less the analysis than the invention which counts. The arabesque

develops starting from the optical analyses of its predecessors, support consideredfrom now on as naturalness of the composition. There is finally really creation of puresigns, new plastic language. And one sees well that Renaissance supposes, as much asthe inventory of a space sensitive, the description of a certain number of rules of appreciation of moral qualities and social of objects artificially selected like symbolsof values.171

46. Gauguin. Portrait of Gauguin in yellow Christ (1890). St. Germain - in Laye.Collection D. Denis.Return to the basic feelings, seeks new systems of organization of the plastic screen,

blamed of the permanence of the objective elements, such thus appears the generaldirection of the speculations on space in second half of the XIX century. I still chosesome examples of particular experiments, before gathering the evidence of thefundamental importance several series of research, those which relate to curvedspaces, the object and the light in the growing opposition of the classic art and thecontemporary art. Mr. Maurice Denis, who had it, announced that this table wascomposed according to the processes of the Italian decorators. However, one wouldnot have to exaggerate: it is a table without air, almost without intermediate space nor air envelope. A table is used as background and suggests its space; a dark amount

provides an alternative of the formula of figure 32; the head of Gauguin, foreground,

has the same importance as the tobacco pot of the second. Made of three beautiful pieces, this table, which aims to the expression, precisely does not have heart. Let usnot confuse the plastic values and the imaginary values. The artist is the matter assembler. Yellow Christ, the tobacco pot, Gauguin: only one reality illustrated under three faces. But the only element of plastic boldness, it is the differential use of thelarge plan.172

Degas. First subject. Dancer on one point (C 1878). Soften with pastel. CollectionMrs Walzmann. U.S.A.



Composition of a supreme refinement where the richness of the nuances is erased inthe unit of the effect. One finds here the warping of the axes which we already met,

but matched this time at the expression of the movement. This movement issuggested, of the remainder, by a crowd of disparate elements which all takes againthis central topic of work: stressing of the gesture of the leg, lightness of the tutu,

gesture of the arms, balances broken, put on page, appearing side of skirt with theextreme left and locating the principal figure in an entourage invisible but present, inthe process of conceal itself. The movement is, at the bottom, suggested by the imagecomposite that we form in our spirit of these differential notations of an even feelingsimple. In spite of appearances, we are not struck by the total accuracy of an attitudetaken on the sharp one; the movement is broken up and not photographed. Let usthink so that the recording of the gallop of a horse or race of a man gives in front of the camera of Marey or Muybridge! Synthetic movement without any realism. Thisrequirement of the composition, aiming at parcelling out the total feeling, is shownespecially in these flakes of wadding which fill the bottom with space elementswithout precise attribution. By Degas work the way with the more modern

speculations (cf figure 66). It will be noted that, in the same time, Renoir is broughtwith giving also in such Baigneuse, Baigneuse Stchoukine, a bottom neutral and

palpable at the same time, which proves how much the palpable design space plays of role in the contemporary art. The rationalized simplification of space, purely opticaldesign, formed one of the essential bases of the Renaissance vision. One foreseesfrom now on a space not only richer but deprived of single qualities andmeasurements, likely of several ambivalent systematic formulas of expression, butincompetents of exhaust never the totality of the possible significances.175

48. Renoir. Bust of woman. Study of naked.One meets here also one of these bottoms unspecified and equipped however withdensity. Space is a substance which is made of the same matter that the flesh of thewoman. The reproduction does not show naturally which these kinds of clouds aretreated in coloured values as well as the principal figure, of which they show thevalues. The concern of the men of Renaissance, which was to make coincide thediagrams representative of the forms by the lines and the colours, disappeared. Inaddition, this Renoir offers to us a very interesting formula of radiant organization of space around a luminous centre, or more exactly of points of light: bend, shoulder,

centre, stops. It is not any more question of bringing back the co-ordinates of thesystem to the point of view of the single eye. And the rules of the projectionorthometric are not worth more. The vision of space is done much more apprehensive,with a so to speak radiant feeling depth and a total indifference with the linear designsand standard volumes of the traditional geometry. What is, here, on the other hand,

preserved, it is the direction of the relief. The vision of the form is sculptural, withtwo steps of the speculations of Rodin, which introduces, him, of the pictorial valuesin the sculpture. Space is the interior space of the colour more still than that of thefabric or the world. We are not yet with the period when a new fixed system of signsis worked out corresponding to classified feelings. One is satisfied to test news and tonote them of them as accurately as possible. The plastic feeling of the new space came

well before the style. It enables us to delimit exactly the range of the company of Quattrocento.



1773. Towards a new space In the tables, only the colour without clearly-obscure forms the life even table.Antidestructif, analytical. The colour is a function of space.

Robert Delaunay. (Handwritten Note with the back of Coureurs.)

It is very difficult to consider things close. By a kind of decency which appearsexcessive to me, much of historians of art or the literature prohibit any incursion intothe contemporary time. It is not seen that the historians of the diplomacy or theeconomists assert the same restriction. The whole is question of method. It is not bad,to include/understand the phenomena of the past, to analyze the events of the daysometimes.What makes truly difficult a study of the facts artistic contemporary, it is rather thelack of well classified materials. It is easier to divide into sheets a collection of works

of Piero than of Matisse; when one wants to take an overall picture of the questions,one runs up, above all, with the great dispersion of materials. It is impossible, to thecurrent hour; to have a precise idea of what was the evolution of ideas in Paris about1905-1914. To join together the reviews of avant-garde represents a thorny work; our large libraries start hardly to discover where could be the source of contemporary art.Several overall works appeared, but they all are devoted to the biography or theanecdote. None poses truths problems exceeding the men.One adopted once and for all, without any criticism, some convenient opinions

borrowed from the daily journalistic activity. One endeavours, above all, to popularizecertain concepts which had a value of polemic or of propaganda but which do nothave anything to see with the history. The proclamation of surrealism or the propheticwritings of Apollinaire on Cubism are admittedly not the events méprisables. But our role is to require of us up to what point they express the major their authors, up towhat point these intentions, major intentions where surface, coincide with theintentions of the artists and up to what point these last intentions coincide themselveswith works. One tends too to write the history, of the contemporary art as if thevarious artists incarnaient ideas providentially prepared on the rays of a vast wellarranged store, where the new ones come would have to only be useful by taking theinspiration following the neighbour. The principal ambition of very new critic is tofind sources with the movement which it adopts or, on the contrary, to invent a badlyrecognized movement or a tendency. There will be soon more movements than artists;

unless one does not discover, on the contrary, that each artist created without usefulcontact with his similar, simply while letting speak, with the manner of a medium,its genius.I do not have, of course, insolence of wanting on some scornful pages to fill the gapsof criticism and information. I know all that it will be necessary of collective effort togather the materials on which will be established, one day or the other, true history of the art of the xx century. I claim by no means to separate, at a glance, the eternal of the transitory one. My intention is limited more. By holding me with the problem thatI raised, that of the last evolution of the pictorial space founded by Renaissance andentirely sapped by the work of the artists innovators of the Trente last years of theXIX century, I would like to show that old space definitely lived, without any hope of

return, because that there was not only speculation criticizes to dispute of it the bases, but already advanced development of new a system.



To arrive to this intention, I will endeavour, reversing the usual position of the problem, to seek not what distinguishes but what joins together, on the contrary, inspite of appearances, the few artists who have chance, in my personal opinion, torepresent in the future one moment of the history of the plastic language, i.e. the finalabandonment of the positions taken since Renaissance.

My choice will appear certainly arbitrary. Why not Rouault and why not Chagall?Why not Modigliani and Bonnard or Villon? Why not Utrillo? I ask initially that oneconsider that I do not claim to write here a complete history of the contemporary art. Ialready drew the attention to the fact that the scale of the innovations, especially in thefield of the representation of space, did not coincide absolutely with the quality andthe charm of the achievements. In the past also, it often arrives180

that the most pleasant work, or most representative of a plastic series, places itself along time after the discovery of the original system of figuration. That Rouault, for example, carried out beautiful works, works representative of a certain emotional

climate of its time, completely of agreement. But I do not believe that it has, however,introduces an original system of visualization.I am naturally ready to admit that I was mistaken for as much, for example, that oneof these days of new comes will borrow from Rouault certain aspects of its methodand will make an impersonalized element of expression of it. For the moment Rouaulthas a very personal technique, in great part borrowed from the stained glass; it iscertain that it largely used the discovery of Van Gogh concerning the autonomousquality of the colour, it is certain also that it expressed a quality very noble of emotion; but I do not believe, precisely, that the problem of the plastic language isonly one problem of emotion. At his place it is the man more than the craftsman whois tall. And it is natural thus besides that Mr. Venturi, who defends a criticism of art

based on the research of the personality - of the heroes -, grants a completely eminent place to him, that in Chagall which is in the same case as him.That Rouault and Chagall thus deserve to be studied with the most pious care, when itis a question of tracing the panorama of the states of sensitivity of the last half-century, it is certain. But I think that it is necessary, for including/understanding their

position well, to remember what occurred for example at the beginning fromQuattrocento. Who will say that absolutely speaking such table about Sassetta or Angelico, which is posterior in first Masaccio and first Masolino, that is to saywithout valor? The modernism never has the character of a block. It appears only inone number, increasingly considerable, of works. I seek here neither the men most

representative of an average state of mind which is, per definition even, attached ingeneral to the use of the established forms of the language, nor the most completedworks. I believe that, in the time that we live, humanity reaches a significant stage of its history and that it modifies some of the fundamental data of the various languagesof which the individuals are used for themselves to communicate between them.Rouault and Chagall speak a tasty language, but which is based on already testedsystems; Utrillo, wire of Impressionism also and Modigliani more distorting thaninventive, and Jacques Villon more voluntary and more curious about setting so muchso that of new vision. I think that with the retreat of time their place will do nothing

but grow, but that they will be attached more to the figurative formulas of thegeneration which passes. They are necessary. It

181



was necessary that they came so that an art based on certain human emotions and acertain technique of analytical and poetic notation of the feeling was complete.However I am convinced that other artists of this time played another role, becausethey found not only the means of expressing current feelings or feelings but of working out a new transmissible system of figuration of the world, and that this

system is nearer ultimately to that which the scientists, the technicians, philosophers,and all the simple men of action build, pulled by a need higher than their will or thantheir emotion, with the measurement of our means transformed of action on the matter and refinement of our intelligence.I am convinced that the painters of today, like those of the XV century, are among thefirst social groups to count among them men turned more towards the future towardsthe past. I have the ambition to bring the proof of it by melting me, on the one hand,on the analysis of certain works, considered as figurative systems comparable to alanguage, and, on the other hand, on the general study of the fundamental role playedin the development of the companies by the phenomena of collective expression andcommunication, such as us the various disciplines of the ethnography, anthropology

and sociology discover them more and more. I wish that archaeology find finally its place among these new social sciences, which will be the collective philosopher'sstone of our time and when the role of the image - language is still insufficientlyrecognized.The first tentative commune of expression renewed of the space to the xx E centurywas Cubism. I hear the Cubism in its form original, semi- theoretic, semi-experimental front of 1914. There are many contradictory opinions on the gasoline of Cubism. The ones claim that it is diverted world, take as a starting point certainlessons of Cézanne and aim at building entirely artificial objects. They readily hold itfor less advanced, if one can say, that the currents which follow the trace of Impressionists and Fauves and approach with the promised grounds of cosmiclyricism, however that « visionaries" as the Douanier(customs officer) wouldapproach with the field of the new realism. For others on the contrary Cubismrecreates under appearances visionaries the reality of the visible world. By fidelitywith the traditions left by Impressionism which would not have had the ambition tocreate a poetic reality but which would be born with the faithful reproduction of whatthe artists saw, and in opposition to Gauguin, initiator of an art attached to therepresentation through picturesque tinsels of a decoration purely decorative, Cubism,left a reflexion on the art of Cézanne, would then have given himself for goal therepresentation not of space but of volumes,

182such as perceives them the human eye. One goes until writing that Cubism does notrest on any geometry since the lines and the curves result from a priori from anyhuman vision and are found in any plastic work of art as soon as the preoccupationwith a partial imitation disappeared. For some ones still Cubism would havediscovered the rate/rhythm at the same time that it gave up the spirit geometric of Renaissance and by there it would be founded on a new realism.I am not unaware of testimonies that these various theories can also call upon with thesupport their statements. I know, in particular, that the serious historians of Cubism,those which defend the second attitude, are in fact the commentators faithful of the

artists of time, making revive very usefully for the future the certainty of a mediumfrom which the last witnesses will not be long in disappearing. But I also think that



the problems rose by Cubism, such as it is expressed in works and not in the theories,largely exceed one and the other of these interpretations.With the origin, Cubism revert, indeed, pace of a series of systematic experimentshalf, half empirical. It is also difficult to say up to which Apollinaire point was theexact interpreter of the works of his friends’ painters as to clear up the reciprocal

situation of Duranty and Maître compared to the impressionism. One should neither scorn nor to over-estimate the share of the reflexion and of the intentionality in thismovement has. Cubism, actually, is not defined by one or the other of the advancedformulas, nor by a new formula to be discovered: it is at the same time realism andarbitrary figure of the world; it is not a concrete method but a general orientation of the plastic thought, quartered between often contradictory temptations. One could notthus seek the definition right of Cubism, nor especially his exhaustive definition.Cubism wanted, at the same time, to carry out a painting without atmosphere and totransform the conditions of representation of the light; it wanted to only reach by thecolour, or only by the form, of visible or invisible realities and it brought back the

practice of the local tone sometimes; it was tried by the geometric and the arabesque.

It will be studied thus without wanting to define.One of the concerns first of Cubism was that dimensions of space. Sometimes itclaimed to introduce famous the fourth dimension by the movement by moving theones compared to different certain parts of the objects - and it wanted, at other moments, to bring back space to exclusive curved forms of dimensions traditional.It is impossible to define Cubism because actually the experiments which he institutedcontinue. We are still with the phase of the divergent investigations, none183

sufficiently general law to impose on our generation a standard vision and a system of standard figuration of the world did not succeed. I believe, for my part, which Cubismcould be defined only when one new academism is born. Then only we will be able tosay, among the innumerable formulas which were tested, which provided the firstoutlines of general solutions.It also seems to me that the first thing which strikes it is the open character of theexperiment cubist. One does not apply at all a figure more or less systematicallydiscovered, one tests several of them. It is not only one of the first cubists whoremained faithful to the doctrines or more exactly, since there are no doctrines, withthe one or the other only of the series of individual or collective experiments of theyears 1907-1914.I have the impression that the difficulty of classification which one meeting holds

with a very general cause in L ' history of any development of a new figurativesystem. If research always left discovered a method, all would be simple; m board onestarts from speculations empirical and groping to create the method slowly, as aconventional stability of the values of significance and meant values are introduced.There is no question of choosing, indeed, the elements represented according to anestimate of beforehand spread out values. It is not a question of the implementationof a theory of the language, but of an experiment where condenses the current actionof the individuals by a combination of T bears of hand ordered by their particular

physical constitution with a certain collective appreciation of the social significancesof the object observed or represented.It is possible to provide a simple explanation of Cubism. If one limits oneself to make

of Cubism a fashion, if one considers as cubists works of the artists grouped aroundBraque and Leger, Picasso and of Apollinaire, Juan Gris and of Delaunay, of Gleizes



and of Metzinger about 1910, all is simple; especially if it is admitted in advance thatthe theories coincide necessarily with the tables. But then, one is brought to say andthink that Leger "leaves" of Cubism, that French Cubism of 1910 is " faded" after thewar by the foreigners, and that Picasso enters and leaves Cubism like one enters andone leaves a country house at each summer, which hardly has more smell than of

saying than Renoir enters and leaves the impressionism and what succeeds, finally, todeny the coherence of the personalities even with which the one allots the honour of the movement.It is undeniable that we encounter a very large difficulty here. It is, in fact, the

problem of the relations which, at all the times, exist184

between the modes and the style. I do not believe that there is only difference indegree between the two phenomena. A style is not a more durable fashion; it does notresult from a progressive selection of accumulated elements. The fashion answerswith the taste of the men for what changes; it is made use of concrete elements,

picturesque, for immediate and temporary ends. The style meets the need for fixity; itis made of the adoption of method of enough durable to interpret and to representfeelings, it does not appear like a sum of fragmentary experiments, but as aframework which directs the multiple experiments of the mode according to a certainstate of mind which does not certainly constitute blow, but which, once acquired, is a

block and does not support of passages. Hundred experiments are needed which failso that a moment given the style change. There are always modes and the styles areseldom renewed. The modes mark the slow stages of integration of the new styles inthe life. With through the modes of the xx E century one can as well read besidesthe history of resistances to the art nouveau as that of progress of the new plasticstyle, which, that one wants it or not, is essential little by little on all the spiritsevolving/moving in the direction of contemporary scientific civilization.It would be thus very significant to make in parallel, but without confusing them, thehistory of the modes and the style through the contemporary time. It is then only thatone could discover the stages of the catch of conscience by the artists of the figurativeneeds of their time, by distinguishing them from all what represents their participation

besides necessary, to flow and the ceaseless backward flow of modes which brew theforces sharp of the tradition with those of the invention.With a certain moment, by example, the fashion required that one take as a starting

point the Negro art, or the Ballets Russian, or of the Romanesque art. There are phenomena very significant and which narrowly attach the artists to their time.

However it is impossible to support that it is the experiment of art Negro, or that of Ballets, or the knowledge of the Romanesque art which produced the orientation of current painting. The artists interpreted these styles, left according to their notimitative but creative concerns, part according to their picturesque and originalelements. They were useful of these modes which they partly accepted, partlyimposed, insofar as they found in these works - or more exactly in a certaininterpretation of these works - the confirmation of than they sought. It is not the exoticart which "inspired" Picasso at the time of Demoiselles of Avignon, singular association of topics in Toulouse Lautrec and a new picturesque figuration. Thequestion is of knowing185



In which comprehension of art Negro measures or of the primitive art or the Romanofrescos, to which lead the contemporary artists, coincided with the real penetration bythe creatures of the authentic direction of these objects on which rests rather atendentious interpretation of the artists and the public of our time. A new attitude of intellectual order an entirely new comprehension of the objects of the culture as well

as of the natural phenomena. It is not art negro who directed the style of Picasso it is avision analytical personal of the world, founded on the agreement of the directionsand of the intelligence thus that on a certain manner of using a plastic gift of writing -which rests like the faculty of the virtuoso on a psycho physiologic kind of directedcouple – which turned it towards a particular exploitation of this art.One sees thus how much it is useless to want to cut out the history of arts during thelast half-century following the elements which the surface analysis of the modes

provides which followed one another. The recognition of various currents which, being added the ones to the others, would give the average of the taste of the timedoes not give the explanation of the particular forms that the painting took our time.I am personally very interested by the history of the modes and the contemporary

taste. I think that it is essential to devote objective studies to it. But, in my opinion,the goal to reach is not to describe a collection of phenomena which, by addition, givethe table of the development of art. What remains it, today, of the history of themodes of Quattrocento? From time to time, a scholar comes, who reminds to us that,about the year so much and so much, the women were insane of such toilet, or thatone discovered such exotic form of culture, or such machines or such manner of arranging and of representing the horses or the gardens. It would be, certainly,impassioning to thus reconstitute the history of the taste, the passions, and the modesof the last centuries.However, all that discovers one time is also not used for the development of its style.It is by the original works only that a human group is affirmed, is expressed andsurvived. While wishing, by consequent, highly that research relating to the history of the mode and the taste develops at the beginning of the XX century, it appears to meessential of good distinguish the range of these studies, which supply the materials aswell with the history of the society as to that of the evolution of contemporary art,those which aim to recall the conditions and the procedures of evolution of thedurable forms of expression.A modern style is expressed, that it or not is wanted, in works of the painters and thesculptors of avant-garde, and already is essential, like a fact,186

in the art of the world entirety. I do not say that it is fixed, that it developed all its possibilities, nor same already set its standards, I say that there exists line certaintendency commune with all arts, and who allows of saying which our time continuesthe work undertaken by former generations. This approach of a new style appears, in

particular, in the design and the figuration of pictorial space, without it being ablenaturally to be still known as if we are already or not in possession of the formulawho is intended to impose itself on the group of the nations of high future civilization,or if we are only in the opened experimental phase, which precedes always the phaseof fixing of a language. In other words, we do not know if we approach the Piero-Alberti phase or if we are still with the phase Uccello- Brunelleschi.One will thus leave side any discussion on the methods of appearance and on the

valor representative of Cubism and Fauvism, Expressionism and Surrealism, theabstract art. I intend to devote soon a series of methodical and documentary studies to



these various aspects of the modern artistic life. But it seems possible to me, as of now, to indicate, in very an other spirit how arises the situation current of representation pictorial of the space _ which is one of keys of interpretation of thecontemporary style.I will consider for that like a block the period of the last half-century, drawing aside,

as I said, all monographic study and any assumption whereby such or such artist isidentified more or less permanently with one or the other movement, or whereby oneor the other of the theoretical movements represents the essence of the new style.One of the great difficulties of research results owing to the fact that, in the work of

boldest, it is parts which belong fatally to the tradition, like it exist in the work of Cézanne, of Van Gogh and of Gauguin of many works which brought out with theimpressionist ideal, like there is in Uccello and in Masaccio or Masolino _ and it iswhat makes me say that we did not come yet with the phase from fixing from the style- parts, moreover full with charm, which arose with the technique of the precedinggenerations. All that arose in particular either with the massive figuration of thegeometrical solids, or with the arabesque, seems me to confirm and popularize the

lesson of Cézanne and Gauguin without adding to it. All that also arose with theassertion of the autonomous value of the pure colour like plastic means of figuration187

direct the depth, and which is deduced from Van Gogh. All that arose with thespeculations on the visual pyramid and the golden section and which exists in thetradition of Seurat.This aspect of the contemporary art is certainly not méprisable, since it had as a resultto make pass a fundamental part of the experiments continued towards the end of theXIX century in the standard technique of painting. One can say by there that a stagewas reached, that a technical instrument was tested in such a way that the lesson wasacquired even by those which did not really receive it. Detractors of the contemporaryart, there are amateurs for Bonnard, which precisely represents one of these men of

passage thanks to which the styles is built by the reserved and half assent consciousof the widened circles of amateurs. Grace in Bonnard, our contemporaries learned toread from works without linear structure. Grace with Picasso of the blue period, theylearned how to grant a certain expressive value to the deformation, thanks to myweave they learned how to read elliptic space. How many men of our time enchantwhen they can put in glance both Dessertes of Matisse, that which, realized accordingto the impressionist principles, now entirely seems to them reassuring, and that where

the arabesque borrowed from Gauguin establishes a unit between the objects and the bottom and makes it possible to forget the ruptures of the traditional form of the prospect. It should not be made signs of recognition. A new language is transmissibleonly by intermediary of bench marks borrowed from a system agreed upon on bothsides. It is certain that, on the whole, the last half-century confirmed the positionstaken by the innovators badly included/understood of the years 1890-1905. WithoutFauves and the posters, neither Van Gogh nor Gauguin would have been heard.However, not more than the first process cubist of the slip of the _ plans which raisesstill of geometrical projection -, the system of the elision and the arabesque, nor thateither of the use of the tone pure and the flat tints do not appear me to have marked of originality our time. I do not need to repeat that I do not believe either that the

sentimentalism of Munch and Kandinsky is other thing that a development of the lastexperiments.



It is necessary to make here a special place with the influence of a difficult man tolocating well and for which I was, seems it, unjust to me on various occasions: it isSeurat. On the intrinsic quality of its works, not of doubt. They are tempting, evenwhen they are not very original, like the Cirque. It is undeniable that Seurat was acreator of atmosphere and that its talent is essential on whoever is sensitive to

painting. I do not believe at all188

that it is, of the remainder, because it used the golden section learnedly; I do not believe in the beauty formulates. The formulas are explanations and by no meanssources of inspiration. Alive work leaves the imagination, which has also its rules, andnot calculation; more exactly the translation in the mathematical capacity as a work of art is legitimate, but it does not owe us to give the illusion that by drawing uprelationship between arts and mathematics we touch with the true "causes". Each oneis obliged to represent painting in its individual language, but this interpretationcannot be regarded as a positive explanation. The value and the range of a work are

explained according to the number of interpretations of which it is possible, but eachone of these explanations constitute a reduction of the significance and could not beregarded as the justification of the artist.There is precisely at Seurat a whole side which worries me. Its style has something of volunteer who feels the artifice. All its theories on the division of the tone and theconstitution of the light are abstracted. I fear that ultimately it results only one writingfrom it. Seurat leads to Impressionism based on a technique of representation of thelight a little different from the precedent. But it is not enough to substitute thedivisionism for the impressionist spot to found a style, i.e. a vision, the recordingconscious of new relationship between objects or between objects and subject. ToSeurat the outline of the space figuration is absolutely traditional. Respect of cubicspace, the linear prospects; there is generally retreat on Impressionism. The techniquetouches with the receipt. I do not believe that such an attitude is fertile or that the neo-impressionism marks a positive stage in the history of the plastic figuration of space.I am obliged to note like a positive fact, however, that Seurat enjoys a very great

prestige among the artists of today and that this prestige lasts. I am thus constrained toadmit that, even if in my Seurat opinion created only commonplaces of space vision,it played a role in the evolution of the contemporary art. Even if one put in Seurat alittle more than it yen did not have in the beginning, it does not remain about it lessthan this also is a reality. Obviously, I do not want to say by there that Seurat is Ilegitimate father of famous "the neo-classicism" whose Segonzac was one moment

the hero. The total exposure of works of this artist was rather decisive, I think it. Onewill quickly forget this great man whose hundred fabrics were not worth twoSéraphine.If I question myself on the Seurat mystery, it seems to me that I see severalexplanations better to his importance. Seurat did not show - contrary189

so that one supports sometimes - how contrasts of colours could be used as meanswith the construction of space. It is the lesson of Van Gogh. The experiment of Seuratwas done, mainly, on figures and, like said it to precisely Mr. Kahnweiler, in his book on Juan Gris, it showed how one could represent bodies with three dimensions in a

space with two dimensions by non imitative methods. It is true that here still thelesson of Seurat joined that of its contemporaries in particular of Cézanne.



The misfortune of Seurat, it is that it found for its account certain possibilities of which others more complete - or especially which had the chance of a longer life -will have had the revelation. It hardly makes but confirm other attempts. Except,

perhaps, with regard to the role allotted to the rate/rhythm? Here, it is Delaunay whichtook again the lesson later, in its admirable Tours Eiffel. It does not seem with the

surplus that the influence of Seurat can be currently fixed. If, for example, suchcurrent artists like Pignon, Gischia or Estève develop such or such possibility of rate/rhythm, Seurat will take a significant place that it is impossible to allot to him or to refuse to him a priori. Excel example of L has way in which are precisely built lesstyles, by acceptance and refusal, clarification or abandonment of certain series of

plastic possibilities. We know since Focillon that the works of art live apart from their creators.But, with all that, one still does not seize of what the fundamental orientation of thecontemporary period consists. One cannot determine it starting from the sources up tonow simply enumerated, which they are the spectacles of the life which acted on the

painters, or of the choice of elder of which they required inspirations.

I make yet only announce here for memory the importance of a man like Toulouse-Lautrec, the large inspirer of the post modern. The role played by the poster ishowever comparable only with that of cinemas. It transformed the taste, developed thefaculty of reading of an image stripped according to new reflexes. Time of César Birotteau, one made publicity by enumerating the virtues of a product. Publicity was

based primarily on the dialectical oratory. Nowadays, the role of the vision developedand our contemporaries immediately read signs which are true symbols - as cowcelebrates it which laughs - allowing all the plays of substitution between meaningsand meant compared to the origin, with the quality of the product, the pleasure whichit gets. All this study returns in the great investigation into the modes and the

popularized forms of significance which does not belong on my subject. I thusleave, for the moment,190

on side all this who touch with the education of the sensitivity of the public, as Ileave side all what touches with the history of the groups where is deliberated andcreated contemporary art, wanting to retain only what is used as index with theappearance of new significant system of figuration of space.If one can finally speak, with my opinion, of an art which exceeds the positionsacquired, it is because, in a certain number of works, one discovers new reflexes

jointly, new objects, new logical. I will be explained then on the positive value of

these expressions. Let us see initially on which positive elements is based the thesis of the appearance of a new style.Like the artists impressionists had started from Courbet and Delacroix, like Gauguinand Van Gogh had left impressionists, thus the contemporaries are left of Cézanne,of Van Gogh and Gauguin. I leave, once again, of dimensions the details and themethods of this history which will be made elsewhere. In the continuation of the

boards which accompany this book one will find a recall summary of its connections.With Gauguin and Cézanne, one borrows especially the smell of the composition, of the clean value of the table; in Van Gogh the direction of the colour is borrowed, inGauguin that of the arabesque and of a new triangulation of space surface of thefabric, of Cézanne one requires a double lesson, the system of representation of the

bodies by plans or volumes. Thus, in a certain direction, the history of the last half-century is that of discovered by general public of the assessment of Impressionism.



That it is not forgotten that triumph popular of Manet follows the splendid exposureof Centenaire in 1932 and that it is since this date that the work of the men of 1860 successively was essential, for finishing with Van Gogh and Gauguin with thecourse of all these last years. One should not underestimate the role of this discovery

by the public of the values which were used for the following generation of starting

point. It was necessary. Well on, the Leger and Braque did not include/understandsame manner these artists as general public. But a bringing together essential wasdone, thanks to which a whole part of art contemporary is already on the way to

become, in its turn, matter of retrospectives. One starts with Fauves, obviously moreeasy, but already all Cubism of origin becomes readable - and almost fireman with theeyes of the avant-garde. The first generation of this century took, in particular, muchin Degas. I made this fact sensitive by bringing together and I will reconsider theextreme importance which it is appropriate to allot to the true investigation on our

body characteristics introduced by the contemporary art _ from where cannot miss191

to leave one day the greatest consequences on our perception known as normal thethings. The first positive stage was, without any doubt Cubism, whose I lengthilyexplained the role, overflowing the executives of the first experiences. I persist inthinking, in spite of that, that Cubism as such is exceeded and that it was much less

bold than it was believed. It was a question primarily of making smooth certain plansor to juxtapose elements borrowed from the successive points of view on the objects.In truth it there had in the experiment cubist, as in the first experiment impressionist, akind of grid, roasts form where the global and spontaneous vision of the world wasnot changed. It could not be it. It was necessary that, with a walk of approach, theartists start by destroying what remained traditional representation of the form. It isnot that then that they could be tried to see new things, then to appear them.So that a new aspect of nature strikes the directions of the man it is necessary that itsdirection criticizes is very developed and particularly informed. There is stillnowadays psychologists who believe that the human reactions are stable in the

presence of reality and that all the individuals react in the same way to a system of plastic representation given.Cubism had finally an importance without equal among all the fashions and all themovements of the beginning of the xxe century, because it expressed a real curiosityfor the analysis of the feelings, thus taking the continuation of Impressionism, andespecially because, in addition, it accustomed the spirits to the idea of atransformation necessary of the plastic language. It is him which developed the

concept of system arbitrary of equivalence. It is him which brought painting closer to physiology. Thanks to him the artists could play their role, I will a few moments agoshow it, in a great movement of civilization that nobody thinks of disputing when theyare others disciplines, but which raises only scepticism and incomprehension when itis about painting - undoubtedly because the plastic representation of the externalworld interests too much of not initiated circles and because the language of theimages at the same time is spread and more badly studied more of all. Linguisticseven, with structural linguistics, has a lead over the history of art. So that, amongcircles of cultivated people, a total incomprehension of the conditions of the plasticfiguration of space usually reigns.While the various doctrinal forms of Cubism, physical Cubism, analytical Cubism,

decorative Cubism, followed one another in192



discussions of workshop and in the ignited pages of criticisms, while a considerableactivity brought together painters and literary men in their function of prophets and

pioneers of an art more quickly imagined and exalted that carried out, another sourceof positive enrichment was done day mainly in the work of Leger: it was the worship

of the object.The conflict around the object played, for this generation, a role which replaces that of the subject at the time romantic, it was the principal source of study and renewal. Theartists discovered remainder a small number of objects, one will be struck later of therestricted number of the topics which were treated indifferently by all the artists:

pedestal table, bottle, glass, fruit dish, candlestick, pot of flowers, pieces of wood.However, even when the human figure appears in this painting, it is still treated likeobject - harlequins, jugglers.I am not certain that the artists themselves included/understood the extraordinaryrange of their attachment to such a small number of positive elements drawn fromreality such as it appeared to them. This attachment is the proof that they work out a

language, still poor of signs and significances, rather than they do not draw up theinventory of their entourage. The very whole time had this curiosity of new objects,i.e. of simple elements recognized like the cuttings usual in reality and endowedhowever with variable qualities according to their position or the use which eachindividual is able to make some.The importance of this notion of the object was specified by all the sociologicalspeculation, which learned to us, since Durkheim, which even the social facts owedand could be treated like objects. If the artists discovered new objects it is inconnection with the general movement of the civilization of their time. One findshere the notion of the psychic distance which governs any determination of alanguage, plastic like the others. The discovery of the objects allows about becomingaware, in all civilizations, of its possibilities of action and comprehension comparedto the external world, not only because it becomes possible to describe them but tolocate them, to use them as term of comparison with the other individuals once thatone made a success of, by the word, the gesture or the image, to make them take on adefinition always necessarily arbitrary.Any individual proceeds to the recognition permanent of objects; any company, anyhuman group, identifies a series of diagrams of representation to which it allots acommon value. Nor accustomed sociologists193

to admit the existence of the signs and the values in the life of the companies, neither the scientists who know well that they need objects, positive or arbitrary, like anumber, to reason and which well also know that, when the reasoning are well led onthe imaginary series, they find confirmation in reality of it, nor the linguists initiatedwith the current methods will have of sorrow to include/understand me. I am less sureto be heard those which, in any discipline, leave it, by principle, with the oldconventional systems of representation. But I am however absolutely certain thatultimately nobody will be able to deny that painting does not constitute a languageand that it should not be studied in the light of what we recently learned as regardssocial "communication". Moreover, for little that some critics and historians acceptthis point of view, it there will have gained part quickly, so much is obvious the value

of the position. The public, as for him, is very ready to include/understand what the



artists want to mean. I repeat that, in certain fields, as that of the poster, contemporaryart A already causes gained.Discovered arbitrary value of the plastic sign, role of the object like support of the

plastic languages as well as of the others, in fact already facts count. I do not believethat one can discuss the capacities of invention of which proof the contemporary art

made. Remain to know if it already managed to some enough organic stylizations toexpress certain ideas or feelings representative of the current world.One sees, incontestably, already getting clear a certain number of systems. Withoutclaiming to exhaust the problem, and at the only end to justify a method of studywhich will require long discussions on absolute and relative values, it seems to to methat I see some groups of works from where are released the fundamental elementsfrom a new language.Some developed the experiments of Impressionists, Degas in particular, on the

parcelling out of space and associations of differential fragments of representation of the sensitive world. As of years 1914-1920 of the tables like the Town of Leger, or Jeunes girls with the bath and Marocain in prayer of Matisse provided memorable

examples of them. Useless to insist, I think, on the relations which exist between theCity and the cinema. The future author of mechanical Ballet tried to use the speed of substitution of the fragments of images on the retina. The experiment did not lead yetto a rigid system of codified space figuration, but it appeared perfectly suggestive.Matisse uses simultaneously, in addition, in its Jeunes Filles, the system of the bandscompartmentalizing the framework in Degas, insertions194

arabesques in Gauguin. Finally, for the time, the work is extraordinary and theschematized figures knew since an extraordinary fortune.Should it be underlined, with the use of certain sceptics, that the mannequins inMatisse, widespread in all the windows of the world, never embarrassed one

purchaser?The Marocain uses another system. One returns to the quadripartite division of Piero.However one introduced a new combination of representation riding and perspectivecombined and one removes very development of the principal character. Thecabbages are worth the man. Here as the role of the successive and analytical visionis largely used, not more as in painting of Renaissance but otherwise. The ratios at thesame time visual and so to speak human relationship between the things are entirelyupset. One absolutely rejects the arbitrary scale which attaches more importance inthe direct claimed vision to the man than with the accessory. Renaissance gave of the

man a representation flattering but particular. In a sense, it is the contemporary artwhich introduced the unit of vision, by putting on the same plan cabbage, the roof andMarocain. Is it believed that the landscape of Simonetta that is to say more realistic? Itis not more humanistic than if it is admitted that the body of the man - not its _ spiritis the measurement of all. Marocain is also perfectly readable; it emphasizes relationsalso positive between the man and nature.The processes of integration of space compartmentalized and of the psycho

physiologic vision different besides largely according to the men and works. It doesnot act by no means of a formula in way of imposing itself nor even is expressed stillrestrictivement. The same Leger, author of the City, conceived the Paysage animated

by association of the formula of the City and certain processes of use of the contrasted

surfaces. The installation in a space illusionist of old type is sought here by a



combination of the systems of parcelling out linear of space and of spreading out of the plans by the pure color. It is seen well that they are experiments.An Estève, in its Trois Arbres, includes the cutting of the fabric but it integrates of

other elements still. The silhouette of the trees of the foreground is reduced to adiagram which records the feeling of visual contact absolutely rough that gets the

displacement of the forms in the fuzzy field of a plan not selected, as well as themeeting of a zone of shade < dense " and fresh with the course of an exit undertakenin the large burn of the sun. Excel example of notation illustrated of a poly-sensoryfeeling. Foregrounds are illustrated in plunging vision, a line195

of hills cuts out in the second plan, finally a square of distant vision is strongly brought closer, in an angle, and is the subject of a significant and emotional treatment particular. In fact Estève uses here a process which is not so distant that it does notappear at first sight of the veduta; but the system of coordination does not rest on thesetting with the square of the background, but on emotive connections and interior

associations. Moreover, the series of recorded feelings do not belong all to the totaloptical vision of the affected universe a priori of regular co-ordinates. Coherenceexists only in the field of interior vision, instead of being done in the field of the

plastic screen. One can thus really speak about a new order of figuration.Once again I am not certain whole which the formula of Estève is intended to be usedas model for the art of tomorrow, but I am grateful to him to have revealed me the

possibility of building a space based on a coordination of the interior images andeither on the coordination necessary of the fragments of _ objects because the space of Renaissance is also made differential fragments associated in an arbitrary system -included in an Euclidean network, controlled to the rules of the third opticaldimension projected on a plane surface. It appears undeniable to me thatcontemporary painting made already us touch finger the possibility material of introducing, in the motionless plastic figuration, of the imaginative and associativevalues of a new type and that it makes us include/understand of what the true partytaken of Renaissance consisted.The succession of examples which I chose allows us simultaneously to note theintimate connection which exists between the direct experiments of Impressionistsand the value of the last attempts of the contemporary art. It is well here about thiskind of slip which allows a system comprehension collective to emerge fromindividual experiments. Certain positive elements of the figuration are used so tospeak as terms of ambivalence necessary; they belong formally to the preceding time

and intellectually with the news. It is clearly however that with Estève we are entirelyleft Renaissance, which that is the analogies surface of the technique. Renaissancedied since one sees stinging a new system of relations between perceived and themeant, based well on other permanent structures of the spirit. We go from now ontowards an affected space of dimensions polysensory of our intimate experiments.Among the reflexions which allowed this new display system based on newassociations of images to emerge somewhat, it is necessary to make a significant placewith the speculations on curved spaces.196

Still here, a completely positive connection exists between certain experiments

inspired to the artists of the end of the XIX century by a rigorous analysis their roughfeelings and the developments of the contemporary art. I chose like intermediate term





provided them with attributes and groups in manner that they form a scene illustrator of certain pagan legends able to be harmonized with the Christian age of the officialcircles. There would have been the nine Muses for example: see the Parnassus deMantegna. Here, made abstraction of a purely linear recall, all the aesthetic andsignificant values are requested from another display system of space. It is towards

the representation of the pure movement that the figures of Matisse are directed. The bodies lengthen and are organized according to a suggestive arabesque of the puredisplacement of the lines. The new god is a god without figure and panoply: it isspeed; it is the perpetual movement of all things. One does not represent hisattributive elements of intellectual explanation but a feeling. One does not specify,one transpose; gestures, not of the ideas. The system of the intellectual relays wasentirely changed. Renaissance had refused the literal explanation of the universewhich Moyen Age proposed to him, but it had substituted to him another explanation

based on the human person like measurement and figure also of any reality. Our timeendeavours to acquire a kind of direct experiment of the forces of nature. One ceasesto consider which the universe is man- made for the king, with his image, and which

the figure of the ground is by assumption the figure of the world. One gives up theidea that the universe is the enlarging198

ad infinitum scenographic cube in the centre of which the man - actor moves. Thefiguration of space ceases being a picturesque and decorative description for coming arecording of gestures or actions elementary and feelings tested in the field of theconscience, according to the agreement of the various directions. Who sees only thefiguration of space in Dance of Matisse - if one compares work with one of theseBallets of the human life that Renaissance has multi folded - has a power of dynamicevocation and that it is based on an immediate polysensory experiment? Who doesn'tsee that we are very close managing to express familiar feelings with the man whoflies, with the man who makes emerge until in contact with the reason the complex

plays of his unconscious? Modern figuration spatial, figuration spatial founded on theanalysis of reflexes, psycho physiologic figuration and either optics with theEuclidean direction of the term.The speculations on curved spaces are far from to have been the privilege of onlyMatisse. Matisse starts from a kind of experiment intimate speed to compose Danse,

but Picasso or Pignon is based on a more analytical observation of the basic phenomena to which Dufy had been shown so sensitive. A fabric like Atelier of Picasso - or more exactly as the series of Ateliers - summarizes a long succession of

experiments. Around Atelier one could group a significant series of studies or outlines which prepare the synthesis. I repeat that, in the work of our contemporaries,the effort of stylization is returned very apparent by the great number of approaches of the same subject as one find in their work. There are ten Ateliers of Picasso, twentyArlequins, Pignon painted thirty sights of Ostend, or of Collioure, on the same plastictopic. At the beginning of Renaissance also, one assisted with this phenomenon,which is a little of all times, but which is always accentuated in periods when theartists, not accepting the formulas more allegorical traditional, endeavour either todevelop ideas but to fix significant relations between certain systems of features or spots and the external world and interior which is essential on them.I think that it would be extremely interesting to undertake a study of the works of

Picasso based not on the chronological enumeration, but on a classification of thefabrics and drawings according to the rare plastic topics who tried it. In the



preparation of a table like Atelier, which is a sum, it would be necessary to utilize besides, not only the direct preparations but the indirect ones, i.e. the series of whichsome led themselves to significant works which enabled him to dig certain problemsof construction - and not only of experimentation of an oblique space or curve. I hear,for example, that

199

fabrics like Premiers Pas, of the drafts like Femme which washes the feet or Guéridons belong to the material of experimentation which gives its significationand its legibility to Atelier. It would be necessary to introduce also there all theseries of round figures through which Picasso familiarized itself with volumes andspaces without angles. It would be higher interest to show, at the same time, how thework of Picasso results at the same time from an investigation into remote curvedspaces and associations under new angles of parts very close to the sensitive world.There exists, for example, for the figure of the bottom, leaning on the table, a doubleseries of extremely interesting preparations: on the one hand studies, sometimes

cubists sometimes in flexibility according to nature, of a figure sitting in front of atable or a pedestal table, then a more significant series still of heads. One does notseem to be sufficient returned account that Picasso studied with a marvellous patienceof the phenomena of vision close, following, once more, one of the ways opened byDegas and Renoir.Many of its boldest deformations can be tested by each one with the help of a verysimple optical experiment - at least in family. Approach you of a face to touch it andobserve it of an eye. You will see appearing a whole world of feelings optical, butnon-Euclidean, which will be monocular of unit as accentuated as the vision of Renaissance, and which will reveal you astonishing aspects of the world of the flesh.

Not microscopic vision, but which suggests us the concrete experiment of what can bea universe where any more the corrections provided by the traditional prospect do not

play in order to solidify reports/ratios of position and to suggest coordinatorsdisplacements of the action.Our time saw, in addition, appearing with it thanks to the sculptors a whole group of extremely significant immediate feelings. We like the plastic objects which point outthe figurative objects of Leger to us: fragments of bark, smooth or raspy roots. See onthis subject film that Leger turned to America and where the artist drew up the

positive report/ratio which exists between its figurative objects and of the physicalfeelings tested in contact with reality. There are an immense world of fundamentalfeelings, contacts of our skin and our muscles with the matter, human or not, which

enriches our experiment by space. Think that, simultaneously, the psychoanalysis andscience introduce us more each day in contact with realities somatic - mental which play an undeniable role in our comprehension of the universe, that in addition onesees developing the taste for new materials and new techniques - iron, the concrete,the matters200

plastics - which get to us experiences positives _ optical and tactile - news. It isnormal that our eye is accustomed to measure by imagination all these possibilities of meeting of our body with the outside world.That these experiments somatic - figurative did not lead yet to a style, I agree; but that

they constitute necessarily the base of the art of tomorrow, I do not have any doubt onthis subject. That they, moreover, already led to certain stylizations at the same time



readable and equipped with aesthetic nature, it goes without saying is with each one to be a judge. But it is essential that, for judging, a certain initiation is given to anaudience larger than that which reads painting naturally. Faculty to be expressed anddecipher the various categories of languages more was not also distributed betweenthe men that the other gifts of the body and the spirit. Some are blind and deaf

verbally, others, they are musically or optically. I ask only that most scornful of these problems remember that makes the music of it, the dance or painting touched as manyindividuals in the history as the written word or for my language. Whole civilizationshad like transmission resource of the thought of the not written signs. We will arriveto widen our knowledge of the man only insofar as we widen a culture too exclusivelyfounded on the practical of a certain semantic system.It seems that, as of now, of the fabrics like certain Pignon, which are attached closelyto the research inaugurated by Picasso, are the proof of the immense plastic

possibilities which results from an organization _ and not fatally of a triangulation -curved spaces. That one keeps only to believe which it will be enough, for developing this tendency, to renew the meant contents of the forms. The figurative

significance, absolutely necessary, can go hand in hand only with a deepening of our psycho physiologic experiment of the universe. Then the only contact will be close between the artists and their time.Parcelled out spaces, curved and tactile spaces, our time was also tested with thedeciphering of fantastic and imaginary spaces. Here still one finds, with the starting

point of research, Cubism. A significant share of the concerns of our time wasdevoted to translate the new feeling of mystery which the man tests in front of themirages of nature. It appears like more to him a moving prism that likes ananthropomorphic power incarnée. The infinite one of the world is in a certaindésincarné direction, or more exactly stripped sentimental and romantic values of which had affected a long tradition of figuration201

dramatic. It is not that it was depersonalized. The Leger expresses a kind of solidity, a joy in life, self-confidence. Matisse, more directed towards traditional psychology,especially in the series of the portraits with the pencil, are perhaps less representativeof the attitudes of the modern man in front of nature. It is remarkable to note that,while the literature insists on the side tormented of the time, painting more expressesthe side conqueror of the century. Would there be a relation between this oppositionand the delayed character of the literary techniques, very whole still dominated by the

commonplaces? Nature especially appeared to the artists like an immense spectacle, a giantkaleidoscope; they tried to represent this feeling of an imaginary space, reducing,

protein, been subject to irrational rules of organization. Several series of attemptswere made. They go from those of Delaunay - which lead to the last term with theabstract art - to those of Miro and Braque - who are attached to surrealism.After having been one of the pioneers of Cubisme, in the years 1910, RobertDelaunay in his Coureurs the use of the colour by plates to return the position of theobjects - method contributed with Leger to discover which is reconciled with thefamous collages of Braque, Picasso and Gris, and which is attached to the lastoffensive of the local tone. But it left from there to speculate in a double assumption:

the possibility of introducing, in the plastic representation of space, figuration of anabsolute coloured order and the rate/rhythm. One could not underestimate the





first. I am certain that they is at his place and Leger that is perhaps the most elaborategerm of future stylizations, founded on the new experiment of the light.203

In a very other field, the surrealist compositions of Miro, Picasso or Braque have an

extraordinary importance. They familiarize us with a figuration of the forms whosefortune was already immense and of which there is no reason to think that they do notcorrespond to a more or less permanent system of spontaneous visualization.It is necessary to be kept, with the surplus, of the positive systems which rest on a tooacute intelligence of the modes of expression borrowed from other forms of stylization. I am not certain that certain research archaïsantes or primitivisantes of Braque and Miro can be used as a basis concrete for a modern figuration of space.Archaeological curiosity, I fear it, like was at a time given Negro art. But it isundeniable that any widening of our comprehension intimates modes of humanexpression is fertile. Linguistics also, at least in its phase of investigation, rests ongreater knowledge possible number of facts, without it being taken account of the

mental age of those which provide them. I think that it is appropriate, however, of distinguishing in the effort continued by the artists from our time between whatenables them to be assimilated unknown systems graphic - what only helps them totake the measurement of their desires and what constitutes the share of originalcreation of their work. This one is expressed only in the pieces of transposition andsynthesis where something of the human reflexes of our time materializes.Whatever the starting point of our analyses, it is necessary well to distinguish betweenthis aspect from exploration a little bubbling, which points out multiple research of XIVe and xv E centuries, and the positive aspect from their effort. Alive painting isnot archaeology of the plastic languages. It claims to propose solutions based on adirectly significant figuration of the gravitational aspects, and correspondent with our

particular forms of activity, reality.It is in fact that the bridges are cut with Renaissance because the values which interestthe artists - rate/rhythm, speed, deformations, plasticity, changes, transfers - coincidewith the general forms of the activity physical and intellectual of our time and areopposed on the contrary violently to all the aspirations of the companies resultingfrom Renaissance - stability, objectivity, permanence. The painters of our time are

building us jointly a new illusionism with the scenario writers and the scientists. Inimagination we do not live yet. Our gestures precede our faculty of renewal of interpretations symbolic systems.204

It always was thus. The man acts before thinking; as soon as it has a tool it uses it. Itis clear, as of now, that new space will be a space built more according to our

behaviours of our reflexion. It may be that Renaissance remains one very particular time because owing to the fact that it has, more than much of others, guided by anintact faith in the force of the reason.It is an aspect of the art of our time which however provides the proof of theexistence of a positive way reconcile the experiment that impose to us the newtechniques of our spirit and our body with a representation of space based on the

powers of the reason. I want to speak about the significant series of works whichsuggest representation of an opened space. The expression is imperfect; but I do not

discover the best. And it will be easy to extremely seize what it is a question while



examining in the boards some works characteristic of this tendency, in my opinionimportant.One returns always in Degas, while crossing Cubism. In how much fabrics or sketchof Degas one does not see the objects poured to some extent towards the witness? Itacts neither of riding space nor with flight of bird, nor of decorative space, nor of

abstract space. The cube scenographic is always present; there is choice of an angle of observation unaccustomed. It should be added that the system is entirely arbitrary. Neither lighting, nor the prospect is accurately deduced from the position allotted tothe eye of the artist, who ordered not made uniform of all the details. We are in the

presence of an imaginary space, not literarily but technically speaking. However thisspace is rather a refined variation on the space of Renaissance that a significant spaceimmediately noted by the artist. This series which besides brings closer to Degas _ the

portrait of Diego Martelli - and Cézanne - the Portrait de Geffroy and that of MadameCézanne - left many works of the beginning xx century, in particular of many figuresof Matisse or Bonnard. This last _ Les Bernheim brothers for example - hardlymakes but repeat the formulas of Degas and Cézanne; but Matisse - France _

introduces a new element by treating the details into a decorative manner. Theformula evolves/moves already.It was taken again by Estève, Pignon and especially by Gischia. In a first phase onesees Gischia - green Vase _ or Estève _ Chaise, which attaches the series to VanGogh - using the purely technical party of the space poured towards the witness. The

bottom, representative of the old cube, is preserved. Interest of the fabric and it is verylarge especially in Gischia,205

it is to associate this particular figuration of space with an attempt to express therelief, volume, all plastic qualities of the form without any recourse to the traditional

play of the shades. The range of this research, to which Gischia devoted more effortthan any other, is enormous. It proposes an original interpretation of one of thearchaeological sources of the contemporary art: the Romance painting, to which thegeneration of Cubists does not seem to have been very sensitive, but which made takea step ahead with the men of rising generation.The profit which our time can derive from the study of this very particular method of figuration is attested by the whole of the works already produced by the group of theyoung painters who started to make known them about 1945. It is advisable to insiston the fact that actually the treatment of the space it in this new painting is not wholein conformity with the design of the XII century. It is well for that that the experiment

is interesting. As of now the new artists, interpreters of curiosities of our time,evolved/moved in rather different ways. Some, Manessier and Singier at the head, areadvanced in the way of a compromise between imaginary spaces and plunging space.Marvellously gifted for the colour they create surfaces chatoyantes which cause theemotion by the simple quality of the relations of tone corresponding to the variouszones of the composition. There is experience on the significant space whichcombines the exploitation of intrinsic qualities of the colour with the acute feeling of the enveloping elasticity of the atmosphere. This painting is a contemporarytransposition of the fascination exerted on an eye of painter by the airspace withunspecified contours and measurements. It has a great importance since it suggests a

possibility of giving a form modern with the space experiment of the colour and the

light and that it joined research of Estève on the distances.



However it has a character of individual experiment which leaves me hesitant aboutknow if it constitutes a starting point valid for the development of a true plasticlanguage. It also too often shows an ideological will of program which brings back ittowards convention. It is in extreme cases of the abstract art within the meaning of Klee and the expressionists, more interesting with my opinion like witnesses of a

certain state of emotive of their medium than as artists’ founders of a means of sufficiently general intermediary to be the plastic language of modern times.It is certain, in any case, that, prosecutor on their side the intellectual and significantexploitation at the same time of an alive interpretation of the Romanesque art - andmore largely of arts known as primitive -, Gischia and Pignon expressed206

the possibility of creating a new space which agrees more with some - ones of themost pressing requirements of the time. Jongleur de Gischia provides this space adiagrammatic representation that its Léda and Paysans of Pignon also uses - what

proves that it is a question well of an enough broad possibility to support various

aesthetic goals. It is a space very close to that of Degas and first Gischia, with thisdifference that the suggestion of the bottom and the scenographic cube entirelydisappeared. The characters are placed here in the medium of space; the light and thesights can come towards them from everywhere, there is absolute destruction of pointof sight single. Like, in addition, the new technique of painting without solid dropshadows also leads to the destruction of the problem of clearly-obscure and of threetraditional dimensions, one sees the figure turning, being drawn up in space with afreedom which it had never had. After the final destruction of the scenographic cubeconsidered as a decreased version of the figure of the universe, we see to disappear design from a setting with the scale of the man and his entourage. The man isregarded as a dominated element, in the centre of a natural which does not receive itslaw of its conveniences of action and intellection. The reports/ratios man- world isreversed. One does not bring back any more each one of our gestures to the limitsillusionists of a reducing framework of the whole; one interests in our general-purposereactions to the centre of a matter which we impose its laws.One reproach sometimes in Gischia character of poster of some of its works. I do nothave any intention to defend all his fabrics. It is fatal that these researches as hisimply a certain character of schematization. More especially as one should not neglectthe fact that our time makes an effort, as I said, to specify the significant values of the

plastic sign in all the fields and than the development of the poster and painting wasmade always simultaneously since Toulouse- Lautrec and even Manet - witness

famous Chats. But that one precisely considers Jongleur and Chats, one will seewell how the last are in front of a space which fall behind the roofs but which islimited by a bottom curtain and how the premier is installed in a fluid space, that itcontrols el that it animates only locally. There is like a modern transposition of thesearch for Pollaiuolo. The general information of the system is attested by the fact thatthe same solution is present in Paysans of Pignon of which there are certain versions,that I did not reproduce, where a space of another nature functions, implying a

bottom.It should be added, while finishing, that research of Pignon and Gischia seems to leadto renew also certain possibilities of expression207



form by the pure colour. The second prefers surfaces definitely definite, and verygeometrical, under the a little drying influence apparently of Seurat; the other inventsmore graphic forms - the chest of its workers or the trunks of its olive-trees. One andthe other prove the possibility of appearing technically speaking in the new system allthe degrees and all the aspects depth and form, made abstraction of the famous

problem of the meeting between the geometrical vision and the single source of lightwhich had imposed on all the systems resulting from Renaissance an essential unitof method. From now on, whatever can be the future, the proof is made that one can

build new arbitrary systems of total vision where the problems of the form and thecolour, the representation and the significance are reconciled.I am not unaware of that there exists in our time of other attempts at development of the plastic signs which are not méprisables. But it seems to me that I however met inthese short analyses the fundamental positions of the artists of our time in front of nature. One passed from an attempt at projection of volumes and objects traditional bynew combinations of the old elements to the dynamic expression of the elementary

body impulses. One discovered the possibility of enlarging or contraction of the space

by the play of the pure colours, leading to the elastic rectangle of Leger or the openspace of Gischia and Manessier, design which attaches the effort of our painters tothat of the architects and the sculptors _ in the forefront of which it is necessary toquote Laurens and Adam. One showed the possibility of structuring pictorially of thedisparate fragments of objects lately cut out in reality. One discovered the possibilityof not more building on the plastic screen a space closed inside of which the witnessis invited to be driven as in a microcosm identically reproducing with his laws thealso closed world which is used as theatre with the action of the human people. Itappears to me that, as of now, the pictorial experiments of the last half-century offer aconsiderable positive assessment thus. I am not unaware of which reserves exist inmany mediums, not even cultivated, and even aesthetically advanced. But I am certainthat the tradition whereby a new plastic space is worked out exists and which it islocated in the current of ideas and experiments which takes its point of support in therevolutionary art of the end of the XIX century.The justification of the position taken at the same time by the men who all, of near or

by far, are attach in École of Paris - which is primarily a centre of international lifeand which does not have with the perfumes of the soil, however tasty208

they are, that the occasional pretexts of the form given to universal speculations - and by those which defend them or more exactly which would like to contribute modestly

to the reconciliation of and the man of feather(pen) and men of the (paint) brush, it isthe parallelism which exists between the methods of the plastic experiment which ishere described and the fundamental tendencies of contemporary civilization. I repeathere, while finishing, that the criticism of art and archaeology have a place to take inthe development of the new humanism based on the more intimate knowledge of the

permanent and particular possibilities of the human body. Our space - one says morereadily our horizons - extended simultaneously towards the appreciation from sizes or infinite smallness, tested usually in the increase in our possibilities of fastdisplacement or effective action centuplicated on the matter. One believes that if curved spaces have some prestige on the painters, that is without relationship with thespeculations of the mathematicians and the daily experiments of handling of the

matter which succeed all without exception with the production of " forms" of a newkind where is identified the ideal at the same time tactile and visual of the men?



Curved spaces of a body of convey or the sides of a plane are the translation on a popular scale, in objects manufactured by the man, of the new principles emphasized by the scientists. The primary functions of the human spirit were deeply modified bythe new material living conditions resulting from what Mr. Friedmann proposes so

precisely to call the second industrial civilization. «Each learned and transmitted

traditional control is based on a certain number of nervous and muscular synergies -true systems, interdependent of a whole sociological context", very recently wrote Mr.Claude Lévi-Strauss in a remarkable work on the thought of Marcel Mauss. And still:«the normal individual conduits are never symbolic systems by themselves; they arethe elements from which a system symbolic system, which can be only collective, is

built". There is not scientifically any doubt that the one time art is more than theliterary expression of a company: it is based on the mental and physiologicalstructures major of the man, it is not a superstructure, but a language.I am not unaware of that this concept of the existence of the plastic languages stillencounters resistances even among the sociologists, less among the ethnographersand the anthropologists. I know that theories rather contradictory were recently

discussed in America and that some believed to be able to deny with art the quality of language. One is confused while reading, for example, in a book of Mme SuzanneLanger, that art is not one209

true language because it does not use no elements fixed which can be compared to the phonemes! That similar thing can be written and even discussed opens abysses withthe imagination and shows up to which point there exists, in the most evolved/movedmediums, of the plastic case of blindness. Mr. Michotte, on his side, could write thaton the plastic screen in fact the shades give the massiveté with the objects and noteven not to suspect, with the reflexion, the range of the objection that I had made him.He is still at the magic age, that where the one believes that the things are placed atour disposal in the world to be measured and interpreted by the man. And the evenMr. Michotte calls upon the authority of experiments of laboratory where it usesindifferently the testimony of subjects able or not to read the plastic language. Withlittle near as if one melted a musical theory on the testimony interfered subjects whichhave ear and others which do not have any! The anthropomorphism and the belief inthe gods are still quite strong.M. Michotte is pagan, apparently without the knowledge.The fault falls about it, of the remainder, with the lack of systematic studies on thehistorical and permanent conditions of the constitution and of the structure of the

plastic languages. My wish is that this work is taken as an example, not of what isacquired, but possibility, interest and urgency of original research in the field of plastic archaeology.One will then see dissolving difficulties against which good spirits and men of greattaste run up with a species of faintness. The debates unceasingly renewed around theconcepts of primitivism and of technicality will find their solution if not easy at least

positive. It is not true that the art of our time has the nostalgia of the technique! Itdefinitively broke with all the bonds which in the past determined the modes of actionon the matter and the empirical evaluation of the distances, the sizes, speeds on whichwas based our regard of dimensions of a space made for us and that we furnish withthe cut out shapes with the measurement of our theoretical and practical knowledge.

With a new age, one needs a new technique. I do not think that one can reproachcontemporary painting for missing technicality. Quite to the contrary; what it misses,



it is the faculty to impose in a spontaneous and immediate way a rich vision at thesame time of significant experiments and agreed figurations. Our time is late on the

plane of the myths. For the moment it manufactures only ideologies.Having destroyed the habits which made it possible to the man to be recognized, likeevolving/moving on a scene of theatre to the image of a world founded by the

experiments of Renaissance, our time did not appear yet of one210

final manner the new imaginary framework where the new conscience of humanitywill be projected. Our magicians are late. The painters and the other artists still haveof the modern man a fragmentary, analytical knowledge. Customs often borrow stillthe executives from the language which is dying. From there the ambiguous nature of the contemporary art, condition and absolute testimony, remainder, of its high socialand human significance.The artists, today like always, constitute a particular class in the company that of themen with which returns the capacity to express, in an immediately significant form,

the possibilities and the needs for their similar. The work of art is an alive form and,as showed to us Focillon, it has the character of the made thing, a true naturalorganization which, once left the brain of its creator, is a true figurative object of theintentions and desires of the entire group.One finds with through the work of art the fundamental categories of the human spiritto a moment given. Faculty to express the sum of the usual experiments andintellectual of a company belongs as well to the plastic form as with the languagesverbal, or gestural, or musical. There are human types still badly definite and of which it is urgent to make the catalogue by being based on the double methodicalreading of the works last and present, ones allowing interpreting and locating theothers. The share of irrational and action which is in the work of art is a means of explanation of the things still obscure. There is dialectical, a syntax of the plastic signas well as of the written sign. Art is a system of relations which makes it possible toconnect elements borrowed from the concrete experiment of the world and elements

borrowed from the level of the beliefs and knowledge. The work of art is with horse between the plan of the thought and that of reality. Only Euclidean logic is not thegold rule of all humanity. The scientific knowledge of our time is quite as rigorousthat that of the preceding generations, why would like one that art sticks to a certainstage of the evolution of the man?Mauss taught us that all the social phenomena could be compared to the language, asDurkheim had taught us that any human activity could be transformed into object. It is

not to contradict with this assertion only to affirm that art is one of the humanlanguages. It is only to wish that it finally be treated and is studied like such. At onetime when psychology and logic traditional are them in the process of renew it; it isabsolutely necessary that art changes too. I believe to have brought the proof that itwas well thus with regard to painting. I believe to have211

lit, at the same time, a certain aspect of the problem of Renaissance. At that time liketoday, there was a change of intellectual attitude with regard to the external world. It

being this change which gradually fitted in works of the time, not without returns tothe past, not without resistances and stammering, not without, finally, a certain

restriction of the initial program of expression did not intervene.



Any plastic language is not constituted finally, as in music, in a form stable that withthe help of the acceptance of a "temperament «. It is not less true than the men of Renaissance gave his plastic expression most perfect in a certain state of balance of the human societies founded on a certain intellectual attitude of the man with regardto the world. Renaissance, through its pictorial representation of space, appears today,

at the moment when it completes to die, like the age of the optical exploration of theuniverse. It seems probable that our time opens the age of a polysensory explorationof the world. Renaissance provided the image of Nature distinct from the man, butwith the measurement of the man and his reactions. The art of today indicates that wego towards a world of new relations where the man ceases becoming the model andthe centre of all things. It is not any more Nature which is with the image of the man,it is now Man which is with the image of Nature, the man enriched by a more major experiment by what surrounds it and of itself and which starts to form figures and aspace measured on the extent of its experiments technical and psychic and directedtowards a new illusionism.

Not more than the illusionism of Renaissance, this new illusionism will not be besides

only based on a theoretical convention. The artist is always, more or less, a magician,with the positive direction of the term. If the magic, according to the formula of Mauss, is the language of the desire, it is undoubtedly, with the war, one of the onlyrather powerful means of suggestion to make it possible to the men to entirelytransform the social bond which links them. Art always more or less has the character of a rite, transmissible and sanctioned more or less semi-officially by the opinion. It isa little with the language what the magic is with the religion. It is him which hides thetrue powers of mythical suggestion one time, supplied with a nuance of fear andhostility, as soon as the collective feelings brought into play cease coincidingcompletely with the belief of the greatest number. Like the magician, the artist is theholder of special capacities which require initiation and push back the ordinary spirits.Like the magician, the artist makes pass in his work, which is gesture and action,something of his will. Under the metamorphoses of the form there is, when work isvalid, a positive force.212

The artist is an avid man of being able on the other men, like the powerful orator or the poet. He wants to impose his vision, i.e. his judgement. He adapts collectiveforces. For that purpose, it allures and it constrained. The development of a new stylerequires, at the same time, the existence of a small group of initiates - who endeavour to seize, in the surrounding medium, the forces suitable for fascinate the men and

imperceptibly to bring them to a more or less durable metamorphosis their feelings -and an avid assistance of new emotions. The artist operates in the field of the mythand the rite: the rooms of Expositions became in our time one of the places where the

passage of a state of civilization to another is done.I listened last year, within the marvellous framework of the old archbishop's palace of Aix-en-Provence, a representation of Don Juan of Mozart. The chance had placed

behind me some spectators which had come there without any idea from what they arewas going to see. Neither Don Juan, nor Mozart meant anything for them; they werecome to intend to sing in Italian - being apparently of Italian origin and amatrices of

beautiful canto. The most pathetic moments of the drama were for them morediverting of the evening; they did not suspect a moment the human range of the part

and music, transfer there only one manner of commedia dell' arte, a spectacle of open, high colours: crime, revenge, ghosts, miracle. In short the booklet of calamitous



of Ponte… They were, among the transported entourage, in the situation of a laymanwho disturbs a crowned ceremony.The whole of the public took part this evening in worship, but much more apparentlythanks to the incantation of the musician, than with that of the drama badly supported

by the decorations. The music, which requires a more precise science and especially

better codified on behalf of the executants, remained only that that had heard Mozart.I realized that, already, a work which summarizes at this point the human anddramatic experiment of ten generations ceases being able to be carried out,represented and to be included/understood in a spirit of unanimity. We do not makethat to interpret it as we translate Raphaël and Rembrandt into technical merits andsentimental of our time. The decorations already did not accompany any more themusic; they were made for a Mozart seen through the culture bourgeois of the end of the XIX century. Three dimensions of work were faced: that of the music, that of thedecorator, that of certain witnesses, exceeded listeners of a bad booklet. We will nothear a Mozart day more that we do not hear the choruses of the ancient tragedy. Themusic, work of art or painting, requires secret rites and a collective communication.

213

It is impossible to accept in a return or a stop of the human adventure.The man continues to create imaginary space where the artists project an attractiveinterpretation of its convictions and its practices. Plastic space cannot cease changingaccording to our collective influence on the external world; it cannot cease being, atthe same time, the reflection of our mathematical design of the physical laws of thematter and the order of the sentimental values which we would like to see triumphing.It will be always at the same time, as with Quattrocento, myth and geometry, formand contained, and there will be still in the human societies many myths andgeometries different from those which we worked out.

49. Dufy. Sunday.The speculation on curved spaces constitutes one of the great ways followed by thecontemporary art to renew the system of the space signs. At the time same as Pierodella Francesca (cf. figure 11) place a circular shelter in the foreground, he frames itin a composition organized according to the prospect known as linear. The space of Dufy, him, is seen like a cutting of another reality. The witness by choosing his pointof sight continues to walk a circular glance around him; he does not select detachedelements of their environment to assemble them in a representative system from

which the laws are distinct from those of the experiment lived, If he is clear, with thesurplus, that this vision is "natural", this does not want to say that it is higher andsubstitutable once and for all, to the old reappearing system. The great variationcomes from what here the artist records an impression as close as possible lived,while Renaissance always endeavours to rationalize elements withdrawn from theimmediate vision. With the remainder, this type of perception was not ignored artistsof Quattrocento, it was voluntarily isolated by them, (cf. figures 24 and 26).216

50. Fouquet. Entry of Charles IV with the basilica of Saint -Denis (C 1470).Grandes Chroniques of France. Paris. National library.





other than those of the Euclidean geometry. I have tried, in the text of this book, todraw the attention to the need for not leaving these problems in out of the circle of our analyses. The aesthetics of the contemporary deformation remains to write, at this

point that, for a little, the same people who laugh in front Picasso believe as they findin front of a real vision in the cinema. One will see in Atelier (figure 57) an effort for

ordering a different composition of the feeling of the curves of space. Pinion, in theseries unfortunately impossible to reproduce in black of its fabrics of Ostende, isadvanced even further that him.220

53. Van Gogh. Shoes.The two speculations on dimensions, the form, and the limits, qualities of the spaceand on the attributes of the object are closely dependent. It was seen that inQuattrocento the problem of the object had arisen from a double point of view: that of its coherence and its autonomous density, which of its position relative compared tothe other objects or to the eye of the observer. Work celebrates of Van Gogh called

upon all the resources put at the provision of the painters by Degas and Manet to provide original angles of sight. But it acts always, spatially speaking, of angles of sight, objects defined by a global and common vision. The really individual element -which rests on what is called in linguistics the part taken for the whole - is provided

by a certain emotive vision which leads to the expressionism, i.e. to a stressing of sentimental tonicity and not to the plastic transformation of the vision or style.222

54. Leger. Composition of objects (1937). Paris.By opposition, one sees all that the contemporary art already gained. Here fragmentsof objects associated on the same plan, without consideration neither of the scale nor of the relative positions, within a free space framework. The elements are taken in asometimes total experiment (the pot of flowers), sometimes fragmentary of the things(the flower, the piece of cut out wood), one finds there also some fragments of

perceptive space undifferentiated (cf. the bottom flocculent of Degas and figure 47).The artist locates them in a space without horizon, with significant half, imaginaryhalf. This space is not without measurement, it has distances; but what definitivelydisappeared and from which one sees well that it was only one assumption betweenthe others, it is the cubic and segregate vision naves plans of the universe. At the sametime besides our time change also its scenic design and its psychological appreciationof the distances among the beings. It is a truly new world which drives out the old one

gradually,

55. Picasso. Sleeper squatted woman (1947). Lithograph in colour. The new design of the object does not affect only the still life; it does not explain onlystudies like that of the preceding board. It serves of support with research whichalready produced works and even as philosopher's stones. The contemporary art is notany more to stammer words. One of its principal attempts is to integrate therepresentation of the human figure in its new design of the object. I joined together onthis board two documents which show the point of traditional support - objective with

the old direction of the term - current research and the break. This lithography showsa first stage where, as in Dance of Matisse, one passes from a «realistic " imitation to



a linear stylization, but with conservation of the accustomed interior image. We are atthe stage of the deformations and Expressionism - which is preserving old globalvision of the things and universe (framing, reciprocal position of the figures, relief,gestures, etc).

56. Picasso. Study of naked (1941). Drawing, black lead.By opposition, I gave a drawing based on a new apprehension of space.Let us imagine that we noted on a sheet, in continuous feature, the successive resultsof our examination of a laid down figure, by moving ourselves around the motionlessmodel. I do not see in what the process is absurdity than that of the space riding,which also makes us simultaneously present imperceptible things in the same glance.

Nor in what the assumption is absurd than that of the space reduced to the cube of Quattrocento, opened on one on its sides and réductif , by pure assumption, of thestructures posed like Euclidean of the world. The line of horizon and the segregationof the plans are not all the same eternal laws, and the assembly by vedute is not theonly one which corresponds to the capacity of association of the spirit.

225

57. Picasso. The MUSE (1935). Paris modern museum of Art. When we turn around a figure and record the series of our impressions successive inthe connecting by means of the graphic bond of the arabesque, we note how the firstdifficulty which exists is for establishing one coherence between the elements,satisfactory only when one regards them as isolated. In fact, we touch here with the

problem of continuous space. In traditional space with three dimensions, thiscontinuous was given, on the one hand, by the existence of the strict and uniformlimits (of the plane surfaces by definition) of the representation and, on the other hand, by the assumption of an identity of laws of the figuration with those of theuniverse. One admitted, moreover, that all the parts of the world are calculableaccording to linear units, reported at a fixed point of vision. From now on, one adoptsthe assumption of a world to multiple space qualities, where the point of view variesaccording to whether the one considers the parts in only one blow of the eye, fromnear or by far, and successively; of a world where the theoretical unit is not given by asingle structure of the thought. The space of Renaissance was that of the mancirculating through the universe and seeking, above all, to locate the usual objectsaccording to a small number of designs of estimate. It moreover is entirely dominated

by the consideration of the flat wall and the panel. We have here, on the contrary, aspace where very close feelings mix with general representations; where outlines of movement are in conflict with a static page-setting; where several methods of stylization are simultaneously tried; where is primarily broken the belief in thesubstantial identity of the fundamental laws of the universe, subjected to a closedsystem of forces, with certain already known categories of the spirit. Renaissance wasa limitation, and our time rejects this system because it increases the field of humanknowledge once more, by simultaneously enriching the field of the action and that of the structural comprehension of the spirit.226

58. Leger. Adam and Eve (1934).



In this development of a new plastic order, the point most delicate it is the figurationof the man. He also, like the object, lost its fixed attributes - if reassuring. He also isapproached by the painters like a new object, which appears under unforeseen dayssince one ceases considering that there is a standard figure, provided by the more or less draped traditional statuary of the view of the daylight. Notion of the man -

character and of the man reflection, more or less brought closer, of a gun ideal of beauty, in conformity with the image of God, thus seems another of the bases of Renaissance and as one of the points where, in our time, true rupture is shown finally.228

In a made universe of objects similar to those which Leger studies for themselves(figure 54), the man between like a fragment, made up of the same stuff as the thingsand likely of the same settings except of the scale. The objects, polished or angular,that the modern sculptors create offer to us by the hand of the tactile and sensual

pleasures of gripping and caress, sometimes soft sometimes rough or angular, similar to those which the sight of the tables suggests to which is sensitive by the eyes. As

new Paradise is tangible, it is among us without knowing it: it is in our capacity tocollect the extent with the hand, to order a kind of ballet individual no longer of our dreams, but of our memories of action.229

59. Cézanne. Street in a village (C 1877).

I would like, in the last boards of this work, to summarize the positions taken, sinceabout thirty years, by the painters, while showing, on the one hand, that they have as a

point of support the awakening, which had in Impressionists and Cézanne, of theeternal bases of the vision and that, on the other hand, in front of the infinity of thecombinations theoretically possible illusionists the artists of this time were already

brought to formulate, to be made hear, a certain number of new general assumptions.Any language implies, indeed, a limitation of the precision and allusive richness of the conventional signs chosen. The first from these two Cézanne illustrates thefamous sentence of the artist on his desire to express nature by the cubes and thespheres; it shows how the cubism left, partly, of its example and can -be much less

bold and innovator that it was not believed.

60. Cézanne. The mountain Saint Victoire (C 1905). Watercolour. Particular collection.

The second of these compositions shows the other great experiment cézanian, foundedon the use of the arabesque like means of connection between the parts of a visionsensitive and either geometrical of the world. And it would undoubtedly be better tosay cursive sign than arabesque whose direction is too much broad and who puts upalso with the Euclidean geometry most strict. One will bring closer the plans floatingthe space of research of Degas (figure 47) and of the free fragments of faces markingout extended without definite plans of Leger or of Braque (figures 54, 58, etc .>). Thefact that both Cézanne are also drafts proves that both ways opened to thedevelopment of a new plastic order do not answer a free play of combination of stylized elements, but with a direct and constraining feeling of nature.231

61. Leger. Roofs of Paris (about 1912).



Cézanne opened the ways in two opposite directions: the expression by the cursiveline and the expression by the spread out plans. New stylization joins again with

problems eluded in Quattrocento. For example, that of the provision of the objects andthe masses (cf. figures 5 and 6). It is not a question, this time, to coordinate episodes,to subordinate and spread out topics. The stacking of the forms, the interference of the

plans, the play of the superimposition lead to the rejection of the traditionalscenographic designs. The principle of unit is requested the vision and either fromthe intellection. The optical values override imagination. Figuration of the world bythe method of the plans - surfaces spread out and of elided volumes produced a seriesof considerable works of Leger (the City) and Delaunay (the Runners) with Pignon(the Workers of the factory).232

62. Estève. Flying men (1947).Proving the insertion of research of the xx century beginning in the styleimpressionist, I want to show also how the bolder attempts of the very last years

prolong the way opened by the preceding generation. To express the conquest of theairs, Estève introduced a vision with the vertical of engaged diagrammatic forms, butit has recourse to the sets of plans whose cubist experiments gave him the idea andwhich the achievements of Leger made comparable to the witness. However, to thestatic vision of the Leger of 1912 is added a vision of forms overhanging and slipping.For where it is obvious that one of the assumptions of Renaissance is definitivelyrejected. The same step is always noted: return to the fundamental principles of thevision, modification of one of the basic postulates, renewed stylization. The unit of the time which is completed is certain.

63. Leger. The morning alarm clock (about 1913-1914). This document illustrates the other series of research which takes its point of supporton the disarticulation of traditional space realized by Cézanne and Impressionism.Here a contamination, very bold, between the figure of the sleeper and the alarmclock, rests on a new appreciation of the couple space time. All the fragments of reality fly and gather in an order which is based not on the unit of the scenographiccube, but on the unit of perceptions in the spirit. Still must one add that legibility isobtained owing to the fact that certain traditional assumptions: horizon, background,

principal figure approximately plane (cf. figure 20) are preserved. It is always thesystem of the grid, essential to the passage from one time to another. We still have a

foot in Renaissance.64. Gischia. The juggler (1948). Paris. Particular collection. A new step is crossed, like always, by examination and choice of one or twoassumptions. Remarkable opposition enters painting flat and the creation of new spacevalues. Meanwhile, there were the abstract art and the discovery from Romance

painting. A new ordering of the feelings outline: total disappearance of the solid dropshadow (problem renewed of Uccello, cf. figure 13); space opened. Clearness, the lifecomes from everywhere. The character is drawn up on a stage, but, this time, one hasaccess around him, it does not have there more vents. The limits of space are not

specified any more, finished the idea of possible duplication or of a preservingreduction of universe to the forms determined by the geometry of Euclide. We exceed



even the assumption of curved space: we go towards an extent which is not any morewith measurement of the motionless glance of the man.235

65. Picasso. The Table (1921). Gouache.

To make sensitive the reality of the passage between the two times, I reproduced this pedestal table which, by comparison with the preceding composition, locates thecubism as an intermediate stage between research which aim to the disarticulation of traditional space and those which tend to the constitution of a new dependent system.It is seen clearly that the cubism proceeded primarily by decomposition anddisplacement of the parts of the traditional vision. It accentuated caricatural someelements and elided the others, it was based on the famous assumption of the fourthdimension, that of the movement, and it thought that it would be enough to drawsaside one part of the object to make it mobile. In fact, it schematized without building.It is him, however, which, drawing the last conclusions from the experiment of the

former generations, provided elements to the creators of a new order, entirely distinctfrom that of Quattrocento. It is the last "grid".236

66. Braque. Athenaeum (1928).One gives up definitively the assumption of a fixed image of the universe of whichthe parts, simultaneously accessible to the motionless eye of a witness, reflect in thewater drop of scenographic microcosm (figure 9). Painting returns to its vocation: tocreate dependent systems of forms according to one time the emotive and drivingexperiments. The evolution towards an open and plural figuration precipitates. Onefinds the lines curves and the sides of space floating of figures 54 el 58, of Leger. Thenew assumptions are not free; they are related to the requests towards the action of our time (cf. figure 62).Our generation undertakes an investigation into sensorydriving perceptions of space.67. Delaunay. La Tour Eiffel (1911). New York. Guggenheim museum.

Delaunay represents a way appreciably different from that which has been juststudied, but it has the same starting point. If one considers, indeed, the composition of this work, it is very close to the Alarm clock-morning of Leger: fragmentation cubistof the objects; accumulation pyramidal of the forms in the centre of the fabric;spreading out of engaged plans, suggestive of an extent despite everything analogue

with the depth of traditional space. The unit in the diversity of the solutions is asobvious as when they were the relationship between Uccello and Ghirlandajo. The personal capital contribution of Delaunay lies in the importance attached to the values- technical aspect - and the light - aspect aesthetic of the problem. At the same time asit uses plans reproducing of the fragments of lit surfaces, it incorporates segments of reality which have another existence only in the universe of the luminous rays. Bythere it prolongs the effort of Seurat, which will be able to become one day, thanks tohim, one of the real ancestors of future art. There is thus simultaneous effort totranslate significant and open space, not only in geometrical combinations but invalues. The artist affirms his desire to base the significant representation of space onthe law of simultaneous contrasts, by what it engages a whole part of the

contemporary art. If I did not reproduce here of Manessier or of Singier, it is because,without colour, the multiplication of the examples is useless. But I wanted to mark



that all those which currently aim to the plastic representation of an immediatelysignificant space by the colour leave Robert Delaunay. It is by him that the figurationof the qualitative values of a movement direction, speed, shimmer, recorded at thetime of a displacement, enters the elementary material of the contemporary art.238

68. Delaunay. Rhythms (1937). New York. Guggenheim museum.

One will undoubtedly precisely have been astonished by little place that I made in mytext with the problem of the abstract art. I am not unaware of it however, nor do notmistake it. As that of the ratios of Cubism with Expressionism - which is alsoexcluded from this debate, all the same that Surrealism of Chagall and of Miro - itappears one of most significant to me to study to take one complete sight of art of thexx century. I was explained in the text on my loathing to parcel out the history of

present time in "currents" which are only the fragile ones and mortals beings of reason. In addition, the abstract art or surrealism and the expressionism blame too

values insufficiently studied so that it is possible to allot to them, in some sharp judgements, their true range. I preferred to show that fundamental gap of our information which relates not to the history of the pseudo currents, but on the materialof bases: catalogues, dates, relations. I do not believe, moreover, that in filling it onewill modify the general curve of an overall movement which one already foreseesthrough a few series of particularly succeeded works. I wanted, however, to prove atleast the fastening of the abstract art with the experiment more known of Cubism,

because the abstract art, contrary to Surrealism and Expressionism which are aspectsof the literary sensitivity of time, constitutes a complete formula of plastic expression.The work of Delaunay shows how, on the basis of analysis "of space qualities of thelight, a representation, exclusive of any figuration of objects to the positive directionof the term, is possible. The object does not disappear; it is created arbitrarily by thestudy, like the equation in mathematics. The greatest error is to believe that the basesof the abstract art are in a free figuration of forms or colours suggested with an artist

by his whim or of vague naturist aspirations which did not know to be expressed inestablished values. There is no art of formless or pure weak-willed gushing. AtDelaunay there is search for an order implying modification but not destruction of the

pressing rules of the logic of the feelings.241

69. Estève. The hill with the three trees (1948). Paris. Particular collection.

The laws of the traditional airspace resulted from the reciprocal position of the plansunder a single beam of light. Those of the contemporary airspace result from aspeculation on the details characteristic of the objects in the diffuse light. Renaissancewas especially sensitive to the collective significance of the representations and weattach, us, more value with the intimate experiments. The world was a spectacle; it

becomes a field of forces. One spoke during several centuries about scenography,about man - actor on the theatre of the world, one speaks more readily aboutstructures, intimate experiment of our body. Thus the plastic speculation follows themovements of the human spirit in the process of understanding and it provides to thecompany figurative objects which help it, as much as the product of its material

activities, to become aware of its intentions. The co-ordinates of traditional spacewere comparable with a double network of imaginary lines which compartmentalized



the interior vacuum of a cube, representative of the universe, in innumerable smalldice. The new system of signs has as co-ordinates of the values of appreciation muchmore interior. Semi schematization ponderal, semi- mobile of three trees on a hill, inthe foreground; view from above in the second plan on the valley; then the cut out lineof a movement of ground locating the other pouring; finally, in the left higher angle,

the figuration on another scale of a zone of shimmering culture chatoyante, kind of veduta modern, manner of sensitive, handy object in the imaginary one without precise attribution of space localization, constitutes the framework of a vision relatedto the sensitivity than to the action. In this century of radar, we go towards the signrelay.242

70. Gischia. Léda and the Swan (1948). Turin. Collection particular. Berthe Morisot rented - wrongly or rightly - Bazille to have been the first of the

impressionist group to have put a figure in space. It is, in effect, the capital problem

with each stage of the history of arts. Of two great compositions which close this book once more prove that our time makes an effort, (C F. figure 58 ), to solve it.We are not here any more in the elastic space of Leger, handy but stable. Thefragments, allusive of plans intermediaries, show a space quasi floating which is moredetermined by the traditional relations of the content and of the container, and by thefundamental feeling of the distance. The contrast of colour which gives the distancesconstitutes a framework opened for the scene, without limits external precise andwithout fixing of angle, or especially from point of view. The notion of continuous istransferred. It does not act more than one diaphanous matter which fills the standardcube uniformly; each one is free to locate at its liking the figures within the imaginarylimits, according to its reminiscences, on a its will scale, and in a universe includingintentional values as well as allegorical are hardly specified. Is this river of Parterre of water of Versailles, posed in the centre of a great space, the raised arms? Or thenymph continued by the satire mallarméen, more skilful with the nervous master keysthan with the majestic gestures? The volume suggested by the figure is opposed to theerotic swiftness of the act. Ambivalent expression of the artist pressing the matter andthe fugitive possession. The topic, all things considered, of Daphné of Bernin incontemporary vision. With Leda of Gischia and Workers of Pignon - the desire andwork - don't we have the two powers which control our universe, substituted for theglory and dead whose images dominated Quattrocento?

24571. The Logger (1951). Gallery of France.

Splendid example of sight planning on an open space. By comparison with Estèveone sees an attempt to introduce a unit vision in conformity with new guns. Thecharacter treated like an object, according to the formula of Leger, is integrated in aunifying plastic topic to which it gives his human resonance. We are very close to thecircles of Juggler of Gischia (figure 64). The signs (cf. figure 60) trace, man andthings mixed, an imaginary framework where the action is. The world is with themeasurement of our acts and either of geometry. Renaissance considered that the man

moved with the interior of an immutable universe; it is remained very inspired by theidea that the world was creation made once of a god. Thus it could reconcile with



some immobility its capacities widened of action. If it were directed towards theinventory of the external world, it believed in the existence of likely laws of aninventory. Modern times are directed towards an entirely different design, where theman is given like drank to create, at the same time, the company and universe with themeasurement of its desires and its capacities of intervention. It thus considers space

not like a «place" open to its activity, but like the «field" of innumerable forces. Willcome, undoubtedly, the day when it will balance temporarily, again, its possibilitiesand its representations; it will have, for a rather long period, the feeling to be in ameasurable universe. This day, it will balance also its plastic research and, in

particular, its total figuration of space. For the moment, it became aware of arbitraryold assumptions on which it had based the rule of its actions. It makes an effort withthe role of new demiurge. It sees its golden age in the future and it endeavours toestablish itself of it the laws. For this reason its space is as basically open as that of the previous centuries was limited.246

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