The great explosion of the sublime period of 1900, still known today as the Style Nouille [“noodle style”], was preceded by the music of Richard Wagner (Tristan and Isolde, 1857–59); the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900); the genius of Barbizon, François Millet, whose erotic cannibalism radiated into “the tragic myth of Millet’s Angelus” (1858–59), which broods over the pompiers Meissonier and Detaille, themselves destined to accomplish the historic mission of perpetuating the genetic code of the fatherland through the flesh and the spirit of Karl Marx (Das Kapital, 1867), Max Planck, Friedrich Hegel, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Antonio Gaudí, Cézanne, Marcel Proust, Raymond Roussel, Mariano Fortuny, Pablo Picasso (b. 1881), and his contemporary Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), who came out of Raymundo Lulio; and the monarchical domes of Buckminster Fuller, which in turn came out of Louis XVI’s architect, Ledoux. Since 1900 there has been nothing, absolutely nothing new: We have been living on the debris and the rubble of more and more minimal explosions, down to the tiny helpings of the minimal art of today.
* * *
Summary list of explosions:
Millet exploded into Seurat and Dalí, driving van Gogh mad in passing. Detaille, with his microstructures, explodes into Cézanne, Cubism, and anecdotal Surrealism. Gustave Moreau with his swarming mythology explodes not only through the work of his most notorious students, Matisse and Rouault, but also into the LSD of oneiric and automatic Surrealism. Boldini’s whiplash graphism explodes into Mathieu’s calligraphy; Gaudí and Fortuny explode into Picasso and Miró; and so on and so forth. Picasso’s Guernica is a delayed-action explosion of Carolus-Duran’s Murdered Woman. The pompier Cormon is an unexpected prehistoric explosion of Millet and, to top it all, Gérome explodes in the hands of Marcel Duchamp: The optician has a hot seat, the heat of a Minim. Because, in Gala’s proverbial phrase, it is always those who are against who are the last ones to understand. Conclusion: Fortuny, the most inspired of all, explodes into Willem de Kooning, who is the most inspired of them all.
Finally, Mr. J.-P. Crespelle in his book Les Peintres de la Belle Époque proves totally and apotheosisistically the utter misunderstanding of pompier art that exists intact down to this day. He writes:
“Suppressed during several decades, the taste for Salon painting from before 1914 now reappears, thanks to the excesses, the pirouettes, the absurdities of the avant-garde; whether it be informel, gestural, miserabilist, or neo-Dadaist. Disconcerted, disgusted collectors have by a kind of boomerang reflex turned their attention back to descriptive painting and ‘well-made’ work, which takes on the supplementary prestige of a period with the nostalgic charm of a paradise lost. To the point where we can no longer really make fun of those artists who often joined love of their profession to a professional conscience that is disdained today. The smile they provoke is tinged with regrets.”
Dalí says no, no, no! No boomerang! On the contrary: Everything in the avant-garde happens necessarily and ineluctably, like the deadly or invigorating debris of the explosion of 1900. After the flushed toilet of microphysics, after Pop, Op, and the minimalism consequences, we shall see pompier art once again very much alive, fresh as a rose and quantified by everything that will have taken place meanwhile in our contemporary aesthetic drama, one of the most grandiose and tragic in history.
Captions of Illustrations
[The paintings noted in the following captions were reproduced in black and white, along with Dalí’s comments, in the original article, “The Incendiary Fireman,” when it was first published in ARTnews Annual 33 (October 1967). Most of these paintings can be viewed on the web. —Eds.]
Ernest Meissonier, The Sergeant’s Portrait, 1874. Collection of Baron Schroeder.
Dalí comments: “This picture is an illustration of microphysics. The instantaneity of the glances forms an antigravitational structure, like that which may be suggested in painting by the trajectories of flies or of pi mesons. The painter is looking at the sergeant. Three people are looking at the painter’s drawing. One is looking at the dog. The sergeant and the smoker look at nothing. The whole permits an antiproton explosion.”
Edouard Detaille, The Dream, 1888.
Dalí remarks: “Chain structures of the discontinuity (and, for the same price) of the ondulatory and corpuscular light of the prescientific dream. Olé!”
Detaille, Saluting the French Wounded.
Detaille, Saluting the German Wounded.
Dalí: “At first glance these two paintings of Detaille seem merely to be faithfully transcribed anecdotes, photographs of reality. On an intuition of Mr. Salvador Dalí, a study of their structure was undertaken which reveals the following. Suppose that an arrow on a black circle indicates a cavalryman in black, and an arrow on a white circle one in white, and that the black triangles represent the foot soldiers in black. The graphs are practically identical—the same number of arcs and the same trajectories, with the following exceptions. The direction of the black horsemen is inverted within the logarithmic spiral indicated by the arrows. The white horsemen and the foot soldiers remain unchanged. The stationary foot soldiers mark the axis of the spiral.”
Gérome, Optician’s sign in rebus form, 1902.
Duchamp, Mona Lisa: L. H. O. O. Q. Rasé, 1964. Cordier and Ekstrom, New York.
Dalí: “The Oedipal-anal complex in Gérome’s work would be evident to any psychoanalyst, as it was to Duchamp.”
Boldini, Portrait of Réjane.
Mathieu, For Elizabeth of Austria.
Dalí: “Boldini’s whiplash graphism explodes into Mathieu’s calligraphy.”
Horace Vernet, Horace Vernet’s Studio.
Dalí points out: “All the elements of a contemporary Happening are here, down to the marijuana smoker with a long pipe for the kif of the period.” Identifiable among others are the painters Eugène Lami, with trumpet, and Vernet, the duelist in profile.
Meissonier, Napoleon III at Solferino, Detail, 1863. Louvre, Paris.
Dalí: “Self-explanatory detail.”
Pablo Picasso, Science and Charity, 1896–97. Private collection, Barcelona.
Dalí says: “This picture was shown in the autumn of 1966 to four hundred brains of polytechnicians in excellent condition, not one of which was able to identify it as a Picasso. Yet no one could deny that it contains all the ‘bits’ of information in his future work: the watch, the limp hand, the sisters of mercy protecting the progeny. Every July I send a telegram to Picasso, which reads, ‘For July, neither women nor snails.’”
Meissonier, The Deathbed, 1838. Fodor Museum, Amsterdam.
Dalí: “Neither watch, nor woman, nor child, nor snails.”
ARTnews Annual 33 (October 1967).
DE KOONING’S 300,000,000TH BIRTHDAY
There is not the slightest shadow of a doubt that the sublimest moment in the history of our planet occurred several hundreds of millions of years ago when the Bay of Biscay opened up and the Pyrenees held fast, thus protecting the divine immutability of the Sals-Narbonne passage, which is really and basically the only thing that interests us. For if one had had to wait for the Indians (who incidentally are deserving of my entire respect and merited a better fate; they were creatures who wore a vertical black or colored feather on their heads; some still wear it); if, I repeat, one had had to wait for the Indians to discover the microscope, which was one day to be the privilege of the city of Delft and the glory of Leeuwenhoek, then it is almost certain that those Indians, despite the fact that they spend most of their lives observing things, would have been incapable of inventing a single pair of spectacles, for the very simple reason that in order to follow the progress of their own reveries with half-closed eyes they had absolutely no need of such inventions. If we pass from the Americas to Africa in search of the first microscope we again find nothing, since even the geography of that continent, which strikes our eyes first because of its mountains and our feet, next because of its seas which one cannot cross on foot, was domesticated and hung u
p like bunches of raisins on the walls of Dutch interiors, while at the same time in African exteriors the only terrestrial globes observable were those which the rhinoceros wears engraved on its backside, which, before maps of the world existed, resembled charts of the sky, especially the rhinoceros of India which Dürer engraved, which brings us from Africa to Asia, where once again we shall not discover the first microscope, for the wisest Asiatics are like raving maniacs despite the fact that maniacs of this sort sometimes succeed violently, like those two Chinese scientists, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, who recently robbed us of the famous law of parity which is a lot to violate and might well be enough to make us lose all sense of direction if the Asians themselves had not created a Corneillian situation by inventing the compass, thus favorizing from a distance the one transcendental thing which matters for man, that is, the geodesic triangulation of the Sals-Narbonne air base where, for the first time in the midst of the French Revolution, by dividing the ten millionth part of the terrestrial meridian, physicists established the standard meter which, scientifically and fortunately for all, is since May 3, 1961, the equivalent of 1,650,763.73 wavelengths, in a vacuum, of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the krypton 86 atom. And now we have almost totally eliminated America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania (since the latter liquidates itself because of the great quantity of liquid which it contains and which dissolves it), and the few kangaroos who inhabit Australia, aborted parachutists who instead of falling like semen from the sky jump on the earth like fleas, without for all that being able to help us at all with the monarchical unity of Europe which is presently being formed. And now be assured we are finally reaching the conclusion, for my readers might begin to grow impatient and rightly wonder what this geological preamble is leading up to, a most justifiable expectation which, far from displeasing me, delights me since it allows me at once and in the most dazzlingly veracious way to shout from the housetops that Willem de Kooning is the greatest, the most gifted, and the most authentic finial point of modern painting, and the initial point of the pompier art of the future.
Let us recapitulate without recapitulating and observe that it was ineluctably necessary, several hundred million years ago, for America and Europe to break away from each other, so to speak, parting company, so to speak, at the supreme moment of the opening of the Bay of Biscay (we are back at our point of departure) in order that one day Willem de Kooning, born in Amsterdam, might cross the ocean to New Amsterdam, now New York, in which city the phenomenon of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting was to take place, thus allowing the most gifted modern Dutch painter to become the greatest painter of America. And now let us observe de Kooning with his prematurely white hair making his great sleepwalker’s gestures, as though he waited in a dream to open Bays of Biscay, to explode islands like orange sections or Parma violets, to tear up cerulean-blue continents split by Naples yellow oceans, the whole with happenings of virtuosity worthy of Velázquez, superposing cataclysms like earthquakes of burnt sienna, Venetian red, and ocher on the geological delirium of the winged and subtle bravura di tocco of his violent squalls of brushwork—and if, by chance or misfortune in these gesticulations of a dionysiac demiurge of reality, amid the collapse of mountains and the formation of volcanic seas, the image of the “eternal feminine” were to appear, above all if it were to be personified in a contemporary woman, the least which could happen to her would be to emerge (from all that chaos) wearing only a little makeup and depersonalized to the point of being transformed into a woman-landscape or a landscape-woman, thus verifying the hypothesis about dreams of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim called Paracelsus, who, going far beyond Prof. Freud, said that if one dreams of a fish which swims in a straight line and it suddenly swerves to the right or the left, this deviation may be verified in the past or in the future, and thus one will find it also in a deviation or accident in a mineral or a metal in the process of formation, which in journalistic language (so that all may understand), means that de Kooning in each of his gestural dreams registers nothing less than the geological “happenings” which took place on our planet Earth tens of thousands of millions of years ago, which is already saying a lot since today there are few painters sufficiently great to stand up straight, gesticulating, dreaming, and painting with feet wide apart like a new Colossus of Rhodes that, instead of letting boats pass between its shanks, would bestride the entire ocean—one foot in New York and the other in Amsterdam. And now that I think of it, my friend Malcolm Morley painted a great painting called The Rotterdam [a boat] before Rotterdam, which recalls Amsterdam, so I shall seize the occasion to excuse myself for not having attended his opening the other day; but I wish to tell him that I have already written an article about him, which, like all that I write, will be magnificent, since I make clear as day that his serious and anguished Neo-Dadaism is not only the culmination of Pop Art but also of Minimal Art, for no one can deny that, in his work, art is minimal, and even the commencement of the imminent pompier art, which is already many things together for the price of one.
ARTnews 68, no. 2 (April 1969).
JEAN HÉLION
(1904–1987)
FIGURE
We do not know whether the prehistoric artist sketched his first bison in a single spontaneous outburst, in a first flash of understanding.
But today, to draw a head is to suppress on the one hand the automatic scribbling that tempts everybody, and on the other, the previously formed images which influence us. Especially the paintings of others.
In order for this choice to assume its full meaning, it must be fully recognized that the painter has the right to do anything.
Surrealism breaks down barriers and causes unexpected constellations of images to flower. A new kind of abstraction gives structures to light. Cubism and constructivist abstraction, in which my painting began, raise monuments to space.
Today there are messes of paint, smashed tubes, accumulations of debris, combinations of all kinds. Why not?
I hear something in this uproar; I feel at ease in it. In the midst of these contradictions I build up my figures.
How lucky I am, really, to be defied on all sides.
* * *
The rubbish which has been written about figuration! The usual stuff about “photography.” Or else, “seen already, finished, old-fashioned,” etc.
Efface everything.
What is figuration, then?
It is looking for and keeping your path between proud, obvious Creation and the Void whose dizziness affects us all.
The painter works on horseback, the reins of color in his hand, his head in the wind of ideas, his eyes wide open on the world. Without knowing what his goal is to be.
Is it anything but life? The most different kinds of artists are occupied with nothing else. Some give it color, others madness; a few give it meaning. To figure is to try to grasp it in its entirety.
Everything must constantly be thought out again, reformulated, redone. You feel that there is an ideal central point from which the image would radiate through colors as well as through things.
Throughout your life you grope blindly for this point, with sometimes the magnificent illusion of reaching it.
And then you are left saddened by so much physics and metaphysics and you try, humbly, to make on a scrap of canvas something that is good to look at, good to keep.
* * *
I have painted pictures of shop fronts, stacked-up cellos, gangs of fishermen, the serious faces of my friends. Candidly. Looking at nothing but them. Freely, with my paraphernalia of experience with different techniques, trying to decipher them. Driving away every other idea with blows of the brush. Yet nothing can be done. The question is always elsewhere. You speak of what is far away in the language of what is near.
Each thing, for the painter, is both what it seems to be and, at the same time, something unknown.
* * *
Reality has no limits. Searchin
g for it, I have several times passed from one side to the other of the mirror in which we recognize things.
The surface of the mirror is Realism. The thing takes refuge in its appearance.
You cross over and it is as though, in a way, the thing became identified with the visual elements which make it up. It is the realm of the Plastic. Everything becomes a cone or a cube, tension, quality.
The other side of the mirror flows into Dreams. The object transformed by the idea. You search for its meaning. You surrender to intuition.
To figure is to define by means of an image the oneness of these three domains.
* * *
We would like, of course, to paint complete works, in the style of Carpaccio, Masaccio, Velázquez, Géricault. Technically, it is not utterly impossible. Spiritually, it is refused us.
Something fundamental has gone wrong. Each time a painting moves in this direction we must rub it out, return to plans that are both simpler and more complex; to firmer notions of space, to a tenser and less explicit degree of representation, the only one our senses can bear today.
Finally we must break off all relations with nostalgia. The canvas is not an open window giving onto the room in which the still life sits. It is a bare wall, or a public square in which the image will be built like a monument.
Keep your distance from the inspiring object, that distance which allows liberty without depriving it of its force.
* * *
From Nature
A side of beef hung up by the shank.
A fat, full cone; the hollow trunk underneath.
Recognize and define the tension between what is broad and what is sharp; between what is flesh and what is symbol.
The leg of beef crowning the nave of its sliced-off chest.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 34