“During the surrealist period, everyone was doing automatic writing. That was a bit of a joke, at least in part, because when you want to be completely automatic, you never can be. There’s always a moment when you ‘arrange’ things just a little. Even the surrealists’ automatic texts were sometimes corrected. Therefore, since there’s no such thing as complete automatism, why not admit frankly that one is making use of all that substratum of the unconscious but keeping one’s hand on it? That doesn’t mean I’m promoting the idea of a rational line of thought, one which goes from deduction to deduction, from one principle to its inevitable consequences. My own thought in doing a painting is often a continuous non sequitur, a series of jumps from one mountain peak to another. It’s what you might call a somnambulist’s thought. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a kind of directed dream, but that’s just as far from pure automatism as it is from rational thought.
“Whatever the source of the emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world. Otherwise a painting is just an old grab bag for everyone to reach into and pull out what he himself has put in. I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves, to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands. A painting isn’t a market basket or a woman’s handbag, full of combs, hairpins, lipstick, old love letters, and the keys to the garage. Valéry used to say, ‘I write half the poem. The reader writes the other half.’ That’s all right for him, maybe, but I don’t want there to be three or four or a thousand possibilities of interpreting my canvas. I want there to be only one and in that one, to some extent, the possibility of recognizing nature, even distorted nature, which is, after all, a kind of struggle between my interior life and the external world as it exists for most people. As I’ve often said, I don’t try to express nature; rather, as the Chinese put it, to work like nature. And I want that internal surge—my creative dynamism—to propose itself to the viewer in the form of traditional painting violated.”
ON OUR WAY BACK FROM ONE of our visits to Matisse, Pablo said, laughing, “Matisse has such good lungs.” I asked him what he meant.
“It’s the way he uses color,” he said. “In Matisse’s work, when you find three tones that are put on close to one another—let’s say a green, a mauve, and a turquoise—their relationship evokes another color which one might call the color. That is the language of color. You’ve heard Matisse say, ‘You need to leave each color its zone of expansion.’ On that point I’m in complete agreement with him; that is, color is something which goes beyond itself. If you limit a color to the interior, let’s say, of some particular black curved line, you annihilate it, at least from the point of view of the language of color, because you destroy its power of extension. It’s not necessary for a color to have a determined form. It’s not even desirable. What is important is its power of expansion. When it reaches a point a little beyond itself, this force of expansion takes over and you get a kind of neutral zone to which the other color must come as it reaches the end of its course. At that moment you can say that color breathes. That’s the way Matisse paints and that’s why I said, ‘Matisse has such good lungs.’
“As a rule, in my own work I don’t use that language. I use the language of construction, and in a fairly traditional manner, the manner of painters like Tintoretto or El Greco who painted entirely in camaïeu, and then, once their painting was about finished would add transparent glazes of red or blue to brighten it up and make it stand out more. The fact that in one of my paintings there is a certain spot of red isn’t the essential part of the painting. The painting was done independently of that. You could take the red away and there would always be the painting; but with Matisse it is unthinkable that one could suppress a spot of red, however small, without having the painting immediately fall apart.”
I asked Pablo how he would classify one of my favorite colorists—Bonnard.
“Don’t talk to me about Bonnard,” he said. “That’s not painting, what he does. He never goes beyond his own sensibility. He doesn’t know how to choose. When Bonnard paints a sky, perhaps he first paints it blue, more or less the way it looks. Then he looks a little longer and sees some mauve in it, so he adds a touch or two of mauve, just to hedge. Then he decides that maybe it’s a little pink too, so there’s no reason not to add some pink. The result is a potpourri of indecision. If he looks long enough, he winds up adding a little yellow, instead of making up his mind what color the sky really ought to be. Painting can’t be done that way. Painting isn’t a question of sensibility; it’s a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice. That’s why I like Matisse. Matisse is always able to make an intellectual choice about colors. Whether it’s close to nature or far away, he’s always able to fill an area completely with one color, simply because it goes with the other colors on the canvas, and not because of being more or less sensitive to reality. If Matisse decided the sky should be red, it would be a real cadmium red and nothing else and it would be all right because the degree of transposition in the other colors would be at the same level. He would transpose all the other elements of the canvas into a sufficiently high color range so that the mutual relationships of those tones made possible the intensity of that first red. In that way it’s the whole color range of the composition which permits that eccentricity. Van Gogh was the first one to find the key to that tension. He wrote, ‘I’m building up to a yellow.’ You look at a wheatfield, for example; you can’t say it’s a real cadmium yellow. But once the painter takes it into his head to arrive at an arbitrary determination of color, and uses one color that is not within nature’s range but beyond it, he will then choose, for all the rest, colors and relationships which burst out of nature’s straitjacket. That’s the way he asserts his freedom from nature. And that’s what makes what he does interesting. And that’s what I hold against Bonnard. I don’t want to be moved by him. He’s not really a modern painter: he obeys nature; he doesn’t transcend it. That method of going beyond nature is actively accomplished in Matisse’s work. Bonnard is just another neo-impressionist, a decadent; the end of an old idea, not the beginning of a new one. The fact that he might have had a little more sensibility than some other painter is just one more defect as far as I’m concerned. That extra dose of sensibility makes him like things one shouldn’t like.
“Another thing I hold against Bonnard is the way he fills up the whole picture surface, to form a continuous field, with a kind of imperceptible quivering, touch by touch, centimeter by centimeter, but with a total absence of contrast. There’s never a juxtaposition of black and white, of square and circle, sharp point and curve. It’s an extremely orchestrated surface developed like an organic whole, but you never once get the big clash of the cymbals which that kind of strong contrast provides.”
IN HIS AVIARY, IN COMPANY with many exotic birds, Matisse had four large Milanese pigeons. Their feet were not bare like most pigeons. They had feathers right down to the ground covering their claws; it was just as though the feet had white gaiters on them. One day he said to Pablo, “I ought to give these to you because they look like some you’ve already painted.” We took them back to Vallauris with us. One of them had a very distinguished artistic and political career. Early in 1949 Pablo made a lithograph of it which turned out to be a brilliant technical success. In lithography one can get an absolute black quite easily, but since lithographic ink has wax in it, when you dilute it with water to make a light-gray wash, the lithographic stone does not take the wash very evenly. That makes what is called in French, la peau de crapaud, a surface mottled like a toad’s skin. But in this lithograph Pablo had succeeded in making a wash that gave the impression of an extremely transparent gray, with gradations that were an amazing tour de force.
About a month later, the poet and novelist Louis Aragon, who serve
d as a kind of intellectual wheelhorse for the French Communist Party, came to the studio in the Rue des Grands-Augustins to prod Pablo into giving him a sketch he had promised him for the poster advertising the Communist-sponsored World Peace Congress soon to be held at the Salle Pleyel. Aragon looked through a folder of recent lithographs, and when he saw that one, the pigeon looked so much like a dove to him that he had the idea of making it the symbol of the congress. Pablo agreed and by the end of the day, the poster and the “dove” had already begun to appear on Paris walls. In its countless printings and reprintings, first as an original lithograph and later in reproduction, the poster went around the world in the cause—or at least in the name—of peace.
After Aragon had “discovered” the peace dove that day, he continued to look through the lithographs Pablo had done recently and he came across a series of portraits of me in the coat Pablo had brought me back from Poland. They were very stylized, with small heads. They had started as an attempt at color lithography but they hadn’t worked out very well because the register marks had not been made accurately. Pablo had pulled a few proofs but they hadn’t satisfied him and so he had reworked the five original plates—one for each of the colors—and made of them five different compositions. From each of these he had pulled several states. Afterward, since they had been so much worked over and almost spoiled as a result, he made another one, very spontaneously. When Aragon saw it he said, “That one you must give to me. It’s completely successful.” Pablo seemed on the point of complying. Then Aragon had the misfortune to add, “I like it especially because for once you’ve shown Françoise to be as charming as she really is.” At that Pablo looked very angry and said, “For me there’s no difference between a charming woman and a frog.”
“I’m very sorry for you, then,” Aragon said, “but if you really don’t know the difference, you’ve had a great deal of luck in your life, because so far, I’ve always seen you surrounded by rather pretty women—classical types, really—and not by little froglike monsters.
Pablo began to laugh and said, “That’s like Braque. He once told me, ‘In love, you still go along with the tradition.’ ” Then we all laughed and Aragon said, “Since you’re laughing, you can’t be angry any longer, so why don’t you give me the lithograph?”
“No,” Pablo said. “You’ve been impertinent. You don’t get the lithograph. You’ll have to be satisfied with lunch.”
Aragon came often to see Pablo. Their friendship was a mordant, aggressive one, crossed with flashes of lightning, periods of sulking, and reconciliations. I think they were fond of each other and yet detested each other a little bit at the same time. Pablo, I know, never felt quite satisfied with Aragon as a friend.
“I can’t have friends if they’re not capable of sleeping with me,” he said. “Not that I require it of the women or want it from the men—but there should at least be that feeling of warmth and intimacy one experiences in sleeping with someone.”
If Aragon had come alone, that would have helped somewhat, because his wife, Elsa Triolet, and Pablo couldn’t get along at all. Elsa was often sarcastic and rather mocking, and although Pablo liked making fun of people, he didn’t like people to make fun of him.
The first time I saw Aragon at Pablo’s atelier, I was quite taken with his physical presence. He looked like an eighteenth-century courtier. One almost expected to see him arrive dressed in silk, with knee breeches and a sword. But even without all that he produced almost the same effect. With his clear blue eyes, his pale skin, and his nearly white hair, he looked very youthful and handsome. Whenever he arrived he was in such a state of agitation he couldn’t sit down and talk like anyone else; he had to stride back and forth from one end of the room to the other, speaking rapidly and continuously as he walked. It was an unsettling spectacle, almost like following the volleys at the Davis Cup matches, first to the left, then to the right, then to the left, then to the right. If by chance there was a mirror at either end, before turning he would look in it and carefully arrange his hair with his left hand. Anything he told you, however intelligent it might be, seemed of secondary importance to the fascination exerted by his perpetual motion, like that of a serpent charming a bird. The result of his marathon was that one wound up by agreeing with whatever he had come to say.
The only common denominator between Elsa and Aragon was their blue eyes—very blue, with a tiny pupil like a little black dot. He was tall and she petite but well proportioned, with remarkable legs. She, too, was still a great charmer. One couldn’t say she was really beautiful, but there was no escaping the charm she exuded. I could well understand the influence she had as a young girl in Russia on the poet Mayakowsky, who was at one time the husband of Lili Brick, her older sister, and in Berlin, later, on the painters and poets there. When I met her she was fifty and still fascinating.
Pablo was always greatly intrigued by the continuing love affair between Elsa and Aragon. On Aragon’s side particularly it seemed to be total devotion, almost a kind of cult or religion of which this unique woman was the reigning goddess. He discussed this with Aragon, sometimes, when he came without Elsa.
“How can you go on always loving the same woman?” Pablo asked him one day. “After all, she’s going to change like everybody else and grow old.”
“That’s just it,” Aragon said. “I like all those little changes. They nourish me. I like the autumn of a woman, too.”
“Well, well,” said Pablo, “I’ll bet you also like lace panties and silk stockings. Are you decadent!”
Aragon laughed. “And you? You’re an eternal adolescent, I’d say. I shouldn’t talk to you about things like that. You’re not mature enough to understand them.”
After Aragon had gone that day, Pablo looked almost wistful and said to me, “He’s lucky to be able to concentrate on one person. I’m afraid I’d find that monotonous. It would be all right for a while but then it would get pretty dull. . . .” He stopped. “No,” he said, “that’s not true. I’m just as particular as he is and I’d like to have my life exemplary, too.” Then he sat up a little straighter and added, “And my life is exemplary.”
I had to smile. “How right you are,” I said, perhaps a bit too fervently.
Pablo looked out from his maligned virtue. “What do you expect,” he said, “when I’m surrounded by sarcasm and critical analysis, instead of by the confidence and devotion that I ought to be receiving? It’s not easy to hold oneself up there on the mountaintop with that kind of support.”
I burst out laughing. Finally Pablo joined in. “Oh, well,” he said, “what difference does it make? Life is only a bad novel, anyway.”
Pablo was never very relaxed with Aragon. He and Aragon were always trying to score off each other. Their relationship was spicy and peppery, interspersed with little coquetries, flourishes, flatteries, hyperbole and paradoxes.
One day Aragon came in saying, “I have discovered a great writer, Maurice Barrès.” Barrès, of course, was a bigoted nationalist and very academic, and neither of them had any respect for him. Or it might be Henri Bataille, a writer of popular melodramas. Or he would say, “I’ve written a brilliant study of the two great heroes of France—Jeanne d’Arc and Maurice Chevalier,” just hoping to get a rise out of Pablo.
Aragon was a very gifted raconteur, whether relating his memories of childhood or his reminiscences of the Resistance, in which he underwent a good deal of danger passing manuscripts to the Resistance press. But when he read his own poems you began to grit your teeth because his manner of reading was completely unnatural. As long as he spoke in prose, he was fascinating.
Aragon, I could see, was a politician in the sense of a man like Talleyrand, a complex personage who played himself amid the complexities of politics. As Pablo often said, “Aragon is a saint, but perhaps not a hero.” He would hate to have me compare him to Malraux but they do have something in common. Aragon, though, is more of a grand seigneur than Malraux.
One day, after Aragon had
called on us, Pablo said, laughing, “All popular parties, like the Communists, need princes” and it was quite obvious that Aragon was a prince. If he had chosen the church instead of the Communist Party, one could easily imagine him as a cardinal. But the overlapping in his nature of the poet and writer with the actor was confusing, because at the superficial level he was primarily an actor and, in that sense, a complete fraud; yet within, he was deeply and authentically himself. He was a person of extreme contradictions, and he suffered enormously from them. He had every right to believe himself a grand seigneur of literature, and he always demanded his due: at first nights or in any gathering of the Tout-Paris, he must be accorded his exact place, as sensitive to rank and protocol as any of the dukes at the court of Louis XIV. And underneath it all lay a permanent suspicion of others, an anxiety, a basic unhappiness, I suppose, which resulted in an insatiable need to multiply himself, to give himself a thousand faces.
I think perhaps Pablo was right in saying that Aragon was a saint, because for a man like that to belong to the Communist Party was the greatest renunciation he could possibly achieve. Just as at the social and literary levels he was capable of demanding all the consideration he believed himself entitled to, at the other pole there was a form of masochism in his adherence to the Party that made him become more communist than all the others. As a result, he was more than once the martyr of the Party’s aesthetic misjudgments.
Life with Picasso Page 31