Paul Éluard. Anthologie des écrits sur l’art - 1952-1954. Part Two

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Paul Éluard
Anthologie des écrits sur l’art.
Part Two

Collection Diagonales - Paris, Editore Cercle d’Art

(review by Francesco Mazzaferro) 

[Original Version: February-March 2016 - New Version: April 2019]

Fig. 6) The 1973 Italian edition

Go back to Part One

I am displaying below: (i) the brief preface by Paul Éluard to the Anthology in the French edition of 1952 (not included in the French version of 1972 and the Italian one of 1973); (ii) his three short introductory essays to the three tomes, which I translated into English from the Italian version of 1973 by Ottavio Cecchi and Fabrizio Grillenzoni, but I also checked against the 1952 French original, and (iii) the book review of that Italian edition, by Dario Micacchi, art critic of L’Unità, the daily paper of the Italian Communist Party, on the third page of the 21 December 1973 issue. To illustrate these texts, I am displaying images of some French art paintings mentioned in the anthology. I also added the picture of some of the works made by contemporary painters for Éluard, and included by the publisher in the 1973 Italian version. That version of the anthology, therefore, marked a crossroads of ancient and modern art.

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From the 1952 French edition

Paul Éluard, Preface (Avant-Propos) to the Anthology of Writings on Art

The universal literature on art is so vast that the present anthology was limited not just to painting, but to some aspects which are particularly dear to the author.

This first volume precedes other three ones, respectively entitled: Lumière et Morale, La Passion de peindre and Au niveau de la vie.

With Les Frères Voyants [Note of the translator: Sighted Brothers], the author has intended to collect the texts which, in his opinion, better assert the bonds that sight and art create between world and man and between man and society.

If Lumière et Morale [Note of the translator: Light and Moral] is of course focused on the sufficiently important developments on the matter itself of light and painting, i.e. colour, it aims above all to prove that physical light must have, as an inevitable corollary, moral light. Those who see well, think well.

The third volume, La passion de peindre [Note of the translator: The passion of painting], is devoted to the search for the absolute, to the Promethean passion that leads the artist to his work, to the challenge of the normal course of life and to the price, in most cases, of loneliness and misery.

In the last volume, we will disembark on the rival shores of the imaginary and the real, enemies who can be still reconciled for the greater good of hope and action.

This anthology is far from being definitive. But it will have served its purpose if it has opened a window.

For others, tomorrow, the task of clarifying, even more, the wonderful problems of art.

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FROM THE 1973 ITALIAN EDITION

Paul Éluard, Introduction to The sighted brothers

I would like to do the work that I am here undertaking with the same ease with which I accomplished my anthologies of poetry. I would then draw no less pleasure.

But, if I am well aware of several critical texts by painters, poets, and writers, it is awkward for me to confine the choice of pictures, whether masterpieces or minor works, that I would like to present to the reader. I was forced to put a limit, and display only the representative canvases of painters who are called into question by the cited texts. Moreover, even the choice of the texts has been reciprocally influenced by my preferences for certain painters, by the more or less vivid impression that they have left in me and that the texts have subsequently permitted to make more precise.

What one has seen, can escape the memory more easily or can undergo a more rapid metamorphosis of what has been read. Shapes and colours supplement each other, are undone, mingled, destroyed incessantly. People think in words and do not forget their rhythm, which is the one of senses. It is much more difficult to imagine a society of only dumb than one of only blind.

Yet, from the depths of time, originates the irrepressible need to see, to show what is worth to be seen: first of all light, then space and therefore the unique detail; and also the need to speak a universal language that breaks boundaries and time, the need to forward own emotions, certainty, confidence in life. And a prehistoric man, alike a Catalan primitive, an Egyptian artist, or Leonardo da Vinci, Holbein, Vermeer, Hokusaï and Utamaro, Van Gogh and Henri Rousseau are telling us that there are in us, always, the same possibilities and the same power.

To see means to understand and to act; to see means bringing together world and man as well as man and world. In the past, at the Quinze-Vingts [editor's note: even today the ophthalmologic hospital in Paris], were called sighted brothers the non-blind men married to blind women. Such a fraternity unites the artist to individuals who, while not suffering from mental blindness, are nevertheless incapable, very often, to use the sense of sight, to discern between ugliness and beauty, between proportions and perspectives, between shades and relations between the colours. The intimacy between the one showing and the one viewing, between the teacher and the pupil, between knowledge and ignorance, between revelation and discovery, at the level of the image of reality, generates the concept of truth. The artist's role is to lead, to open the most rebel eyes, to teach seeing like one teaches reading, and to indicate the path that goes from the letter to the spirit.

Art critics, and I mean by this term those who have attempted to transpose in words emotions in front of a work of art, are also sighted brothers. But their task, which is rarely considered creative, proves risky and thankless, because it is customary to give them greater responsibility than the artists. One would like them to be infallible, forgetting that their preferences, their opinions, their capabilities are more contingent than innermost, more external than substantial. Artists make new eyes: art critics make glasses.

But the best of them, in spite of all the innate or interested powers of ignorance, have helped to save the enlightening flame. With armfuls or twigs, with the patient building of an aesthetics or a rapid thought, have fuelled the fire of the bloodless history of civilization. They have the merit of treating a subject that is a part of man as his own skin. Is it not perhaps the history of human aspirations, a verifiable and explainable history, that would be whole silent, if they remained silent?  [25]

Their contradictions, their mistakes, their failure do not prevent them from maintaining attention, vigilance, intelligence. The truth can come out naked, intact, from the most diverse and most obscure appearances.

I did my best to draw a smooth line through my innocent choice. I tried to delete from my citations every complexity, every paradox, every glint. Only the light of sincerity drew me, whenever it awakened a reflection in me. Since I will not hide my bias: I will not hide I have sometimes freed, extracting, from confused and perhaps even contradictory texts, what helped the cause of youth, the cause of the renewal that is indispensable for me to live.

Particularly in this first volume, I wanted above all to talk to artists and writers who have brought their art to earth, that really considered themselves as being men among men, dependent on men, and at their service, and return them with generosity what they receive from them. Here, all challenge the lie of art for art, the aberration of the useless glorified, whether they have consciously wanted to serve or not, through to the different paths of faith, dream or reason. Maybe not all were confronted with the question that Victor Hugo responded (and his response is valid for art in general): «Beauty does not degrade because it serves freedom and the improvement of the conditions of the mass of men. Emancipated people are not a bad ending of a verse. No, the patriotic or revolutionary utility does takes nothing away from poetry.» But again I confess - and I do not think I abused my rights - that I had as purpose, by putting them together, to increase that immense treasure of living forces and possibilities from which all men must be able to draw. It would be quite a fool who dared to object! [26]

The inevitable disorder of my extracts is somehow a natural order. The logic cannot force any chronology, any hierarchy on me. My attention depends on memory, on current events, on the circumstance with happy encounters with the works of art. I do not pretend to reign over the vast empire of representation, figuration or the images of which are avid my eyes. But I would like to make this greed contagious. I would like to prove above all that artists have, almost always, shown their ability not only to manifest their intentions but also to explain how and why they were able to realize them. Their theories have the credit which their works deserve. They have written their reasons, their reason on the golden book of humanity, for sympathy. They care to say it all. Dawn needs day. The man has nostalgia of the total light.

Fig. 7) Short dictionary of surrealism by André Breton and Paul Éluard

Paul Éluard, Introduction to Light and Moral

The nostalgia of the total light

At this point, still close to my departure, where I arrived after long days of searching and passionate readings, I think it will take shape, for both the reader and for me (beyond a sense of disorder which I have already explained), the precise notion of what I mean by total light. In the following texts I moved, almost without realizing it, from the physical light to the interior and moral light, from the outside aesthetics, to quote Pierre Reverdy, to the inside aesthetics. I did nothing but follow the natural inclination of all those who are concerned, I would say tormented, consciously or not, by the problem of vision in the most complete sense of the word. My knowledge of life is, like theirs, fragmentary, episodic, and the field of my mental vision is equally limited as the visual one. Nevertheless, my effort to understand and establish a relation can effectively contribute to enhancing vision, reflection, action, and, in one word, life.

How to watch a picture, in order to understand it? Somebody asked me this, naively. As if I could reveal the magic or mathematic formula that opens our eyes to the beauty, to the objective or subjective truth! As if I could reduce, among painters and art lovers, those differences which, as William Blake said, make men equal: an ideal of equality that has no other purpose, for that matter, but to help each person to determine his personality. Compared to human laws, the rules of art are deeply changing.

Truths meet together, the lights go out and come back on, confidence and restlessness, skills and ingenuity, knowledge and intuition all point to the same end: the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth, for the greatest pleasure of reason.

How could I indicate a route when I move myself along a large amount of unexpected paths? I am relying on my sense of direction, on the abstraction that leads me to the other and then brings me back to myself. I am watching the mirror where my image will be reflected, in the space of a phrase, a look, a flash, as well as the sentence I want to countersign or which, at least, awakens in me an echo.

I am not moving between books and museums as in a tranquil garden: I am trying the adventure, even in places that I thought familiar! I am exploring my ambitious reign, that of the infinity of man, of his desire for cohesion. I am not chasing a mirage; I am trying to earn my place in the sun, in the visible choir of the future. I am sure to never end with social and fraternal enlightenment, as well as with myself.

Paul Éluard

December 1951

Paul Éluard, Introduction to The Passion of Painting

The introducers of reality

[Editor's note: based on the analysis of archive documentation, Jean-Charles Gateau concluded that the text below was the central part of a writing, chosen by the publisher as an introduction for the third volume, but not necessarily conceived as such by Éluard. [27]]

The passion of painting has always shown itself similarly to that of living and letting live, with others and for others. The artist wants to listen, to understand, to be heard, to be understood. He shows himself and shows the world. Painting is a language, a communication means which is entirely similar to speech, a tool for relationship: a proof of the existence, but also of trust in existence. And if we exclude some paintings (and with them the desire for total abstraction) of a desperate denial and therefore similar to suicide, to nirvana, there is neither unrealistic nor pessimistic painting, and this is one of the indisputable superiority of painting to poetry. Almost always, the aspiration of man is manifested through colour. The description of the world, of the visible, has always been that of temptation, of trust, of hope. It has always happened to confuse lights with enlightenment, i.e. with a clear conscience, with a joyful imagination and with reason. We live this life, but we are given to fight in order to live a different one. Being nothing, we can be everything. We can, of course, show evil, but it would be better to fight it, to escape it. The painting of monsters, with words or with the brush, was, alas, always a contingent practice, but it is from it that were born the great optimistic revolts, the most valid claims.

I am a man and I can reproduce my desires, I can get free, by freeing others. And I know that I am entering at the same time the barrier and the door between the outside world and me. But if the barrier is opened, the internal life is ours. The man is running on the ground.

«The naive - says our Diderot, the Diderot of all - will be essential to produce any work of art.» It is clear that for naïveté Diderot, and we with him, meant sincerity, frankness; only a great purity may allow you to carefully copy the outside world. But the truth of the realists has long had a limit with the needs of the powerful. The painter was imposed a certain indifference to the social situation of his time, a certain blindness to the collective movement. At this price he could paint with serenity. It is against this more or less unconscious bondage that Courbet has rebelled.

The painters of portraits, in the simplicity of their hearts, identified themselves naively, in their faithful effort, in their models; they saw them in their mirror; the same blood flowed in their veins. And Diderot, contradicting himself, claims that by then art does not exist anymore, because it becomes the pure thing, without alteration. In the moment in which art disappears, the truth emerges, and the art is reborn from its ashes, for an unlimited future.

The art of portraiture, in France naive art par excellence, has always united the similarity to the expression, and therefore to the means of expression. The saints of the Middle Ages have a whole human personality. And the Virgin of Fouquet is nothing more than a portrait of Agnès Sorel. Our painters bring back heaven on earth. Even in Italy the painters arrive at the same scandal. On two paintings by Titian, more noble, more "idealistic" than any French painter, Montesquieu says: "One is an admirable Venus, naked, and you think you see the flesh and the body itself. The other is a virgin, but the person portrayed is the same."

Together with the Flemish, our painters were the great Introducers of reality. The Master of Saint-Sever, the Master of Moulins, Clouet, Corneille of Lyon, Fouquet, Louis Le Nain, Philippe de Champaigne and Sébastien Bourdon have the same desire for objectivity as Chardin, Géricault, David, Corot, Daumier, Courbet, Millet, Manet, Renoir and Picasso. And also, how can we doubt that under the formal vault of pure beauty, of light, Georges de La Tour, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Greuze, Ingres, Delacroix, Cezanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Signac and Matisse have wanted to give a big lesson in moral truth, naked under the transparent veils of perfection?

Painting is a sovereign art that combines all the prestige of the real to the biggest possibilities of exaltation and transformation. The Dove of Picasso is not a utopian bird. On its wings, it raises at the same time our reality and our ideal.

Never an alive painter was equally celebrated as Picasso*. The secret of his glory lies in his eternal youth, in his continuous renewal, so that this man of seventy years can be considered to be the youngest of the artists of his time. His work, which began almost seventy years ago, continues to surprise, to make you indignant and, fortunately, to arouse enthusiasm. «What is essential in these times of moral misery, - I quote Picasso, - is to create enthusiasm. How many have read Homer? And yet the whole world is talking about him. Thus the Homeric superstition was created. A superstition, understood in this sense, causes a precious excitement. It is this enthusiasm that we need, we and the young. »

The eyes of Picasso rejuvenate the eyes that rest on his work. Picasso knows that any advancing man discovers a new horizon at every step, knows that there is no stagnant youth, with no zeal, no confidence, no hope. Picasso is seventy, but he knows that we cannot revive the past and the world opens up before us, that everything is still to be done, and not to be redone. «Why to cling desperately - he says – to everything that has exhausted its promises? » Here is the real secret of Youth: let us start incessantly from today, now I am starting, tomorrow I will not restart, I will start, and so every day I will be born to myself and to the world. Time passes, time begins. Apollinaire already said on Picasso in 1912: «New Man, the world is his new presentation... It's a new born that puts order in the universe for his own personal use and to facilitate his relations with his kind.»

And today we do not commemorate Picasso, we inaugurate him, because he comes into the world. His strength will be great, his genius, once again, will blossom. Tomorrow he will not achieve the promise of yesterday, but the promise of the next tomorrow. This eternal child, this new Faust intends to seduce and enchant. He wants to have the means, and wanting them, he has them, and having them he is renewing them, ad infinitum, at any cost.

Of course, in this he loses his soul; however, it is not his future soul, but his passed soul, his hereditary soul that is lost along the way. He conquers his future soul every morning, by waking up. And when he thinks of the dead who were animated by his same fire, he sees them alive, always young, always alive, because their enthusiasm has not faded. Their enormous amount of work, through the centuries, joins the desire to dominate the time that is revealed in the precipitation, in the crazy pace of the hands of Picasso. For them, as for him, the youth, the taste of life mean only this longing to see and learn by living. To see is to understand and love, to participate, engage and assess, to build and get to know according to the needs of men and the world.

Paul Éluard

* [NOTE INCLUDED IN THE 1954 FRENCH EDITION] Paul Éluard had included among the documents that he wanted to use and merger in the preface, the manuscript of a text written to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the man who embodied for him the living passion of painting, his friend Pablo Picasso.

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Fig. 8) L'edizione argentina in tre volumi, pubblicata a Buenos Aires dall'editore Proteo (1967)

From L’Unità, Friday 21 December 1973, page 3

Dario Micacchi, 

The Enthusiasm of Éluard. 

The «Anthology of writings on art.» Reinterpretation of ancient and modern authors, by enhancing their art and social conscience

Among this year-end books, Editori Riuniti Publishers present the ''Anthology of writings on art”, by Paul Éluard, published in France last year, twenty years after the death of the poet, by Editions Cercle d'Art (pp. 360, 197 colour and black pictures, preface by Jean Marcenac, L.15.000).

It is a unique work: in setting it up, Éluard wanted to do a book of art that was also a book of life. The art literature of all time offers pages to the poet, but they are pages-stones for the architecture of the present, which is uninterrupted and open a new space gained for the knowledge and the adventure of imagination. And how many chapters of this living anthology seem to make treasure of the searches of the present and the reinterpretations of the past, which his friend Max Ernst, the surrealist painter, has done with paintings, collages and frottages!

The book is a compass through hundreds of books, through the ideas of philosophers, critics, ancient and modern artists, whose artistic and social conscience (and not the simple gesture of art production) is enhanced. Wherever it is possible, the lyrical Communist Éluard locates the «introducers of reality» and Giotto is among the first ones. The reinterpretations of artists of the past and the acquaintances and friendships with contemporary ones are animated by the same lyrical energy, by the same spirit of intellectual adventure. Once we have taken confidence with the pages of the anthology, we feel them live and pulsate like the images of his poetry over the years: from the 1926 Capital of pain until the 1936 Fertile Eyes, from the 1942 Poetry and Truth, to the 1946 Uninterrupted Poetry and the 1951 Phoenix.

Humanly and lyrically, even in this anthology, Éluard seems obsessed with light, morality, the colour of life. His purpose is to «create enthusiasm», to show the ancient artists as he sees his friend Picasso: «The eyes of Picasso rejuvenated the eyes that rest on his work. » For Éluard, it is a great discovery to penetrate the rich mines of art and ideas about it. «Everything has to be done, not to be redone.» So the anthology becomes evidence of an immense conscious construction, a book of knowledge and hope where, with brilliant will and despising all illustrative pedantry, Éluard rips from the centuries everything that looks constructive and unfulfilled, and confirms the youth of history and of creative image.

Thus, the artists of the past get rid of any heavy thickness and, now between us, echo the energetic and activating steps: they bring «bread for all, roses for all» as the beloved Picasso of the Face of Peace: «I know all the places where the dove dwells/ but the most natural is the man's head.»

In the series of the sketched drawings portraying him, made by Picasso in 1944, Éluard has a multi-faceted and enlighted head like a bright and transparent diamond: the force lines of the skull delineate and shape it as a planet in formation; he has «the beautiful look of those who have nothing», just as he wrote of the figures of Picasso, on which he also said that they were men without weight. And when Éluard writes verses on friends painters, he exalts those same qualities that he saw in Picasso. Jacques Villon: «Life day sight / Wet of dew / Through the plagues» and «Wing Growth / Space Growth.» March Chagall: «A face with moon lips / that never slept the night.» Georges Braque: «With mild eyes, a man describes the sky of love». Picasso: «We become real along with the effort / With our willingness to dispel shadows.» Max Ernst: «In the middle of a desert island.» And so for many other artist friends: Bellmer, Dominguez, Léger, Lurçat, Giacometti, Magritte, Beaudin, Man Ray, Mirò.

The anthology is made up of three parts: The sighted brothers, Light and moral and The Passion of painting. The first is the celebration of the «fertile eyes», the «introducers of reality» and the triumph of those artists and art writers who «who have brought their art to earth, that really considered themselves as being men among men, dependent on men, and at their service, and return them with generosity what they receive from them.» Those artists for whom art was a clear battle. Leading figures are Giotto, Michelangelo, Goya, Courbet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Delacroix, and the «inexorable and good Daumier».

The second part is devoted to the problem of vision, the physical light and the interior one. Amateur of differences that make men equal, Éluard says here: «I am not moving between books and museums as in a tranquil garden: I am trying the adventure, even in places that I thought familiar! I am exploring my ambitious reign, that of the infinity of man, of his desire for cohesion. I am not chasing a mirage; I am trying to earn my place in the sun, in the visible choir of the future. I am sure to never end with social and fraternal enlightenment, as well as with myself.» This second part is a masterpiece, in as much as it puts into evidence the means that can help us to use our capacity to see. 

Éluard gives us these means disentangling them in a historic battle of great light and shadow. Typically, he assumes the existence of moral and social relations in the light: thus, one can celebrate Rembrandt and Leonardo, Masaccio and Michelangelo among those who have passed each other the cry: more light! Among those who have handled the colours of life are Giorgione and Titian, Rubens, Piero della Francesca, Grünewald, Jan Van Eyck, the German and Dutch painters, Vermeer who painted even the silence, La Tour, Velasquez, Lorrain, Turner, Monet, Boudin, the Impressionists, Renoir flaming joy and flesh, van Gogh, Degas, Matisse, Léger.

In the third part, the selection intends to show that the «the passion of painting has always been similar to that of living and letting live, with others and for others.» In a long chain of artists who wanted to understand and be understood, there are still two hot rings: van Gogh, suicide victim of society, and Picasso: "When you start a painting, you do significant things. You have to defend yourself, destroying the picture, and to do it again and again. Each time you destroy a good creation, the artist does not really suppress it; but it turns and condensates it, makes it more substantial. The success is the result of rejected creations. Otherwise you become lover of yourself."

Even this remarkable anthology is the result of rejected creations, and it is driven by the anguish of dedication to the others, which was typical of van Gogh. Picasso said that you should just paint what you love. Éluard has chosen and put together what he loved of art. The result is a strange womb that can stimulate, in the reader, both the adventure of changing lives as well as the desire to change art; anyway, it always stimulate the desire to go beyond the wall between inside and outside. The same was expressed figuratively, in a strained lyrical ambiguity, by Max Ernst in the recently recovered paintings executed in 1923 in Eaubonne, not far from Montmorency forest, and which are reproduced, in the book, for the first time in Italy: tropical forests crossed by a wall but with light hands that go through it with the same lightness as tireless insects. Neruda has said: Paul Éluard was a big bee in the light: he came and went, full of wisdom and pollen. Also in this art book, we find him like this.

NOTES

[25] The original text is: Mais les meilleurs d’entre eux, en dépit de toutes les puissances innées ou intéressées de l’ignorance, ont contribué à sauver la flamme éclairante. Que ce soit par brassées ou par brindilles, par la patiente édification d’une esthétique ou par une réflexion en passant, ils ont apporté un aliment au foyer de l’histoire non sanglante de la civilisation. Ils ont le mérite de traiter d’un sujet qui tient à l’homme comme sa propre peau. Et n’est-ce pas cette histoire des aspirations humaines, histoire vérifiable, variable, discutable, qui, s’ils se taisaient, se tairait aussi tout’ entière?

[26] The original text is: Dans ce premier volume en particulier, j’ai surtout voulu faire parler les artistes et les écrivains qui ont porté leur art sur terre et qui se sont vraiment crus des homes entre les homes, dépendants des homes et à leur service, leur rendant généreusement ce qu’ils en reçoivent. Qu’ils aient, consciemment ou non, voulu servir, par les Chemins divergents de la foi, du rêve ou de la raison, tous, ici, s’inscrivent en faux contre le mensonge de l’art pour l’art, contre l’aberration de l’inutile glorifié. Peut-être ne s’est-elle pas présentée à tous l’interrogation à laquelle Victor Hugo répond (et sa réponse est valable pour l’art en général) : «Le beau n’est pas dégradé pour avoir servi à la liberté et à  l’amélioration des multitudes humaines. Un peuple affranchi n’est pas une mauvaise fin de strophe. Non, l’utilité patriotique ou révolutionnaire n’ôte rien à  la poésie.» Mais encore une fois j’avoue – et je ne crois pas avoir outrepassé mes droits – que mon but a été, en les groupant, d’augmenter cet immense trésor de forces vives et de possibilités où tous les hommes doivent pouvoir puiser. Bien fou qui oserait s’en fâcher!

[27] Gateau, , Jean-Charles, Éluard, Picasso et la peinture (quoted), p. 307