| In turn, Mr. Pierre Girieud defends the sovereign rights of the imagination. he even poses as champion of the noble subject and, deeply imbued with Italian classicism, finds a more noble spirituality in a Madonna and Child than in a simply human Maternity. There is no doubt that Mr. Maurice Denis is right in believing that the work of a great painter reaches the most sublime peaks when he is exalted by a noble subject, as was said at the beginning of the last century. The example chosen by him is typical; similarly closer to us, it is certain that the emotion expressed in the Massacres of Scio is of a higher quality than that of the Still Life with Lobster of the Moreau-Nélaton legacy. Motherhood, whatever elevation of feeling that inspires her, will never equal a Madonna holding the Child Jesus in her arms. It is an undisputed axiom: the container is always larger than the content which could, in a century in which we accept that mathematical truths, definitively decide the difference which has divided artists since the triumph of somewhat outdated realistic and naturalist theories , dating from 1850. At that time, the painters, tired of seeing the noble subjects badly treated by the Academy who no longer knew how to paint and who did not think nobly, affirmed that only the quality of the painting mattered and that direct representation of an object was a self-sufficient art motif. From escalation to escalation, we arrived at the total suppression of the object, the goal pursued by the painter becoming the same as that of the druggist combining the volumes and the colors of the front of his store. It has thus been proved, by the absurd, that the artist, above all else, must be endowed with the eye of a painter. It is surprising that such a proposal has generated so much effort and such a deluge of words. This opinion prevailed to such an extent that today one has replaced one cliché by another. Basically, the School is still the School, even when it emigrates from rue Bonaparte towards Montparnasse or Montmartre. The models at Place Pigalle went bankrupt at the exact moment when the grocers got rich by selling the Cézanne apples. And, since I pronounce the name of Cézanne, how it was misunderstood! How we have disfigured all his words! How they were pressed to try to extract the vacuum! Fateful handling of levelers that greatness offends. Cézanne said, and we forget it too readily: "an art which does not have emotion as a principle is not an art". He spoke of the emotion directly experienced before one of the motives of Nature, but, without his knowledge (but is it really without his knowledge? Reread the magnificent book of our dear and great Joachim Gasquet), a new emotion, cerebral this one, was superimposed on the visual emotion. He chose and his mind developed a great subject: this is how, before the Holy Victory, he thought of the Barbarians defeated by Marius, in these plains, rich in the best wheat in the world, dominated by these beautiful lines of mountains where the order and measure taught by the Greeks and the Romans who named them: Olympus Trets, Mount Aurelian.
Only realistic painters have responded to the current need for laziness of mind; you have to see a work at a glance, to be able to say: it is such a painter. What an atmosphere! What respect for values! What brightness! What color! What volume! etc ... This is worth so much. It is necessary to linger on the ceiling of the Sistine, the Vatican chambers, the Tintorets of the school of Saint Roch, the struggle of Jacob and the Angel at Saint Sulpice, the Pilgrims of Emmaus at Louvre, if you wish to penetrate them. But also, what deep emotions, hence the joys given by the profession of painter are not excluded, for those who say:
for it is truly Lord the best witness That we can give of our dignity That this ardent sob that rolls from age to age And comes to die at the edge of your eternity.
The struggles and triumphs of realism have not brought down the great and noble subject, have not abolished the sovereign rights of the imagination, have you not, Delacroix, Chasseriau, Puvis de Chavannes, Gauguin? This is for Mr. Maurice Denis a title to our gratitude for having affirmed it in his painted work and in his writings.
To sum up, I readily believe Pascal. "Who wants to make the angel, makes the beast" (when the wings fail, this is how it should be understood); but, to speak mathematically, the converse is not true, and who wants to make the beast does not make the angel. |