Mr. Jean Paulhan has just published two remarkable articles in the NRF on Cubist painting which greatly interested me.
He insists on the, he says,
“sacred”
nature of this attempt.
And it is not my fault if this word immediately awakened in me a memory of Rimbaud:
“I end up finding the disorder of my mind sacred.”
The enthusiasm of the authors of the movement, which had its apostles and martyrs, is reminiscent of that of the Byzantine iconoclasts.
Yet these only attacked a certain category of paintings.
While the Cubists abjure everything which until now has been the very subject of their art, that is to say the fixity given within a frame by the composition to a subject, to a presentation, to a representation of things, characters or events.
Abjuration expressed not by a purely negative attitude and consisting of religious abstention, but positive and affirmed by the destruction of its object: thus the zealots who do not...
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