Friday, 23 August 1957 –Chamonix

My monochrome propositions are landscapes of freedom; I am an impressionist and a disciple of Delacroix.

Monday, 26 August

When Claude presented to me his most recent manuscript to read, I told him: The day will come when you will present something to me that is true poetry; I believe that already by taking the manuscript in my hands I will feel it. Something will have changed everywhere!

Saturday, 31 August – Venice

What above all inspired me in my most recent gouaches is the theme of the dissolution of form by or in color. The apparent re- sult is for me like a return to the soul with infinite speed that I consider to have surpassed already and which is, in any event, a stage already surpassed. This is the lyricism of displacement. It is the return to the romanticism of movement. While pure monochromy is truly of the present moment, it demonstrates the static freedom of universal sensibility, an absolute power of defying and dissolving every kind of movement; that which today no longer signifies life for anyone who knows, but death, whereas the true present-day manifestation, the veritable effi- cacy beyond picturesque agitation, is the static.

Tuesday, 3 September

I am quite definitively opposed to those painters who neither know who they are nor what they do, who squeal, miserably safeguarding their impotence, that a painter should never speak of painting; otherwise (this in their eyes would be a rule), they would not be good painters.

I despise the obscurantism of false painters who proclaim themselves mystics and occultists. A painter should understand what he is and what he is doing and should be able to express himself in simple terms, perhaps, but must be able to do this through painting.

Venice, Friday, 6 September

A film is being shot in Saint Mark’s Square; there are many ex- tras attired in period costumes of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. A group of bishops and a sumptuously at- tired prelate makes me reflect that the habit makes not the monk.

This is the very evidence: these ecclesiastics are only by virtue of their exterior dress, and how many others are like them, even if engaged all the same. What thus makes an ecclesiastic [who he is] is what one does not see; it is abstract, but it is this that truly counts. It is same in painting: the painting makes the painter; it has nothing to do with his outward appearance but with what is not seen.

Saturday 7 [September]

Abstract painting is the picturesque literature of psychological states. It is impoverished. I am delighted that I am not an abstract painter.

True painters and poets neither paint nor write; they are simply painters and poets according to their legal status. Their presence and the sole fact that they exist as such is their great and unique work. And there, truly, one returns to, or rather, there one attains the masterpiece, and not as with today’s painters who coin money by producing their canvases instead of painting them.

A painter must paint a single masterpiece, constantly: himself, and thus become a sort of atomic battery, a sort of constantly radiating generator that impregnates the atmosphere with his pictorial presence fixed in space after its passage. This is painting, the true painting of the twentieth century; the other is exercises of the past, justified by pruning and by introspection.

Painting serves only to prolong for others the abstract pictorial moment in a tangible and visible manner.

DELACROIx: I adore this little vegetable garden ... this gentle sun- light over the whole of it infuse me with a secret joy, with a well-being comparable with what one feels when the body is in perfect health. But all that is fugitive; any number of times I have found myself in this delightful condition during the twenty days that I am spending here. It seems as if one needed a mark, a special reminder for each one of these moments.

Paintings for painters are usually the marks of these moments, as poems are for poets.

For the painter, paintings serve only to take stock of these moments, to ascertain their nature or rather what they are. Little by little, by trial and error, canvas after canvas, they succeed in living the moment continually.

Collectors and amateurs purchase paintings, unconsciously in search of the indefinable, because they sense (not so much because they see) the moment and because they, too, have experienced it in a manner even more vague than the painter and, in any case, without the creative power.

For each painter, the moment is generally always the same; only very rarely does it change.

It is the quality of the moment that determines the style of the painter.

There exist many qualities and degrees of the moment, and the amateur quite quickly recognizes this moment in the style of a painter, what he experienced himself, and in pursuit of which he rushes headlong, for this moment has illuminated his life so filled with boredom.

(...)

The composition, even the texture of my paintings, is the tex- ture of the pictorial matter; it must be highly effaced, intensely worked, strong, and serious, in order to permit the display in all its splendor, color. DELACROIX says again correctly: I do not know whether I am mistaken, but I believe that the greatest artists have had great struggles with that difficulty, the most serious one of all. Here one sees more than ever the drawback of giving to the details, through grace or coquetry in execution, so much interest that later on one mortally regrets sacrificing them when they are injurious to the ensemble.

Numerous are the painters and the refiners of space [spécialisateurs d’espace] who know nothing of it.

Several months ago I was interviewed for the radio by an American woman who said to me, If I understand you correctly, you have pulverized the barrier of form in your painting? I replied to her, Yes, I would even say that, in my paintings, I have succeeded in suppressing the space that exists in front of the painting, in the sense that the presence of the painting invades both the space and the viewer.

At the conference discussion of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, a man rose from his seat and furiously cried out: All of this is a gigantic joke; what is one to think, in effect, of a symphony consisting of one sustained note? This is how I achieved victory right away: I had with me my tape recorder on which there were effectively recorded several long, sustained human screams. I descended from the stage for each response and lifted the tape recorder from the floor, placed it on a table, and turned it on. The room roared with joy.

The gesture had won the day, even though, ultimately, I was not able to play the sounds and the screams because there was no electrical outlet nearby. I was given full credit. The gesture alone was sufficient. The public had accepted the abstract in- tention. At that same conference in London, friends had done a poor job of standing up for me by repeating, It is pure! It is pure purity... etc. A young lady, having risen after the showing of a film on the Blue Period in Paris in which blond Bernadette ap- peared for a moment, protested in saying, If it is so pure, what about that pretty blond in the film we have just seen? I rose and looking straight into her eyes, I answered, I am crazy about beautiful blond girls and I have many of them, and you, I like you very much too. I would love to see you later, when all this is over, without any further thoughts of my painting.

She added nothing more and sat down, blushing profusely!