To keep him well within the genus he represents I finally decide to give him stripes. The idea is that if he won’t lose his playfulness I can turn him into a zebra. So I put in the stripes. Now, damn it all, he seems to be made of cardboard. The stripes have flattened him out, glued him to the paper. Well, if I close my eyes again I ought to be able to recall the Cinzano horse-he has stripes too, and beautiful ones. Maybe I ought to go down for an aperitif and look at a Cinzano. It’s getting late for aperitifs. Maybe I’ll do a little plagiarizing after all. If a lunatic can draw a man on a bicycle he can draw a horse too.
It’s remarkable-I find gods and goddesses, devils, bats, sewing machines, flowerpots, rivers, bridges, locks and keys, epileptics, coffins, skeletons-but not a damned horse! If the lunatic who compiled this brochure had wanted to draw a truly profound observation he would have had something to remark about this curious omission. When the horse is missing there is something radically amiss! Human art goes hand in hand with the horse. It’s not enough to hint that the symbolists and the imagists are, or were, a little detraques. We want to know, in a study of insanity, what has become of the horse!
Once more I turn to the landscape on page 85. It’s an excellent composition despite the geometrical stiffness. (The insane have a terrific obsession for logic and order, as have the French.) I have something to work from now: mountains, bridges, terraces, trees…. One of the great merits of insane art is that a bridge is always a bridge and a house a house. The three little men who are balancing themselves on their canes in the foreground are not absolutely necessary to the composition, especially since I already have the Ionian horse which occupies considerable space. I am searching for a setting in which to place the horse and there is something very wistful and very intriguing about this landscape with its crenelated parapets and its sugar-loaf escarpments and the houses with so many windows, as if the inmates were deathly afraid of suffocating. It’s very reminiscent of the beginnings of landscape paintingand yet it’s completely outside all definitive periods. I should say roughly that it lies in a zone between Giotto and Santos Dumont-with just a faint intimation of the post-mechanical street which is to come. And now, with this as a guide before me, I pick up courage. Allons-y!
Right under the horse’s ass, where his croup begins and ends, and where Salvador Dali would most likely put a Louis Quinze chair or a watch spring, I begin to draw with free and easy strokes a straw hat, a melon. Beneath the hat I put a face-carelessly, because my ideas are large and sweeping. Wherever the hand falls I do something, following the insinuating deviations of the line. In this manner I take the huge phallus erectus, which was once a fifth leg, and bend it into a man’s arm-so! Now I have a man in a big straw hat tickling the horse in the rumps. Fine! Fine and dandy! Should it seem a little grotesque, a little out of keeping with the pseudo-medieval character of the original composition, I can always attribute it to the aberration of the f ou who inspired me. (Here, for the first time, a suspicion enters my head that I may not be altogether there myself! But on page 366 it says: “Enfin, pour Matisse, le sentiment de l’objet peut s’exprinaer avec toute licence, sans direction intellectuelle ou exactitude visuelle: c’est l’origine de l’expression.” To go on…. After a slight difficulty with the man’s feet I solve the problem by putting the lower half of his body behind the parapet. He is leaning over the parapet, dreaming most likely, and at the same time he is tickling the horse’s ribs. (Along the rivers of France you will often stumble across men leaning over a parapet and dreaming-particularly after they have voided a bagful of urine.)
To shorten my labors, and also to see how much space will be left, I put in a quantity of bold diagonal stripes or planks, for the bridge flooring. This kills at least a third of the picture, as far as composition goes. Now come the terraces, the escarpments, the three trees, the snow-topped mountains, the houses and all the windows that go with them. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Wherever a cliff refuses to finish properly I make it the side of a house, or the roof of another house which is hidden. Gradually I work my way up toward the top of the picture where the frame happily cuts things short. It remains to put in the trees-and the mountains.
Now trees again are very ticklish propositions. To make a tree, and not a bouquet! Even though I put forked lightning inside the foliage, to lend a hint of structure, it’s no go. A few airy clouds, then, to do away with some of the superfluous foliage. (Always a good dodge to simplify your problem by removing it.) But the clouds look like pieces of tissue paper that had blown off the wedding bouquets. A cloud is so light, so less than nothing, and yet it’s not tissue paper. Everything that has form has invisible substance. Michelangelo sought it all his life-in marble, in verse, in love, in architecture, in crime, in God… . (Page 390: “Si 1’artiste poursuit la creation authentique, son souci est ailleurs que sur l’objet, qui pent etre sacri fie et soumis aux necessites de l’invention.”)
I come to the mountain-like Mahomet. By now I am beginning to realize the meaning of liberation. A mountain! What’s a mountain? It’s a pile of dirt which never wears away, at least, not in historical time. A mountain’s too easy. I want a volcano. I want a reason for my horse to be snorting and prancing. Logic, logic! “Le fou montre un souci constant de logique!” (Les Francais aussi.) Well, I’m not a fou, especially not a French fou: I can take a few liberties, particularly with the work of an imbecile. So I draw the crater first and work down toward the foot of the mountain to join up with the bridgework and the roofs of the houses below. Out of the errors I make cracks in the mountainside-to represent the damage done by the volcano. This is an active volcano and its sides are bursting.
When I’m all through I have a shirt on my hands. A shirt, precisely! I can recognize the collar band and the sleeves. All it needs is a Rogers Peet label and size 16 or what have you…. One thing, however, stands out unmistakably clear and clean, and that is the bridge. It’s strange, but if you can draw an arch the rest of the bridge follows naturally. Only an engineer can ruin a bridge.
It’s almost finished, as far as the drawing goes. All the loose ends at the bottom I join up to make cemetery gates. And in the upper left-hand corner, where there is a hole left by the volcano, I draw an angel. It is an object of an original nature, a purely gratuitous invention, and highly symbolic. It is a sad angel with a fallen stomach, and the wings are supported by umbrella ribs. It seems to come down from beyond the cadre of my ideas and hover mystically above the wild Ionian horse that is now lost to man.
Have you ever sat in a railway station and watched people killing time? Do they not sit a little like crestfallen angels-with their broken arches and their fallen stomachs? Those eternal few minutes in which they are condemned to be alone with themselves-does it not put umbrella ribs in their wings?
All the angels in religious art are false. If you want to see angels you must go to the Grand Central Depot, or the Gare St. Lazare. Especially the Gare St. LazareSalle des Pas Perdus.
My theory of painting is to get the drawing done with as quickly as possible and slap in the color. After all, I’m a colorist, not a draught horse. Alors, out with the tubes!
I start painting the side of a house, in raw umber. Not very effective. I put a liberal dash of crimson alizarin in the wall next to it. A little too pretty, too Italian. All in all, I’m not starting out so well with my colors. There’s a rainy day atmosphere somewhat reminiscent of Utrillo. I don’t like Utrillo’s quiet imbecility, nor his rainy days, nor his suburban streets. I don’t like the way his women stick their behinds out at you either…. I get the bread knife out. May as well try a loaded impasto. In the act of squeezing out a generous assortment of colors the impulse seizes me to add a gondola to the composition. Directly below the bridge I insert it, which automatically launches it.
And now suddenly I know the reason for the gondola. Among the Renoirs the other day there was a Venetian scene, and the inevitable gondola of course. Now what intrigued me, weakly enough, was that the man who sat in the gondola was so distinctly a man, though he was only a speck of black, hardly separable from all the other specks which made up the sunlight, the choppy sea, the crumbling
