Mimesis
Il colore e la storia
di Henry Thoreau
“…Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer…”
Matisse and Picasso were linked by a profound friendship, born in Stein's salon around the early 1900s. They were brought together by a common feeling, a certain indifference to beautiful form, to Impressionist classicism, the involuntary heir of the French tradition, which manifested itself through a reduction of the image to its elementary elements, colour in Matisse's case, citationism in Picasso's case. Despite the common feeling, the paths diverged and friendship turned into academic rivalry, although Picasso, following his philosophy of misappropriation, continued to draw on his friend Matisse's repertoire here and there.
Of different social origins, although both generated from the provincial petty bourgeoisie, Picasso benefited from a more academic education. A drawing teacher in a provincial Spanish art school, who also became his teacher for some time, he grew up amidst plaster casts of Greek-Roman sculptures that he copied with alacrity. From those copies he retains a taste for archaeological excavation, which often becomes an excavation into the artist's soul. In addition to an undoubtedly precocious talent, his early drawings testify to a natural taste for copying, for delving into different eras and myths, an expression of an entirely Latin taste.
Matisse, son of the French provinces (...how many times have we heard this story...), a family of seed wholesalers, experienced a more affluent childhood, and was sent to Paris to study to be a lawyer. Fatal for him was the French metropolis, then perfumed with a joi-de-vivre that infected everyone, from the most aristocratic to the humblest of carters. The lust for art reigned supreme in the scenes of the tabarins and bistros, frequented by steaming hosts of sorcerer's apprentices. And so young Henri, who did not want to know about a career as a bookworm, enraging his father, moved in to the artist's studio. He first studied with the academic Bouguereau and then with the symbolist Gustave Moreau, but from the two he only drew the first technical rudiments of the trade, which were mired in a rather academic manner, far removed from the developments of Matisse's art. The real encounter took place with Russell, a less academic painter, who, according to him, first showed him the way of colour, which then became his main linguistic matrix. Unsteady beginnings, of course, as even then people were hungry for novelty. So he became wild, starting on a path towards the abstraction of forms born out of continuous observation of the everyday.
Picasso learned from the past, Matisse from the present, and both projected into the future sensations filled with a common destiny, a destiny that would change the face of art to come.
Frankly, neither Fauvism nor Cubism had anything to do with it. To understand their destiny, one had to look at their works free of the yokes of avant-garde trends and notifications, where art hovers sincerely, free of any relation to the earthly world, where art relates to the sublime of an unbound narrative. Art of the soul.
About Resemblance:
"...I ended up discovering that resemblance...derives from the opposition existing between the model and the other models, in short from its particular asymmetry. Each figure has its own particular rhythm and it is this rhythm that creates the resemblance...' (M)
About Coherence:
"...no Picasso proposition is definitive, and no research. It is good today, perhaps not good tomorrow. Everything moves in him, around him. The intention falls at the very moment when he abandons one quest for another... The painter and the model are always in the same pose, but everything is now going another way, everything is taking place in a different atmosphere...' (Hélene Parmelin)
About Imitation:
"...What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of, or imitate another painter? Is there anything wrong with it? Indeed. One must always try to paint in someone else's manner. The fact is that one cannot! One wants to, and how! And one tries! But you get it all wrong... And at this very moment, at the very moment when you get it wrong, you are yourself..." (P)
Also.
About Painting:
"...A painter like Tintoretto...starts painting, goes on and, finally, when he has filled everything in...then and only then, the canvas is finished. Whereas, if you take a canvas by Cézanne...from the very first brushstroke the painting is already there...' (P)
About Freedom:
"...The freedom not to do one thing, that is: that demands that one do another...So here are the chains. I'm reminded of Jarry's story; you know, when the anarchist soldiers do the drills, he says: right flank! And those, because they are anarchists, they all do left flank. Painting is like that. You take your freedom and you lock yourself in with your idea, your own and not another. And there are chains on you again... You have to be careful what you do. Because just when you think you are less free, it happens that you are more free. And you are not at all when you feel you have very big wings: those wings prevent you from walking..." (P)
About Precision:
"...Attention, attention! All right, it is most gracious to make the portrait with all the buttons of the dress, with all the buttonholes and even with the little reflection on the button. But be careful! At some point the buttons start jumping on your face..." (P)
About Metamorphosis:
"...One day I take a bicycle's saddle and the handlebars, I put them on top of each other and I make a bull's head...but immediately afterwards it would have been necessary to throw that bull's head away, to throw it in the street, in a stream...Here comes a worker and picks it up. And it seems to him that perhaps he could make a saddle and a bicycle handlebar out of that bull's head. And he does...' (P)