André BRETON analyzes the relationship between men and the beauty of art.

André Breton (1896.1966)

Signed autograph manuscript – À L’ŒIL NU

Six pages in-4° on cream paper.

Paris. March 1952.

“I often tell myself that this open eye of youth remains the only good one. »

André Breton analyzes the relationship between men and the beauty of pictorial works. Invoking the modern outlook of youth, he looks back on his first artistic loves, on some masterpieces from his collection and, from Picabia to Picasso, from Braque to Modigliani, on the great masters who influenced and guided him in the quest for Beauty.

This text was published under the title "It's up to you to speak, young seer of things", in the revue XXth century, in June 1952. We attach the seven pages of proofs corrected and signed by Breton.

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WITH THE NAKED EYE

"If only I had kept the eye I had at seventeen or eighteen for such plastic works, then brand new, exposed to almost unanimous decries and intolerance! The encounter with these works, or even with mediocre photographic reproductions of them, lifted me, it seems to me, above myself, offered me the most exhilarating glimpse of the possible certainty of which I was naturally only able to discover from a distance . I said a long time ago that I was incapable of considering a painting other than "as a window on which my first concern is to know what it looks out " and it is well understood that I meant by that: "In any case, nothing of current appearances." [ ^* Rimbaud]. The first condition of pleasure – whether it was felt in light or dark – was that there should be a revolution in these appearances, that one should be transported outside (as far as possible) of conventional life. I was far from having explored the theories that abounded at that time (it was 1913-1914) and, without any connection with anyone in the world who shared my tastes, I did not even know how to defend myself from the accusation of “snobbery”. Since then, critical rationalization has provided us, and others, with good reasons to love what I loved and what they abhorred. I congratulate myself on this without any other transports, as on having lived.

Nevertheless, I often tell myself that this open eye of youth (open to what is not yet but which, one feels obscurely, is going to be) remains the only good one . Not knowing that it is the eye of youth, I was surprised at that time to no longer find it in men who seemed to have had it like Valéry for Renoir, or who certainly had had it like Fénéon for Seurat. Considering what is happening today to the plastic adventure, I sometimes wonder if the declining interest I have in it is due to an inevitable warping of the gaze due to the years or if this adventure remains as much adventure and progression on itself as it claims to be. Even if I suspect my own motives, I am not certain, especially when I observe, on this side of the world, the outrageous proliferation of so-called "abstract" art, which gives me the impression of sinking, with more fear than curiosity, into a landscape of termite mounds. It goes without saying that, on the other side of this same world, the so-called "socialist realism," imposed by force, not only put an end to any desire for artistic adventure but also undermined the very foundations of art as it has always defined itself.

In July 1916, Paul Valéry wrote to me: “…In the meantime I have had a son who is fourteen days old today. This fact, for you, various people, did not prevent me from visiting a cubic exhibition where your support would have been precious to me. I don't know what you're doing, but this was worth a surgical automobile. There is certainly something new in this art, but what? Descartes believed that the greatest scientist in the world would not be able to add anything to an arithmetic operation correctly performed by a child. Boileau, with less reason, perhaps thought that twelve well-counted syllables, well divided into groups of six, made a poet. And I kept saying to myself: how can I distinguish Cubist A from Cubist B? I'm tired enough to stick to these words. It’s up to you to speak, young seeing things…”

On the art of today as on that of yesterday – Valéry was right – it would be, for the general benefit, for this type of “young seer” to express himself, but even rarer than then are the opportunities offered. The word is always given to the same people to celebrate the same people, as if the ladder had to be drawn after them. There is no (deafening) noise except organized around a galaxy of artists working for half a century and of whom it would obviously be too much to ask to arouse throughout their lives the interest and emotion which were attached, in times already distant, to the most audacious and the most lofty formulation of their message. At least from the point of view I am taking, the attitude towards art should continue to be a quest in all directions and not consist of spying on the slightest gestures of those who were conquerors, when the wind of conquest no longer carries them : their part would still be quite beautiful without that. In the times in which we live it is unfortunate that routine and commercial speculation decide otherwise. What sufficiently independent magazine will decide to open an investigation in the most sensitive circles of youth to learn from them the names of the living artists who truly have their favor and even - for there would be no fear, in this domain, of subjectivizing judgment to the extreme - what are the five to ten plastic works of today which exercise the greatest attraction on each of those consulted? I have no doubt that such an investigation would provide surprises, that it would bring out of the shadows and promote to the rank they deserve the artists and the works which have in their favor not yesterday but tomorrow .

Still, if I had had to answer it myself at the time when, having just opened up and somewhat initiated myself into contemporary painting, it was for me the object of a thrilling question, I would hardly have hesitated in my choice. I add that, subsequently, I was able to see that this choice anticipated the recognition of a fairly large number of values.

Some of the works that I would have nominated then? I will name them in the order in which they appeared to me: The Portrait (of his wife) by Matisse, exhibited at the Salon d'Automne of 1913, of which – although I have never seen it since – I cannot forget the crown of black feathers, the thin tawny fur and the emerald blouse (wasn't the hair café au lait?) This for me is a perfect example of the work-event (well beyond even La Joie de vivre and La Danse aux capucines , which I so often went to see again at the old Bernheim gallery on rue Richepanse, where they remained hanging for years).

The Portrait of Knight X , by Derain: although I was never able to approach the original – buried, like the previous one, in Moscow in the old Stchoukine collection – the strange balance of the character between a drawn curtain and the unfolded “Journal” that he holds in his hands has long intrigued me, and held my attention. By the same artist, on the wall of his studio around 1918, a large Cabaret du front , of which I do not know what became of it.

The Brain of the Child , by Chirico, which has not left me since the day when, exhibited on rue la Boétie in the window of the Paul Guillaume gallery, it alerted me to the point of forcing me to get off the bus to examine it at your leisure. Years after I had acquired it, this painting was to return to the same place on the occasion of an exhibition: the fact that, passing by there, also by bus, Yves Tanguy – whom I did not yet know – had the same reflex as me, enough to give objectivity to such an appeal.

The Clarinet Player , and also his extraordinary wooden still life constructions (1913-1914), of which nothing seems to have survived, apart from the very inadequate photographic image. Woman in a Chemise (1915), also known as "Woman with Golden Breasts."

Udnie, young American girl , by Picabia.

To which were subsequently added:

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, even , by Duchamp, in which the greatest part of the cycle of the modern legend shines and is fulfilled for me.

The first "collages" by Max Ernst, arriving from Cologne by post, which one evening, a few of us, made our eyes marvel.

Miró's paintings from 1924-25: The Plowed Earth , Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) , Carnival of Harlequins , all together ingenuous, rebellious and so sure of themselves, – crazy with joy.

This is what takes center stage for me, this is what I would like to know what the equivalent is for a young eye today.

I have given in, I would give in again, to a need that I find difficult to explain, that of "possessing" paintings: it could be, quite banally, to be able to caress them with my gaze or change their angle when I please, but rather I believe that it is in the hope of appropriating certain powers that, in my eyes, they electively hold. Very often in the evening I have hung this or that canvas on the wall, in front of my bed, in order to be able to experience its seduction on me when I wake up. Thus I was able to assure myself that the happiest waves were dispersed to me by the Blond Braques of 1912: it seems to me that the investigation that I suggested should be extended to this morning's questioning, which provides a significant clue about individual taste (in the absence of original works, beautiful color reproductions would allow the need to be expressed).

As, over the course of life, I have been far from being able to keep all these paintings that I had managed to bring into my home, I distinguish quite well from those which it was not too cruel for me to part with. , those that I have never ceased to regret, even that I find it difficult to forgive myself for having had to give up to another chance than mine. I limit myself to mentioning, among the latter, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street , by Chirico, Woman with a Mandolin , by Picasso and, above all, The Bride by Duchamp.

The relationships I have had with paintings, some prolonged, others fleeting, have left a great mark on my life. One of my first poems (1916) is dedicated to André Derain, whose work prior to the war of 1914 had a long influence on me. I place high in my memory the hours spent alone with him in his studio on rue Bonaparte where, between two superb soliloquies on art and medieval thought, he read the tarot cards to me. I find this contact, exalted from the start, with Vlaminck, to whom, in 1918, I came to ask, on behalf of Apollinaire, how the sets for Couleur du temps . I still keep in my ear the brilliance of his fantastic stories, borrowed from everyday life, of which he was the first to be afraid. I remember myself, one spring morning in 1919, sitting on a bench on the Avenue de l'Observatoire, next to Modigliani, eager to discover Isidore Ducasse's "Poésies" which had just appeared in Littérature : no one is quicker to grasp their importance, no one has a more lucid and enthusiastic first glance at this enigmatic work. I recall my frequent visits to the friendly merchant and poet Zborowsky, fearing that I would not be able to follow the entire plot of Soutine's first landscapes, where the most ardent feeling for nature bursts forth in sumptuous cashmere. I rekindle, at the thought of my first encounters with him, Braque's great inner emotion, a lyre string stretched to breaking in the woods. To even think of giving a slight account of it, too many impressions, each stronger than the last, assail me at the mere mention of what Picasso discovered in me of this vein which so often seemed to me to bring all the blood possible back to the heart. I retain, even more profoundly, the regret of not having been able to know, before he undertook to behave like a vandal on his own lands, the prodigious Chirico of the years 13-14 on whom I sometimes meditate with all the requisite melancholy – extracted from an unpublished manuscript that I have of his – these lines of light:

“The Greeks rarely imagined a God in the sky. It was especially on high places that they saw it. This is the conception of Greek Olympus: Zeus with his cerulean gaze is seated on the highest summit: the expression of the divine torso pushes back into the distance the glaucous depth of the celestial vault; the God is not himself in this depth; it only serves to make it more enigmatic. The same feeling is given, in a heavier way, by the biblical legend of Moses who, confined in a hole by Jehovah in fear that the sight of his face would kill the prophet, then sees the God from behind who distant. The principle of revelation is there. Perhaps with a greater effort of abstraction, by turning the angle of matter and its meaning , the point of eternity would appear, shining in space like the crystalline tear of a God who had cried with joy. »

Failing, here, to be able to evoke – which would take me too far – the artists who, for a quarter of a century, were truly my companions in struggle, I flatter myself that I was the first, in 1933, to salute the arrival of Kandinsky in Paris , to have made him agree to be, at the Surindépendants, the guest of honor of surrealism, or to have anticipated his present consecration by many years by celebrating, he still very much alive, his "admirable eye , barely veiled behind the glass, [which] forms with the air a pure crystal, sparkling with all the iridescence of rutile in quartz. This eye – I assured – is that of one of the very first, of one of the greatest revolutionaries of vision. Paris, March 1952. André Breton. »