A major article from French artist and art historian (and future Resistance fighter) Jean Lurçat as he surveys the different modern schools and their relationship to the aesthetics of capital and the social crisis of the 1930s.

‘The Social Sterility of Painters’ by Jean Lurçat from Art Front. Vol. 1 Nos. 5 & 6. May & July, 1935.

FOR the last twenty years we have been thinking a great deal about painting. We have been thinking around painting. We find ourselves violently struck by the impact that can come from a piece of canvas surrounded by gilded oak, and suddenly the world seems to be nothing but a suburb of this concentrated space. Then we come back to ourselves. The rings on the water die away. We thought we were overwhelmed, but this pleasant titillation, this pompous rhetoric of the eye, isn’t that all that we are looking for?

I doubt it. I doubt that the painter, hoisted on the pinnacle of curiosity, bombarded by money, by questionable friends, by state awards, is really conscious that he has betrayed his role. In former times exponent of the idea of God, architect of the images of the gods, has he ever stopped to consider in these days of the laity his own meagerness, his own solitude? Has not the demand for originality anchored him to a rock, a rock standing on sand? Anyone who has observed, during the last twenty years, how many of the little mounds of earth which we thought secured our old treasure of Occidental civilization. have crumbled into dust, anyone who is convinced that we are living only in a sort of suspense, that injustice has been raised into a very system which cannot much longer hold its own; that, in a word, our world, the whole world, is in the grip of. an irresistible impulse to stop payment, such a man cannot but admit that painting today emulates this state of affairs. It offers nothing or little that can satisfy the essential needs of the human spirit.

I am getting off the track. I grant to each painter (there are twenty thousand of us in Paris) a consciousness of his day, of its trends, that faculty of sensing currents which they no longer trust to anything but machines. Perhaps I grant them too much, for I will get nothing for my pains. The painter lives alone, confined, retired and kept. Pride has slowly tamed his gestures. “Society is no longer for him, no, neither him nor for the poet.” And we see him trying to make himself at home in a caste of untouchables.

What is then the problem?

After all, an obvious fact imposes itself. Reality is trampled underfoot, exploited at the bottom, nibbled away at the top. Reality indeed, still intact, still unexplored but sufficiently healthy to revenge itself from time to time. What has the painter become in this conflict? His is the problem we must determine. And to what extent has he, though an accomplice, realized the fact he is victim.

I believe that the conception of painting has become clouded in the mind of the painter because for the last thirty years the painter has let himself be overwhelmed by “incident” painting. He wants to live his life, and at the same time to draw from this experience and this adventure his means of existence. He isolates himself from the system of community life of which he wants to know only the outward manifestations, and only the most comfortable and exciting of these manifestations. Thus, his idea of painting has become, to know only one class of society, the class he reveres as much as despises, to impose upon this class certain ways of feeling, no longer even believing in the value of his attempt, to pretend to accept this life based on reciprocal misunderstanding. These two groups can meet only on the admittedly barren and waste ground of money. This is the true face of the painter’s triumph. The work of art, gulped down with a certain solemn ceremony by its proprietor, must show “strength,” must wear on a face irremediably tired, a distorted label of vitality and representation.

The consequences could not but make themselves violently felt. Living in spiritual isolation never helps one see clearly into himself, nor into the world. around him. This refusal to collaborate with the great public–one can already see these gentlemen grimace this alliance with a single class based only on taste, this could not do otherwise than to precipitate the painter into an individualism of effusion and fabrication, to make him see his painting as a function of painting for painting’s sake.

The negation of this old mission which does not lack grandeur, the commenting upon and re-creating by means of images the central ideas of his time, has brought the painter to a state of social sterility. The truth is that he prizes nothing more than his own liberty, even though it is but the abstract shadow of a liberty existing only in words, and God knows how temporarily.

He slavishly recognizes only the ambition of his ancestors to illustrate the signs of their times. His rejection of subject matter has progressed to a refusal of the object itself. His scorn of the object has precipitated him into an abstraction through which the whole era in all its phases will before long come to its death. He has tried to make himself. brawny because he is alone. The result has been the formation of a state within a state, a society closed, congealed, the world of the painters, distilling slowly its customs, its laws, its press, its market of values. One must show that he “belongs” in order to get in that is, to agree not to consider anything unusual which the painter may demand through his hyper-sensitivity or his scapegrace pride.

This society has been slowly invaded by an imperialism peculiar to itself, having knowledge of its productive powers, its territories of expansion. The governments have taken possession, moving their pawns to suit their own propaganda. Barriers of custom have gradually been raised, quotas set, and saturation having been reached, depressions have followed. Thus a cycle is completed, demonstrating that far from resisting the moral and economic pressure of the times, a society abstract, vain and speculative has sought for itself a separate destiny, set itself a private standard. Having established itself between the masses and the creator, it has slowly cut itself off from any essential roots, has, one can say, insidiously smothered the man under the individual.

Let us see in what measure the middle class can also lay claim to this attitude of the painter’s mind, whether the two attitudes are related, and in what way their zones of interest overlap. Were one to accept painting purely as an art centered in itself, the fatalities of which concern itself alone, what can he call it? A sensuality developed into an esthetic theory, and nothing more. Nothing. The compromise upon which we live and move Matisse, Leger, Picasso Brancusi and so many others–what is it if not this “The picture moves me only because it is a picture, and it is a picture only in the measure to which purely pictorial considerations have presided to the exclusion of all others at its conception and fabrication.” This position in its immediate expression stands strong so long as we have not brought to light the reasons for its appeal to the will for pleasure.

But on the contrary, do we not find it typical of a conformist class that, relaxing after its effort of production, it desires nothing so much an art of acquiescence, of sensationalism, of decorative power. Painting addresses itself, then, to these groups in which power is distributed. We might condone this were the class we are dealing with young, open-minded, holding the world well in hand, really mistress of the world. But what do we see? A class in a state of ruin, driven by its own machines of production, overcrowded; for the last twenty years witnessing the breakdown of the laws on which were based its reasons for being, its ethic, its methods of thinking and working, and, final symptom, the breakdown of its faith in itself.

The painter, it is evident, fails to get to the bottom of things. The painter doesn’t want to plumb the depths of this morality, search into which would only bring him proof that the order which has moulded him and supported him is based on confusion of principles, on struggles without mercy, on the exploitation of man by man, on a clearly ridic-ulous distribution of values and materials. If it is true that Lamine reigns mistress over 50 per cent of the globe, it is because the keepers thereof are stupid or criminal. And so, collaborator and accomplice of one class, the painter remains ignorant that he serves nothing but a notion in full putrefaction.

What can then be the character of this sensuality? This we will examine later. But who will contradict us when we challenge rhetoric and eroticism, evils typical of powers going down the descending slope to their death.

During this tragic decline there arise from time to time the isolated protests of individuals who have been if not actually smothered, at least relegated to the position of eccentrics in painting. This is the case with Rouault among the orthodox Catholics, of Max Ernst among the Surrealists, and of several others as well, fighting alone. In circles of taste they are reproached with not seeming to understand their age in the least, and with not being willing to sacrifice pure art to Moloch. But their insurrection against the current gospel could not take, could never take a decisive attitude; it lacks pure nourishment. The group of Surrealist poets undertook to divulge through the pen the protests of some of these men. Its undecided tactics assumed slowly the form of an agitation, at heart really revolutionary, fearless of politics. It is necessary at this point to make a digression to treat of the defunct agitation “Dada,” and of the companions male and female of Andre Breton.

It would seem vain to me to repeat the sentence of Andre Breton, “One publishes to find fellow men, and for no other reason,” had I not come across it recently in looking through a copy of his “Pas-Perdus,” left, God knows by whom, in the gardens of the station Denfert Rocherau. Its cover attracted me to those benches in the squares which are used at that hour only, by bums for the elaborate nursing of their toes, since they have no more to expect either in the way of seasons or of nailed soles.

I looked through the pages. I did not enjoy it particularly, even hating those choice bits which were suggestive of a more substantial repast. But the hours which follow directly after dawn gave birth to reflections which have in them something fortunate. I stayed, surprised to find Andre Breton after eight years seem at times ridden with paradox at others so near the inside of man. How could I have read him in 1924 without leaping to that phrase? Yet it is true that much of the rest of the context drove me back.

For really, strange contradictions lie in the book, fruits of a compromise between this spirit, Dada-anarchist, and that taste of the age not yet over- come, that taste for the gratuitous, for gesture, for the shocking, whereas at other times the affirmation bursts forth that Breton has no other law, and no other challenge to hurl at the world than “desire.” We could give some credit to this last term, honor it in a full and revolutionary sense. A group of intellectuals could believe in its reforging, in its regeneration, if among them a few individuals, with full understanding, uphold a universal objective of desire. This the proletariat has discovered, who itself wants to live, and whose roots, still intact, can guarantee to that desire bitter integrity, clear vision to establish its principles. We have seen nothing in the proletariat that is gratuitous, that makes for gesture, for humor.

MERE denials are not sufficient. In the mind of Breton nothing was yet decided in 1924. It was not only to taste that he was unable to bend his principles. Suffering from the obscurity of the whole epoch, he prolonged its movements as if in spite of himself. Since then we have seen him fly into a rage having found out his theory.

In any case there will always be doubt and confusion around these exceptions (Dadaists, Catholics, Surrealists). It is the same with the idea of art. If art were really questioned, put to the test, a hereditary estheticism would still be found to hover over the councils of the Dadaists, to preside at their meditations. The humor and scandal which they propagated under the guise of poetry and painting attacked only the internal contradictions, of that same poetry, that same painting, and, however desperate the play, it remained nevertheless a game and nothing more. Principles are the products of societies. The wound beneath art should have been opened up. Society itself should have been attacked, and by name, and not merely the false graces of society and the groups of people, often obscene, living off these graces.

It took Dada several years to find that out. With us painters, although it is almost impossible for some of us to believe nowadays in this art of ours to believe that it can be practiced in the fullness of its rights and duties although we cannot. at all, believe in the validity of the moral code that drags along our tastes opposing our desires, our mental attitudes, opposing our will. our reactions, so often the brakes of our action–how are we painters going to believe in the possibility of driving back in our lifetime these false teachings, these habits of feeling that have made of us nothing but accomplices, vain servants? The domination of an epoch, its chains, those which we admit, and those more terrible which are inadmissible, its pressure against us, warp the spirit. Poisonous air can be breathed only through the mouth. War kills only after the public wailing of its chiefs–who “never wanted such a thing!” Bestiality breaks loose where dishonor hides from the light of day. Painters, we have sullied ourselves, we have blockaded ourselves by our invincible need to get ahead of others, of each other, to let those who follow us pay for that uncomfortable feeling that we have cut ourselves off from the rest, from the mass.

We cannot work with impunity for a few princes who still cling to the stronghold of their former power. Neither the Negro, the Scythian, nor the Greek knew or had to reckon with those specialists in questions of art who would strengthen its stubborn or freakish sensibilities by breeding it with primitive arts. In the Rue de Lapp, one stumbles into some little fallen-in store where there is a specialist in Caledonian art, or in old iron furniture. One is simply forced, pushed by the times to breathe this niggardly atmosphere, which, as Pabst said, “sharpens the sensibilities, but dries up the heart”. So, certainly, it does not displease me to find this confession of Breton’s “Breton, sure that he will never get done with this thing called heart, the doorbell of his house.” We cannot doubt it, the men of this generation have suffered a great deal, and Breton with them. But why are we tempted to write in the margin, as in a school book, “He could have done better”?

In France painting is never for an instant lost to view. It has played a role so active, so central, even so cumbersome, I must admit, that one can hardly touch the world of poetry or music without finding there its imprint, sometimes its domination. Almost everywhere it is either visible or implicated. Few have ignored it, many have consulted it. The interrelation is so deep that in the works of several writers we cannot tell where it begins, where its primacy is overcome. This intimacy between men of letters and painters makes us ask whether it is not a common danger that has drawn them together, a desire to eat their last cans of food together. It is curious to observe that, among the most insurrectionary, the plastic arts have found the most attentive audience. So I will not be far wrong in saying that at the final point of dissolution painting will still occupy a favored place. Its sensibility, its febrility in France have forced it to serve as a registering instrument. It is painting which has undoubtedly shown the worst signs of decadence, and at the same time, the desire, alas too hesitant, of renewal.

If it is true that with some its spirit has degenerated until, like Onan, it no longer believes in any- one but itself, why not recognize in this retreat, in this taste for the trappe an accomplished reputation of the era? What could it believe, admit, accept from the Third Republic? The question only makes us burst out laughing. What have these stammering moralists, these imperialists who could not even banish cynicism, given to the painter that is essential, that he could first have absorbed, then translated into works of durable value? For that task there should have beer something like the amiable foolery of Henri Rousseau, that power of popular illusion captured in his appealing, easy-going art. Rousseau was perfectly content with the Republic, but his “Celebrators of the 14th of July” are the Reds in their wooden shoes of ’89, and not the bearded “radicals” of 1930 eaten by the moths of departmental politics. The painters should not have bothered with these men, nor with their gospels. Nausea brings bad counsel.

That is why painting crawled under its tent and has not come out, except as in the case of the Dadaists, for some fly-by-night encounter more likely to light the torch of the enemy than to stir their own hidden fire. Other groups, most of the Fauves, for instance, have stayed irremediably conformist. Cubism has been like a dowager polishing up her jewels, blind, utterly bewildered by the disasters of 1914 and what followed.

The trouble is that everyone deceives himself with words. The intellectuals of Paris thought they were seeing a regeneration of painting when, led by Matisse, the painters determined to resist extern phenomena. Should painting follow events or content itself with watching, astonished, from a distance? Literature, coming on the scene, promised that she would try to take the same stand, but vainly, for she could not help recognizing or wanting to recognize a certain qualified revolutionary spirit.

“In the figurative sense”, our Larousse dictionary tells us, with that good assurance which stock companies alone possess, “revolution means sudden changes brought about in conditions of the world, in opinions”. Let us prove then that there was nothing new in this change of spiritual values, no- thing strange nor dangerous to affect the ways of men living in society. We know too well from experience how this word has been exploited, and we are no longer caught in the nets of those revolutions which are only the sidings of authentic revolutions.

Evidence of revolution becomes real only on the day when black can be considered white, and white becomes black. In Moscow many persons felt frustrated when carried away by the full acceptance of the term, and having lived through such a violent change, they recognized the survival of things of the old order, police, loans, marriage, bureaucracy. I will not discuss this sentiment here, nor do I take any side except in my inner mind. In public I am only arguing a problem of definition.

Was Cubism a sudden change, or rather that which Larousse gives us as the non-figurative sense. “movement of an object which travels around a closed circle”? Indeed, I find this definition the exact explanation of what Cubism was, wording which limits it, stops it, puts it in its place, even disposes of it.

Whoever examines the work of Cezanne in the light of its possibilities, its future, cannot but recognize in it all the implications of Cubism, and to him the event Braque Picasso loses its novelty, ceases to be revolutionary. Let us in turn cease to consider it an attack launched into the vitals of our culture, but rather an incident of insurrection, an impatience with certain exaggerated notions of our culture with its syntax.

It Cubism had not attained its central position in the world of plastic art today and only old fogies I would deny it that position–some other art of the same purport, the same idealism, would have taken upon itself the same refutation of the exterior world that Cubism implied, the same retreat, the same es-ape.

Just as Maxime Alexandre and Peter Unik set forth so well in their pamphlet, “a crowd of young bourgeois, restless, finding in eroticism, in dreams, in the sub-conscious, in poetry as many means of evading the problem put before them by the decomposition of their class”. What these two men said about surrealism as an explanation of the approach of the younger stratum of bourgeoisie to the esthetic extremists, applies also to Cubism, and could have been applied since 1914 to the works of the so-called advance guard. Cubism and Dada at that time do not quite represent a dictatorship over things of the spirit, but rather a more humble state of the spirit itself, a reactionary attitude rather than an attempt at action. They were movements brought into being by a certain moral degeneration, tending rather to limit the fields of the painters’ thought than to extend them or throw them open. Of what use is the spirit of insurrection, if it cannot reach the point of aiming at some definite objective?

We hear it said that the Cubist painter tried to free painting from a social group, to give it a life of its own, an evolution, liberty, that an artist should treat an object as he alone could feel it. Surely the point of view that painting, up until this time in slavery, should seek and find a universe of its own, in which the language laws and products would be determined only by itself and its own destiny, is too individualistic to be practical. It is well demonstrated here that such a spiritual divorce from the times and society was sensed by many and left unexplained, accepted and not combatted. Braque and Picasso express nothing further than that which in May 1904, ten years before, Cezanne had formulated in the words: “Taste is the best judge; it is rare; the artist addresses himself only to a highly restricted group of individuals; all that is necessary is to have a sense of art, and that sense of art is the horror of the bourgeoisie.”

What may seem a truism to some seems mere childishness, if we do not permit ourselves to read into these phrases anything more than they actually say. The whole life of Cezanne would lead us to believe that more is meant by these lines than merely the rebellion of a player tired out by checkmates, of a person wearied by unsuccessful attempts to adapt himself to the life of the city. Again, and one can not repeat it often enough, we find here a man in revolt against modern society and its morality, but his revolt is weakened by confusion; his conscious ness of the miserable condition of modern painter’s is deaf, is not able to justify itself by a superior finality.

Cezanne turned for an instant to the church. “I lean upon my sister,” he writes somewhere, “who confides in her confessor, and he, in turn leans upon Rome,” a pyramid which was capped by his exile in Aix-en-Provence, dyspepsia, and the development of that taste of the epoch, art for art’s sake. Later would be time enough to settle things with God, this worthy man seemed to think. Everything went against him: family, Sunday distractions, the pleasure of Vesper services, the kunstpolitik of Paris. Everything seems a miracle in this life that was able to produce out of ashes and debris so considerable a work.

Poor, without hope of getting much from his profession, even without optimism other than a raw feeling of progress in his art, Cezanne cannot appear to us otherwise than as a man practicing scales, waiting for something working toward a future which he himself could hardly glimpse, much as a workman stands astonished before the strength of his machine, terrified by the riches he is creating–but for whom? Out of such emotions, such despair, spring real revolutions.

Art Front was published by the Artists Union in New York between November 1934 and December 1937. Its roots were with the Artists Committee of Action formed to defend Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads mural soon to be destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller. Herman Baron, director of the American Contemporary Art gallery, was managing editor in collaboration with the Artists Union in a project largely politically aligned with the Communist Party USA.. An editorial committee of sixteen with eight from each group serving. Those from the Artists Committee of Action were Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Zoltan Hecht, Lionel S. Reiss, Hilda Abel, Harold Baumbach, Abraham Harriton, Rosa Pringle and Jennings Tofel, while those from the Artists Union were Boris Gorelick, Katherine Gridley, Ethel Olenikov, Robert Jonas, Kruckman, Michael Loew, C. Mactarian and Max Spivak.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/art-front/v1n05-may-1935-Art-Front.pdf

PDF of issue 2: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/art-front/v1n06-jul-1935-Art-Front.pdf