Notebook

Notebook, 1993-

APPROACHES - In The Words Of . . . .

From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988.

Wassili Kandinsky


1944

Each period of a civilization creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try to revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works

Those who hunger for illumination, those who see, remain on the fringe. They are derided, they are treated as mad. But these few rare souls resist and are vigilant. They have an obscure need for spiritual life, for knowledge, for progress.

All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. Al methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.

The artist who allows his gifts to go unused is a lazy slave.

If, from today on, we set about cutting all of our links with nature, tearing ourselves from her, unhesitatingly and with no possibility of turning back, contenting ourselves exclusively with combining pure color with a freely invented form, the works that we would create would be ornamental, geometrical, and at first glance very little different from a tie or a rug.

The true work of art is born from the "artist": a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

Painting is an art, and art in its entirety is not a goaless creation flowing into nothingness. It is a power whose goal must be to develop and to refine the human soul.

The artist is not a "Sunday child" for whom everything immediately succeeds. He does not have the right to live without duty. The task that is assigned to him is painful: often, it is a heavy cross for him to bear.

White rings like a silence that suddenly could be understood. It is a "nothing" full of juvenile joy or, to put it better, a "nothing" before all beginnings. Thus, perhaps, resonated the earth, white and cold, during the days of the glacial era.

Like a "nothing" without possibility, like a dead "nothing" after the death of the sun, like an eternal silence, without a future, without even the hope of a future, black resonates internally.

[An Exerpt From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988. p. 421]




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