The weather’s still fine here, and if it was always like that it would be better than the painters’ paradise, it would be Japan altogether.
Tag: painters
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ResetHere you have portraitists, living for so long side by side and they don’t agree on posing for each other and they’ll separate without having portrayed each other. Well! I’m not pressing the point.
Is it true, as I think in moments when I’m in a good mood, that what is alive in art, and eternally alive, is first the painter and then the painting? Well, what difference does that make — but if one sees people working it’s still something one doesn’t find under glass in museums.
As long as we were preparing the way for richer lives for the painters who will walk in our footsteps, that would already be something.
On Saturday evening I had a visit from two amateur painters, one of whom is a grocer — and also sells painting materials — and the other a justice of the peace who seems kind and intelligent.
At the moment I'm furnishing the studio in such a way as always to be able to put someone up. Because there are 2 small rooms upstairs, which look out on a very pretty public garden, and where you can see the sunrise in the morning. I’ll arrange one of these rooms for putting up a friend, and the other one will be for me.
I want nothing there but straw-bottomed chairs and a table and a deal bed. The walls whitewashed, the tiles red. But in it I want a great wealth of portraits and painted studies of figures, which I plan to do as I go along. I have one to start with, the portrait of a young Belgian Impressionist; I’ve painted him as something of a poet, his refined and nervous head standing out against a deep ultramarine background of the night sky, with the twinkling of the stars.
I’ve just received a letter from Bernard, who joined Gauguin, Laval and someone else at Pont-Aven several days ago. In this letter, which is very kind by the way, there isn’t, however, a syllable about whether Gauguin intends joining me, nor another syllable, moreover, asking me to go there. All the same, the letter was very friendly. From Gauguin himself, not a word for almost a month.
I personally believe that Gauguin prefers to manage with his friends in the north, and if by good luck he sells a painting, or several, he could have ideas other than those of joining me.
Considering, if you will, the times in which we live as a true and great revival of art, the moth-eaten and official tradition, which is still on its feet, but which is at bottom powerless and bone-idle, the new painters, alone, poor, treated like madmen and as a result of this treatment becoming so in fact, at least as far as their social life is concerned.
Works unintentionally form a "group," a "series." Now then, at present the Impressionists too form a group, in spite of all their disastrous civil wars, in which people on both sides try to get at each others’ throats with a zeal worthy of a better destination and final goal.
More and more it seems to me that the paintings that ought to be made, the paintings that are necessary, indispensable for painting today to be fully itself and to rise to a level equivalent to the serene peaks achieved by the Greek sculptors, the German musicians, the French writers of novels, exceed the power of an isolated individual, and will therefore probably be created by groups of men combining to carry out a shared idea. One has a superb orchestration of colours and lacks ideas. The other overflows with new, harrowing or charming conceptions, but is unable to express them in a way that’s sufficiently sonorous, given the timidity of a limited palette. Very good reason to regret the lack of an esprit de corps among artists, who criticize each other, persecute each other, while fortunately not succeeding in cancelling each other out.
At another moment, if I were less impressionable, I would probably poke a good deal of fun at what seems to me to be askew and deranged in the local customs. At present, from time to time it doesn’t have a very happy effect on me. Right, well – in fact, there are so many painters who are cracked in one way or another that little by little I’ll be consoled by it.