Black Spring (7 page)

I sit down for a moment to smoke a cigarette. There’s a pamphlet at my elbow, about three inches square. It’s called Art and Madness. The ride is off. It’s getting too late to write anyway. It’s coming over me that what I really want to do is to paint a picture. In 1927 or ‘8 I was on the way to becoming a painter. Now and then, in fits and starts, I do a water color. It comes over you like that: you f eel like a water color and you do one. In the insane asylum they paint their fool heads off. They paint the chairs, the walls, the tables, the bedsteads … an amazing productivity. If we rolled up our sleeves and went to work the way these idiots do what might we not accomplish in a lifetime!

The illustration in front of me, done by an inmate of Charenton, has a very fine quality about it. I see a boy and girl kneeling close together and in their hands they are holding a huge lock. Instead of a penis and vagina the artist has endowed them with keys, very big keys which interpenetrate. There is also a big key in the lock. They look happy and a little absent-minded. … On page 85 there is a landscape. It looks exactly like one of Hilaire Hiler’s paintings. In fact, it is better than any of Hiler’s. The only peculiar feature of it is that in the foreground there are three miniature men who are deformed. Not badly deformed either-they simply look as if they were too heavy for their legs. The rest of the canvas is so good that one would have to be squeamish indeed to be annoyed at this. Besides, is the world so perfect that there are not three men anywhere who are too heavy for their legs? It seems to me that the insane have a right to their vision as well as we.

I’m very eager to start in. Just the same, I’m at a loss for ideas. The dictation has ceased. I have half a mind to copy one of these illustrations. But then I’m a little ashamed of myself-to copy the work of a lunatic is the worst form of plagiarism.

Well, begin! That’s the thing. Begin with a horse! I have vaguely in mind the Etruscan horses I saw in the Louvre. (Note: in all the great periods of art the horse was very close to man!) I begin to draw. I begin naturally with the easiest part of the animal-the horse’s ass. A little opening for the tail which can be stuck in afterwards. Hardly have I begun to do the trunk when I notice at once that it is too elongated. Remember, you are drawing a horse-not a liverwurst! Vaguely, vaguely it seems to me that some of those Ionian horses I saw on the black vases had elongated trunks; and the legs began inside the body, delineated by a fine stenciled line which you could look at or not look at according to your anatomical instincts. With this in mind I decide on an Ionian horse. But now fresh difficulties ensue. It’s the legs. The shape of a horse’s leg is baffling when you have only your memory to rely on. I can recall only about as much as from the fetlock down, which is to say, the hoof. To put meat on the hoof is a delicate task, extremely delicate. And to make the legs join the body naturally, not as if they were stuck on with glue. My horse already has five legs: the easiest thing to do is to transform one of them into a phallus erectus. No sooner said than done. And now he’s standing just like a terra cotta figure of the sixth century B.C. The tail isn’t in yet, but I’ve left an opening just above the asshole. The tail can be put in any time. The main thing is to get him into action, to make him prance like. So I twist the front legs up. Part of him is in motion, the rest is standing stock still. With the proper kind of tail I could turn him into a fine kangaroo.

During the leg experiments the stomach has become dilapidated. I patch it up as best I can-until it looks like a hammock. Let it go at that. If it doesn’t look like a horse when I’m through I can always turn it into a hammock. (Weren’t there people sleeping in a horse’s stomach on one of the vases I saw?)

Nobody who has not examined the horse’s skull attentively can ever imagine how difficult it is to draw. To make it a skull and not a feedbag. To put the eyes in without making the horse laugh. To keep the expression horsey, and not let it grow human. At this point, I admit frankly, I am completely disgusted with my prowess. I have a mind to erase and begin all over again. But I detest the eraser. I would rather convert the horse into a dynamo or a grand piano than erase my work completely.

I close my eyes and try very calmly to picture a horse in my mind’s eye. I rub my hands over the mane and the shoulders and the flanks. Seems to me I remember very distinctly how a horse feels, especially that way he has of shuddering when a fly is bothering him. And that warm, squirmy feel of the veins. (In Chula Vista I used to currycomb the jackasses before going to the fields. Thinks I-if only I could make a jackass of him, that would be something!)

So I start all over again-with the mane this time. Now the mane of a horse is something entirely different from a pigtail, or the tresses of a mermaid. Chirico puts wonderful manes on his horses. And so does Valentine Prax. The mane is something, I tell you-it’s not just a marcel wave. It has to have the ocean in it, and a lot of mythology. What makes hair and teeth and fingernails does not make a horse’s mane. It’s something apart. … However, when I get into a predicament of this sort I know that I can extricate myself later when it comes time to apply the color. The drawing is simply the excuse for color. The color is the toccata: drawing belongs to the realm of idea. (Michelangelo was right in despising Da Vinci. Is there anything more ghastly, more sickishly ideational than the “Last Supper”? Is there anything more pretentious than the “Mona Lisa”?

As I say, a little color will put life into the mane. The stomach is still a little out of order, I see. Very well. Where it is convex I make it concave and vice versa. Now suddenly my horse is galloping, his nostrils are snorting fire. But with two eyes he looks still a bit silly, a bit too human. Ergo, rub out an eye. Fine. He’s getting more and more horsey. He’s gotten kind of cutelooking too-like Charley Chase of the movies… .

To keep him well within the genus he represents I finally decide to give him stripes. The idea is that if he won’t lose his playfulness I can turn him into a zebra. So I put in the stripes. Now, damn it all, he seems to be made of cardboard. The stripes have flattened him out, glued him to the paper. Well, if I close my eyes again I ought to be able to recall the Cinzano horse-he has stripes too, and beautiful ones. Maybe I ought to go down for an aperitif and look at a Cinzano. It’s getting late for aperitifs. Maybe I’ll do a little plagiarizing after all. If a lunatic can draw a man on a bicycle he can draw a horse too.

It’s remarkable-I find gods and goddesses, devils, bats, sewing machines, flowerpots, rivers, bridges, locks and keys, epileptics, coffins, skeletons-but not a damned horse! If the lunatic who compiled this brochure had wanted to draw a truly profound observation he would have had something to remark about this curious omission. When the horse is missing there is something radically amiss! Human art goes hand in hand with the horse. It’s not enough to hint that the symbolists and the imagists are, or were, a little detraques. We want to know, in a study of insanity, what has become of the horse!

Once more I turn to the landscape on page 85. It’s an excellent composition despite the geometrical stiffness. (The insane have a terrific obsession for logic and order, as have the French.) I have something to work from now: mountains, bridges, terraces, trees…. One of the great merits of insane art is that a bridge is always a bridge and a house a house. The three little men who are balancing themselves on their canes in the foreground are not absolutely necessary to the composition, especially since I already have the Ionian horse which occupies considerable space. I am searching for a setting in which to place the horse and there is something very wistful and very intriguing about this landscape with its crenelated parapets and its sugar-loaf escarpments and the houses with so many windows, as if the inmates were deathly afraid of suffocating. It’s very reminiscent of the beginnings of landscape paintingand yet it’s completely outside all definitive periods. I should say roughly that it lies in a zone between Giotto and Santos Dumont-with just a faint intimation of the post-mechanical street which is to come. And now, with this as a guide before me, I pick up courage. Allons-y!

Right under the horse’s ass, where his croup begins and ends, and where Salvador Dali would most likely put a Louis Quinze chair or a watch spring, I begin to draw with free and easy strokes a straw hat, a melon. Beneath the hat I put a face-carelessly, because my ideas are large and sweeping. Wherever the hand falls I do something, following the insinuating deviations of the line. In this manner I take the huge phallus erectus, which was once a fifth leg, and bend it into a man’s arm-so! Now I have a man in a big straw hat tickling the horse in the rumps. Fine! Fine and dandy! Should it seem a little grotesque, a little out of keeping with the pseudo-medieval character of the original composition, I can always attribute it to the aberration of the f ou who inspired me. (Here, for the first time, a suspicion enters my head that I may not be altogether there myself! But on page 366 it says: “Enfin, pour Matisse, le sentiment de l’objet peut s’exprinaer avec toute licence, sans direction intellectuelle ou exactitude visuelle: c’est l’origine de l’expression.” To go on…. After a slight difficulty with the man’s feet I solve the problem by putting the lower half of his body behind the parapet. He is leaning over the parapet, dreaming most likely, and at the same time he is tickling the horse’s ribs. (Along the rivers of France you will often stumble across men leaning over a parapet and dreaming-particularly after they have voided a bagful of urine.)

To shorten my labors, and also to see how much space will be left, I put in a quantity of bold diagonal stripes or planks, for the bridge flooring. This kills at least a third of the picture, as far as composition goes. Now come the terraces, the escarpments, the three trees, the snow-topped mountains, the houses and all the windows that go with them. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Wherever a cliff refuses to finish properly I make it the side of a house, or the roof of another house which is hidden. Gradually I work my way up toward the top of the picture where the frame happily cuts things short. It remains to put in the trees-and the mountains.

Now trees again are very ticklish propositions. To make a tree, and not a bouquet! Even though I put forked lightning inside the foliage, to lend a hint of structure, it’s no go. A few airy clouds, then, to do away with some of the superfluous foliage. (Always a good dodge to simplify your problem by removing it.) But the clouds look like pieces of tissue paper that had blown off the wedding bouquets. A cloud is so light, so less than nothing, and yet it’s not tissue paper. Everything that has form has invisible substance. Michelangelo sought it all his life-in marble, in verse, in love, in architecture, in crime, in God… . (Page 390: “Si 1’artiste poursuit la creation authentique, son souci est ailleurs que sur l’objet, qui pent etre sacri fie et soumis aux necessites de l’invention.”)

I come to the mountain-like Mahomet. By now I am beginning to realize the meaning of liberation. A mountain! What’s a mountain? It’s a pile of dirt which never wears away, at least, not in historical time. A mountain’s too easy. I want a volcano. I want a reason for my horse to be snorting and prancing. Logic, logic! “Le fou montre un souci constant de logique!” (Les Francais aussi.) Well, I’m not a fou, especially not a French fou: I can take a few liberties, particularly with the work of an imbecile. So I draw the crater first and work down toward the foot of the mountain to join up with the bridgework and the roofs of the houses below. Out of the errors I make cracks in the mountainside-to represent the damage done by the volcano. This is an active volcano and its sides are bursting.

When I’m all through I have a shirt on my hands. A shirt, precisely! I can recognize the collar band and the sleeves. All it needs is a Rogers Peet label and size 16 or what have you…. One thing, however, stands out unmistakably clear and clean, and that is the bridge. It’s strange, but if you can draw an arch the rest of the bridge follows naturally. Only an engineer can ruin a bridge.

It’s almost finished, as far as the drawing goes. All the loose ends at the bottom I join up to make cemetery gates. And in the upper left-hand corner, where there is a hole left by the volcano, I draw an angel. It is an object of an original nature, a purely gratuitous invention, and highly symbolic. It is a sad angel with a fallen stomach, and the wings are supported by umbrella ribs. It seems to come down from beyond the cadre of my ideas and hover mystically above the wild Ionian horse that is now lost to man.

Have you ever sat in a railway station and watched people killing time? Do they not sit a little like crestfallen angels-with their broken arches and their fallen stomachs? Those eternal few minutes in which they are condemned to be alone with themselves-does it not put umbrella ribs in their wings?

All the angels in religious art are false. If you want to see angels you must go to the Grand Central Depot, or the Gare St. Lazare. Especially the Gare St. LazareSalle des Pas Perdus.

My theory of painting is to get the drawing done with as quickly as possible and slap in the color. After all, I’m a colorist, not a draught horse. Alors, out with the tubes!

I start painting the side of a house, in raw umber. Not very effective. I put a liberal dash of crimson alizarin in the wall next to it. A little too pretty, too Italian. All in all, I’m not starting out so well with my colors. There’s a rainy day atmosphere somewhat reminiscent of Utrillo. I don’t like Utrillo’s quiet imbecility, nor his rainy days, nor his suburban streets. I don’t like the way his women stick their behinds out at you either…. I get the bread knife out. May as well try a loaded impasto. In the act of squeezing out a generous assortment of colors the impulse seizes me to add a gondola to the composition. Directly below the bridge I insert it, which automatically launches it.

And now suddenly I know the reason for the gondola. Among the Renoirs the other day there was a Venetian scene, and the inevitable gondola of course. Now what intrigued me, weakly enough, was that the man who sat in the gondola was so distinctly a man, though he was only a speck of black, hardly separable from all the other specks which made up the sunlight, the choppy sea, the crumbling palaces, the sailboats,
etc.
He was just a speck in that fiery combination of colors-and yet he was distinctly a man. You could even tell that he was a Frenchman and that he was of the 1870’s or thereabouts….