André Lhote & Jean Paulhan, 1919-1961
André LhoteJean Paulhan“I understand why Paulhan doesn’t like my painting. It's too true. He moves in an abstract universe and sees nothing around him, only ideas. He is another Zeno of Elea. No need to prove the movement to him by walking, he doesn't see you walking." These lines found in a notebook by André Lhote set the tone of the approximately six hundred letters exchanged between the painter who was the first art critic of the Nouvelle Revue Française, and Jean Paulhan, director of the prestigious magazine.
Here are forty years of intimate conversations between two personalities, at the height of their maturity, who question each other, confront each other, but always understand each other. Between the two friends, no sycophancy, rather complicity, they debate. While fighting for the regular publication of artistic columns in La NRF, Lhote found in Paulhan a formidable interlocutor, a great lover of painting. Little by little, seeking in the plastic language a new approach to the world of ideas, he will begin to write about painting. These almost uninterrupted discussions offer us a true panorama of the major currents of artistic thought and the controversies which marked the twentieth century. The correspondence tells us everything about the two friends: the adventures of their domestic life, their vision of politics in this century tormented by wars and post-wars, their infatuations, their quarrels, their disagreements, and finally the estrangement of two figures who set off towards their destiny without suspecting the secret they have revealed.
Jean Paulhan and André Lhote, for an NRf art review
by Clarisse Barthélemy Acta fabula, revue des parutions Décembre 2009 (Vol. 10, N° 10)
A fourteenth Cahier Jean Paulhan, at Cahiers de la NRf, has swelled the ranks of publications produced on the occasion of the centenary of La Nouvelle Revue Française: the Paulhan-Lhote Correspondence covers a period, 1919-1961, which goes from the simultaneous arrival of André Lhote and Jean Paulhan at the NRf, to the death of the painter, and corresponding almost entirely to the presence of Jean Paulhan at the head of the review, first as secretary to Jacques Rivière, then as editor-in-chief and finally as director. Behind the well-known application and irony of Paulhan's epistolary pen, and Lhote's passionate comments on his findings, his articles, on Paulhan's choices, on the review itself, this correspondence shows all the place that the NRf has given to art and its current affairs. We see how the function of art critic was assumed with passion, by the painter André Lhote, under the authority of Paulhan working to shape the magazine according to his own conception of an “extreme middle” criticism, and how the sometimes thorny question of a literature on art arises, through an exchange that the passionate temperament of the painter sometimes made tormented, often complicit, with a content always profoundly literary and plastic at the same time.
The correspondence between Jean Paulhan and André Lhote numbers 632 letters, exchanged with a regularity desired as much by the imperatives of regular and complete publication, as by the momentum of friendship; reading it reveals all together the coldness of editorial requirements, the enthusiasm of art, and the sincerity of confidence, in the spontaneous outburst of a word that is always sincere, measured and frank in Paulhan, bubbling and moody in the Bordeaux painter. These private epistles naturally offer a very large amount of intimate information delivered according to a confidence with multiple contours, which provide all the relief of exchanges dictated by the imperatives of writing: thus the thorny question of the divorce of Lhote followed by that of Paulhan; the painter's discovery of the village of Gordes and its ruined houses, his desire to have his students and friends settle there, his love of nature, where he liked to settle down to paint, of landscapes and his dream of a small ideal society, again the friendships forged over time, Chagall for Lhote, Dubuffet for Paulhan, Supervielle for them both. The closeness of the two friends offers very beautiful pages of mutual concern during the war years, a period when correspondence was not interrupted at any time; the Second World War was above all a turning point in their correspondence, after which the issue of a pictorial and artistic reflection narrowed more and more on their personal exchanges, to the detriment of the magazine, around the question of the relationship between thought and matter, of plastic language, a variant of verbal language whose whole strength resides, for the two men who found an irreducible consensus there, in its mystery, its obscure point.
The vitality of this correspondence comes from the fact that it presents an evolution, in the intimacy of the epistolary relationship, which transcends the space of the magazine, a crossroads where first the two men bond out of necessity; Over the course of their exchanges, André Lhote and Jean Paulhan, initially subject to a balance of power due to the position of the latter at the NRf, find themselves on an equal footing, Paulhan gradually taking the place that the painter occupied alone - that of discoverer (Braque, Fautrier, Dubuffet), of thinker of pictorial art, and, in addition, that of writer, a function that Lhote persists in maintaining. deny for himself. Friendship and complicity are therefore the cement of a relationship that is first hierarchical and then competitive, but whose strength, precisely, is to create a fertile space for discussion, built from one letter to the next, and giving this correspondence a remarkable historical and theoretical substance.
This work edited by Dominique Bermann Martin, niece of the painter, and Bénédicte Giusti-Savelli, full of very beautiful illustrations chosen from the works of André Lhote, some notably coming from the Interview on Various Facts by Paulhan, reproductions of handwritten letters, a very complete index and very illuminating and precise notes, often transcribing extracts from certain articles by Lhote, reminds us of a fundamental aspect of the NRf, its presence in the field of artistic creation and art criticism, the reflection that it could provide on an entire history of art in the process of being lived and written. It also reminds us of the extent of Paulhan's critical talent, his intellectual, literary and editorial authority, and his power of discovery, accompanied by a formidable power, if not of theorizing, at least certainly of interrogation, of questioning, which will have contributed so much to the artistic 20th century, inside and outside the NRf.
It is thus a whole memory of 20th century art that we unfold while browsing this correspondence, around the monthly programs of the magazine, and in the private debate between Paulhan and Lhote, on modernist aesthetics or on the issues of theory. As much as the artistic news of a century covered, reflected by La Nouvelle Revue française, from Cubism to Abstraction, it is the question of criticism, in all its literary aspects, which takes shape over the course of this correspondence, as if the two men, beyond their “speciality” Paulhan would say, came together on a fundamental and common question, that of the relationship between ideas and their means of expression.
One hundred years of art at the NRf
André Lhote owes in some way to his Bordeaux origin to have gradually entered the NRf adventure. He was the friend and protégé of the Bordeaux collector Gabriel Frizeau, with whom he established bonds of friendship, which for some became family bonds, whose strength will have marked the painter all his life, as his letters continually testify: Gustave Tronche, his brother-in-law by marriage, Alain-Fournier, and Jacques Rivière, who married the latter's sister, and whose memory Lhote venerated throughout his life, became three key figures of the first NRf. It was in Paris, at Tronche, then commercial director of the magazine, that Gide met, at the same time, Rivière and Lhote; the first took the role of editorial secretary, providing a very important work of criticism, particularly on painting - what Lhote took care to recall upon his death, in the tribute issue published in April 1925. When, in June 1919, Jacques Rivière took control of the review, André Lhote entered the summary, then becoming the official art critic of La Nouvelle Revue française; art at the NRf is thus immediately placed under the auspices of Cubism, of which Lhote embodies the classical, figurative current, with an article on the “Braque Exhibition (Galerie Léonce Rosenberg)”: “No work better than that of Mr. Braque allows us to understand both the importance and the insufficiency of what Cubism gives us brings.” The major issues of the relay of artistic news at the NRf, of Lhote's plastic intelligence, and of his subsequent discussions with Paulhan, emerge here, at the origin, in this highlighting of a fundamental ambiguity of the great current of modern art.
Jean Paulhan made the acquaintance of André Lhote that same year, 1919, undoubtedly through Éluard, as we learn from the introduction to the Correspondence, when the painter was illustrating The Animals and Their Men3. Paulhan's taking up the post of editorial secretary, alongside Jacques Rivière, in November of that year, therefore coincided within a few months with Lhote's entry into the journal as a regular art critic. Their first exchange is placed under the auspices of one of Lhote's most important articles, "The Teaching of Cézanne", a formidable illustration of the painter's very intellectual and above all very poetic pictorial conception, placing the "spirit" above the “matter”, defining the “plastic metaphor”, where Paulhan recognizes a “strong and serious discovery” critical. From the outset, a very strong point of connection was established between the two men whose friendship truly blossomed at the turn of the years 1924-1925, especially after the death of the revered Jacques Rivière. The growing complicity and intimacy of the two critics on the one hand, and the vagaries of editorial authority with its impulses and its arbitrariness on the other, are the two sides of a relationship that is often conflicted, disappointed, but faithful, and strong in an intellectual communion which is gradually emerging. A word from Paulhan in one of his very first letters allows us to understand and read precisely this exchange strewn with debates and contradictions: “Your theory of history and “sudden variations” of art interests me extremely without completely convincing me”. There is, throughout their correspondence, this same attraction, this same unfinished affection, which lacks complete enthusiasm, this discrepancy which leaves room for discussion, for testing, for what Lhote calls a “necessary contradictor” — and it is Paulhan who has full authority in this game.
A first reading of the correspondence between Paulhan and Lhote thus reveals a tension between, on the one hand, the demands and the continual impulse of the editor pressed by regular publications, and who wishes to leave his mark on the journal, to give it perfect unity - an obsession mentioned several times; on the other hand, by complaints of overwork and lack of space left for commentary, and other accusations of negligence. The first demands texts “urgently”, cuts them or removes them without consulting their author; the latter does not hesitate to number his occupations in detail to excuse a delay, or to complain precisely that one of his texts does not appear, or seems riddled with typos. These repeated exchanges, sometimes borrowed from bad faith on the part of Lhote, driven by an imperative need to write, to instruct and to develop, but refusing to identify with the cause of the NRf, would be painful to follow if they were not tinged with affection and self-deprecation: “I am delighted that you have asked for my letter, but I would like to grumble in my turn, so as not to lose the habit of it and for that I miss the exact day of the expedition, and to know if it was sent to Paris or to Mirmande", writes Lhote to Paulhan, who, for his part, controls these repetitive angers with force and irony: "It would have surprised me if you had not written me a surly letter [...] You grumble all the way to Algeria, Tunisia and the Cape from where we writes me worried letters.” Paulhan is on the strength of his growing authority within the magazine, and in the literary and artistic world; the establishment of a restricted editorial committee in 1927, which establishes this authority and justifies Paulhan's blind rigor, gives numerous pretexts for complaint to the painter, who refuses to question his friend: in the direct exchanges, often threatening and spiteful, there is always a means by which the friendship is saved, and can thus be deployed on other grounds. Paulhan even comes to oppose the painter's whims with the inconceivable alternative of separation: "It will be understood that at the first letter of recrimination or reproaches (of the type: "arbitrariness... hypocrisy... incredible delay... melancholy etc.), we will separate or rather you separate from the NRf. How delicious it will be to just have you as a friend.” This confrontation of Lhote's bad humor and Paulhan's authority invites us to dissociate their collaboration on the review from a real intellectual and critical complicity, despite profound differences of opinion, linked in large part to the divergence of their temperament, and which their correspondence only gradually reveals, as Lhote abandons writing, and Paulhan devotes himself to art criticism.
At the NRf according to Rivière, Paulhan claims his power, his success, and his superiority over the missing friend: “note that there is more place given to art in this semester January-June 32 than in any semester of 1921, or 1922, or 1923.”8 The relationship between the magazine master and the copy supplier, in fact, offers an insight into Paulhan's conception of La Nouvelle Revue française, the role he claimed to play in it, but also his conception of criticism, a criticism of the day, neither devoted to established or classical literature, nor devoted to the avant-gardes and militant modernism. While Lhote, with a curious, spontaneous and burning temperament, very active, with a taste for teaching, an autodidact who never stops learning himself, seeks, in his articles, to explain what he feels, discovers, experiences, to comment on a discovery, to develop an idea, Paulhan only asks him for the fact, to give to readers to judge, and a point of view, that of an "extreme environment", which Lhote, better than any other representative of pictorial modernity, embodies, through his classic aesthetics and his theoretical vision. Thus the creation of “L’Air du mois”, which Paulhan was very keen on, gives rise to a paragraph from Paulhan on the link that the NRf must represent between artistic news and the arts public, which it wants to have as a readership: “The fault of the NRf obviously remains that it talks about too few things, and that it talks about them too late […] But I believe that if we want to keep the suddenly, we must express our opinion, and we must pronounce ourselves in detail, and that each reader is sure to learn from The NRf to judge accurately everything that happened during the month. " It is the entire ideal of the journal which is contained in this collective presentation (the letter is a typed circular) of a new section, with its essential principle of regularity: measurement, omnipresence, independence of judgment; and the ambition of Paulhan himself, who wanted to make the NRf the essential critical reference, not for a specialist readership, but for a broader public who would find in it a fair opening to the activity of art. Lhote, for his part, demands space to write, regrets the sidelining of concerned and militant texts on the conditions of existence of an art which already inhabits museums, and which is illustrated to the highest extent by the sad fate of Faut-ilburn le Louvre, on the restoration of paintings, never published in the magazine. He thus multiplies his criticisms against a review not respecting the priorities which seem essential to him: the time (and therefore the space) of commentary, art literature rather than exhibitions, the news of publishers rather than “picture dealers”; he reasons as a teacher and a theoretician, more than as a critic animated by the surge of the present time.
Artistic news is reflected in the numerous and diverse catalog of Lhote's articles and reveals the importance of the ongoing dialogue established between the NRf and contemporary art. The correspondence between Jean Paulhan and André Lhote thus unfolds a formidable fresco of modern art, from Cézanne to Picasso and from Braque to Chagall and Dubuffet, including Lhote's admiration for Delaunay, Jacques Villon and Marie Blanchard. Cubism, radiating for Lhote on all the inventions of art in the 20th century, fundamentally “current”, essentially spiritual, or rather Cubisms, the “pure”, intellectual Cubist, and human, “emotional” Cubism; to Abstraction, the object of Paulhan's passionate reflection that Lhote refuses to understand, seeing in its representatives defended by the first a lack of spirit, a form of barbarism, with all the more bad faith no doubt as he sees his task as discoverer and commentator usurped by a "literator". Artistic news continues in the debates and discussions to which the NRf lends its pages as a real forum: we thus see Paulhan advising Lhote in his ongoing discussions with the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, the writer and gallery owner Maurice Sachs, the collector and critic Maurice Raynal, theorist of Cubism, and even Jean Coutrot, founder of the group X-Crise and host of the Entretiens de Pontigny.
André Lhote appears as a central figure in art criticism, through his role and his position at the nrf, which make him the “literary” reference. artistic news to a wider audience, as he likes to remind Paulhan, who is constantly busy counting pages and words: “Every moment I meet strangers whose first words are: “It is thanks to your notes in The NRF that we understand (or have understood) modern painting.” Lhote never ceases to claim his right to develop, to educate, and struggles to stick to purely informative and event-related notes. Here lies the deep issue of this correspondence: writing, relay of creation, relay of painting, relay of non-verbal art, which torns the painter between his faith in writing, and his dread of writing badly, his distrust of not literature, but of writers, which often puts his situation at odds within the magazine.
Painting and writing, the criticism in question
Lhote is an author, a writer as much as a painter, because writing is for him explicitly necessary not for creation, the fruit of an uncontrolled burst of instinct, but for the understanding of the creative act, and therefore for an advance, not progressive, but “involutional” of pictorial creation11. As such, his correspondence with Paulhan is of great interest for understanding his intellectual approach, and his conception of criticism, which for him firstly involves an internalization of creation, and which explains that he is reluctant to write succinct articles, limited to the presentation of current events. So he never stops complaining about this condition of criticism, as if writing also had to be born within a framework of unconditional personal freedom; the correspondence thus clearly reveals the fundamental tension which animates Lhote's pictorial reflection, between painting and writing, "necessity of theories" and impossibility of pursuing the profession of a man of letters. Lhote's critical work represents several issues which closely touch on the very ambition of the journal: its place in the artistic environment and more precisely in relation to the avant-garde, a critical morality implying an intellectual and artistic humanism, the importance of paraliterature whose own literary ambition is under constant discussion. In short, it is the essence of the profession of criticism that is at stake in these alternating manifestations of love and repulsion for writing and literature; after the end of the war, the correspondence inclined more and more noticeably towards the abandonment of writing, towards painting alone, towards increasingly advanced technical and aesthetic discussions with Paulhan, an art critic in his turn, on their respective critical (literary) work; certain articles by the painter are transcribed by himself in his letters.
Lhote adopts a healthy distance from the artistic environment, remaining sheltered from militant criticism working in favor of an avant-garde or academicism, from which he lends himself to a lucid historicization of the Cubist movement by distinguishing a “purist” school. and an “emotional” school, simpler and also more telling than the technical distinctions, between a Cézannian, analytical, synthetic, Orphic cubism, the first being defined by an absolute idealism and the second by a modern realism. The humanism, ethics and aesthetics, which characterizes “French Cubism”, of which it can be considered, with Gleizes, Metzinger and La Fresnaye, as one of the main representatives, fits perfectly with the humanist ambition of the journal, defined by Jacques Rivière then embodied by Paulhan and, after the Second World War, by Arland at his side. Thus all of Lhote's pictorial thought, which is at the same time poetic, can be summed up in one equation: the question of the restoration of matter does not go without a return to the human, plastic intelligibility, the spiritualization of figures, the revision of sensitive values.
What pictura poetry? It is precisely this poetic ambition demonstrated by the painter, great reader, theorist of “plastic metaphor”, who places writing at the center of his concerns; we can note in this regard that almost all of his articles published in the NRf were taken up and published in major works, Painting, the heart and the mind (1933), Let's talk painting (1936) and Painting first (1942). The preference for teaching, always, the concern for the “public”, the primacy of aesthetic considerations over “lackluster manifestations”, on which Paulhan makes him write, are the great motivations of the writer Lhote, who does not conceive of painting without its formulated continuation. At least this is how he responded to a collective circular from Paulhan on the insufficient unity of the magazine. Also it is his role at the magazine which puts him in a position of constant dissatisfaction with the publication of his writings: “This work which repels him: writing”, but writing among “literati”, among critics who, Paulhan first, see in his works science and means more than end; it would seem that Lhote is critical in spite of himself, when all he wants is to be not a litterateur, but a painter who writes, with a purely heuristic and reflective aim. It is from this ambition that the anthology From the palette to the writing table (1946), a tribute to the painter-writers, was born, his Treatise on Landscape (1939) in which he announces “purely literary passages”, claiming there the authority of the sublime Treatise on Landscape by Leonardo da Vinci. Paulhan himself rewards his “First walk at the Exhibition” (the Universal Exhibition of 1937) of “a great literary thing”. Finally, it is the reference to poetry which links his chaotic relationship to writing to a poetic ambition that his profession as a painter makes ambiguous, since from the pictorial material to the words it is a whole relationship to the conception of ideas which is called into question, and to the conception of figures; perhaps we can see in this ambiguity the key to his distrust of Abstraction, which a literati, whatever he may say about it on several occasions, can more easily touch and reach intellectually, thanks to the verbal instrument. Questioning the sincerity of classical literati, attached to rhetoric, who take non-figurative, "barbaric", "informal" painting seriously, Lhote, who believes in a necessary relationship between painting and writing, according to one and the same conception of language, verbal or plastic, concludes that there is an incompatibility between pictorial art and literature.
The constant reference to Mallarmé significantly supports his conception of the history of modern painting, and his belief in an “art of expression” which would define a “pictorial heroism”; the drift towards abstract painting, tachism and informal art, goes for André Lhote against the fundamental method of pictorial creation, which must distinguish absolute abstraction from retrenchment, research and the purity of “invariants”. This is the subject of the final article he gave to La Nouvelle NRf, in 1956, “About abstracts”: we cannot accept “spiritual resignation” of these “creators without creatures”, we must stick to a spiritualization at the limit of matter, as the poetic theory of Mallarmé illustrates with words. “Cubist” Mallarmé, forgotten behind a “deified” Rimbaud, gives the measure of “expressive reduction”, which makes, according to Lhote, “a good painter” and that modernity has too quickly and too early confused with pure abstraction. This is a quality that he also recognizes in Paulhan, bending there, once again, to the overlaps of pictorial art and rhetoric, just as he proclaims his admiration to the point of putting Les Fleurs de Tarbes and Divagations on an equal footing.
It is precisely this intelligence of the “plastic metaphor” and “expressive reduction” which presents common ground between the two men, whose exchange gains depth as Lhote withdraws from the magazine and Paulhan takes initiatives in art criticism; The Mallarmean analogy, however, only creates an intellectual link, but the two men do not seem to understand it in the same way. The phenomenological approach of Lhote, who is preparing conferences at the Collège de France on "The Plastic Invariants", does not seem to find a response in the search to which Paulhan submits for a mystery, an obscurity full of meaning, this rhetorical combination that he describes in Le Clair et l'obscur, and on which he relies to criticize the works of Lhote which, for him, say too much about their means, but above all which serves as a key to his definition of abstract painting: “I am a little afraid of your “philosophy of enlightenment”. You are not religious, that is very good, or rather no, it is not very good because religion, it seems to me, would give you the sense of the hidden, which you lack. But I would like you beyond religion, not below. There is at least one condition of intelligence that religions have admirably understood: it is that there needs to be an obscure point for the rest to seem clear, and an inexplicable element for a synthesis to openly have its reasons. Don't blame me. I am making every effort to follow you.” This final judgment of the conceptions of a painter who precisely reproaches abstracts for not being sufficiently “submissive to the spirit”, is only the opportunity for Paulhan to express his intimate conviction of a rhetoric of “chiaroscuro” at work in literature as in art, allowing us to go beyond aesthetic considerations and rise to an intellectual sympathy that transcends “means” works. And the reproaches addressed directly to the painter for not recognizing that the sublime of art is to “conceal” his means, will serve Paulhan in Braque le patron, to distinguish between a great painter master of his pictorial rhetoric, and a painter whose brilliant impulse does not exceed the spontaneity of gouaches and watercolors. The correspondence between the two men thus advances more and more into a comparison between painting and literature from a critical point of view, where Paulhan regains all authority, strong in his conception of a rhetoric exceeding the dichotomies between purity and informality, between mastery and absence of meaning, to the point of denying to his interlocutor and friend the very possibility of glimpsing the vanishing point of art criticism, a function which he now fully assumes - the vision of the dark.
This correspondence between André Lhote and Jean Paulhan underlines the importance that the NRf wanted to give to art, in the general ambition of a criticism accorded to its time, subtle and generalist, specialist without bias. And this rich volume gives us a personal, plastic, historical, theoretical point of view, of all the forms of manifestation of a modern art in constant and dazzling evolution. But it is above all the figure of Paulhan as a critic that emerges from this exchange with a painter in constant conflict with regard to writing, an activity that he considers necessary and yet too compromised with the world of writers, unfit for pictorial understanding according to him. Paulhan dominates, in his role as head of the magazine, judging and correcting the painter's copies, before attacking his painting, in a slow but sure advance on the ground reserved for Lhote, art criticism, plus, his theorization, and the historical and critical understanding of a rupture that the classical cubist fails to conceive or think about. The NRf is the great witness to a very rich artistic topicality, while Paulhan, a nascent art critic, extends and transcends the historical vision engaged by Lhote, definitively embodies the ideal critic in full understanding of his century.
Clarisse Barthélemy, “Jean Paulhan and André Lhote, for an art critique of the NRf”, Acta fabula, vol. 10, no. 10, “Centenary of the NRf”, December 2009, URL: http://www.fabula.org/lodel/acta/document5374.php
- The painter and the critic by Vincent Giroud
Publisher : Gallimard