The one who loved painters

This text appeared in the [nrf homage issue to Jean Paulhan] (nrf-hommage-a-jean-paulhan) in May 1969

A few weeks before Braque's death, Jean Paulhan telephoned me one morning, inviting me to accompany him to his home. We met the next day in the workshop on rue du Douanier with Dominique Aury and Pierre Domec. It was a moving visit. Braque, aged and worn, had kept his youthful gaze, more lively than ever. But he quickly exhausted himself while talking, and we felt that he would not be able to hold on for long.
A few days after his death, I received a letter from Jean, bearing these words as a postscript: “Braque was a rough friend, but extremely kind. And then, he knew what we have so much trouble searching for. We miss him. We will miss him.”
In my turn, I couldn't say better about Jean Paulhan. Because he was an extremely kind friend. We miss him. And I think he knew more than he wanted to admit. He was one of those very rare men who are not blinded by intelligence and culture. His spirit, his liveliness are no longer to be said. But I have never seen him contemptuous. Ironic, often, in the face of the pretensions and assurance of a few. He was wary of peremptory assertions, knowing well that infallible reasons are never good, that lines are never straight, and that men, thinkers, scholars, artists, can ultimately do nothing other than question things a little. One day when I was explaining my anxiety to him in front of my canvas, before I set to work, he said it to me in his own way: “There is nothing like ignorant people to be sure of themselves. Pascal doubted his faith, Einstein doubted his calculations. » And I recently read this line, quoted by André Dhôtel: “We can take ourselves for Jesus Christ, but not all the time. »
Each of his readings, most often short notes full of the unexpected, was an event. He invited my wife and me to a game of croquet or to lunch, recommended a reading, a film, or suggested that we accompany him to the Feria in Nimes: “Won't you come to the Feria on May 18? These are the most beautiful festivals in Europe, which do not end without some thirty dead or injured (I had an uncle killed at the Feria of 1898, which remained the honor of the family). 
Rereading some of these posts today, one thing strikes me: he talks very little about himself. But it is rare that they do not contain a word of encouragement, of sympathy. If it's sometimes about drama, it's about his friends. More often, it is a question he asks himself about a painting, a reading. This erasure involves an element of modesty. But something else too: his incredible youth, his interest in everything around him, his tireless pleasure in living, seeing and listening. I don't think he was getting old. In any case, he did not show any bitterness, recommending his friends to do the same “to experience a host of feelings which until then seemed to you to be the pure invention of writers, lies”.
He often reproached me for being wild, for not showing up, asking me to come see him or announcing himself at the workshop. Each of our encounters had some surprise in store for us: a curious toy that he had just bought at the bazaar, a small painting made of sand squeezed between two glasses, a shrunken Jivaro head lying in a box of sweets, or this drawing by Apollinaire that he gave me one day as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
We often talked about painting, and I think he taught me a lot. Not that he ever flaunted his tastes or his knowledge. But he had a mischievous way of slipping in the right word, forcing you to think a little further. There was an element of play in his conversation. By turns serious and caustic, attentive, surprised, or pretending to be so, enigmatic, he liked to disturb, to push people to the wall. But, seeing you disarmed, he claimed immediately prove you right, even if he didn't think any less, as if to apologize for having too many trump cards in his game. He had the elegance of a free man to never force his hand. He relied on his partners to draw their own conclusions.
From our first meeting, I understood that he liked painting “differently”. We are entangled in habits. And, if there's one habit that's difficult, it's not settling for habits. But Jean Paulhan had a horror of ready-made ideas, including those that it is fashionable to consider “current”. Speaking one day of a painter whom, unlike him, I did not judge to be bad: “But he is part of the official avant-garde,” he told me. Impartial, he was ready to admit rather than reject out of hand. But he was aware of the danger, and already declared, in Braque le Patron, "that the painting that we admire at first glance is likely to be a clever painting, which disappoints quite quickly, which lacks resources".
He knew that painting is demanding and deceptive: “We do not avoid giving artists a general view of things, which resembles the feelings they awaken in us. They have more or less thought about it (in general it is less). Never mind. What we seek in this way is to retain and recognize them, rather than to understand them.”
He went even further and I believe he had his method: looking at the canvas “at an angle” without seeming too much, he approached it gradually, as it is prudent to do with a frightened animal. Then he became familiar with it, going so far as to take hold of it, turning it over, changing its light. He accepted the change of scenery and feelings. Thus he could love painters as diverse as Braque and Odilon Redon, Paul Klee and Fautrier, Wols and Jean Dubuffet or, among those of my generation, Dufour and Bonnier, for example. He understood that this detachment is necessary to enter into the adventure of the painter. And he entered with a good appetite.
Giving me one of his books as a gift, he added this dedication, borrowed from Kipling: “Painters, like salmon trout, must be caught in white water, before they have completely taken off from their experiences. » Too many amateurs taste painting with their fingertips. Jean was greedier than those. He delighted in the painting and the painter at the same time, without fear of the edges.
It has become commonplace to say, after Picasso, that the interest of a painting comes from the painter behind it. But how many critics (and painters) burden themselves with such serious reflections? How many are only looking for a shock, a little emotion, a distraction for the eyes?
Jean was not one of them. He perceived that painting, beyond appearances, touches the secret of man. That art is always “something else”. How easy it is to say what it is not, but impossible to say what it is. In any case, that it never exists outside of this impossible that it approaches, that it surrounds, that it touches and does not reach.
“It is in the works that come from his hand that man experiences the presence of a mystery; in his myths and fables, the advancement of the ineffable. At all times he stumbles upon the absurd, the opaque, the unknowable,” he writes in L’Art Informel. Further: “The theorists who have attempted to explain art agree, as we have said, on two points: that this art both enchants us and brings us closer to the truth. They often add, in agreement with common sentiment, this, which is more curious: that we should not try to determine too precisely the nature of this truth. It is difficult to know, more difficult to express. As if we were all mixed up with her, and her very proximity prevented us from seeing her. Trueer than the truth, says one, and the other: a truth that surpasses truths. As if we had to content, in these matters, with a presentiment, with a flash of light, and that there was in every painted or sculpted work (thus there is a blind spot in the eye) an irreducible part, made to escape analysis.
Thus Paulhan sees in art much more than a reflection of nature or of the painter himself. An approach, rather, to what escapes knowledge. In this sense, he envied painters a little, and often told me so. Looking for the first time, a few years ago, at the paintings in his office on rue des Arènes, I told him that I was struck by the fact that each painting meant something, but that it was impossible to know exactly what, and that, in any case, it was never the same thing...
“You are lucky with painting,” he answered me roughly, “the words pretend to express the thought but they deceive it at the same time. They always have several meanings. Whereas it would never occur to anyone to maintain that red means blue... And then painting remains on the margins of ideas, while words want to merge with them and it is terror, revolt... There is nothing like philosophers to say the opposite of what they want. Poets explain themselves better, in general, because they proceed by allusions. »
I understood him poorly, not having read much of him until then. I thought it was paradoxical. Then discovering his books, and remembering his response, I understood this trait of his character: he was considered paradoxical but did not, strictly speaking, have the taste to contradict. He simply knew that truths do not exist without contradictions, that one should never pretend to separate the true from the false. He knew how to enlighten his thoughts a little further than us.
We resumed this conversation several years later, when I showed him some drawings. Two or three days later, I received in an envelope this printed sentence from Tagore: “If you close your door to all errors, the truth will remain outside. » A few hours later, by pneumatic: “Dear Friend, it seems to me that you continue to become both simpler and more mysterious, more obvious and more difficult... Plato said, better than Tagore: “When you know all the truth of an essence, you still have to know all the falsehood.” »
In a world of illusions where scientists tell us that two and two no longer make four, is art after all just another illusion? “It’s anxiety made an object,” said Sartre. Is not this anxiety the very index and proof of other measures and other conditions? It is in this sense that art sometimes exceeds our own dimensions. Isn't the secret unity of a work this sum and this agreement of what seems irreconcilable: the container becomes the content, matter becomes spirit, time and space merge, reality is converted into a dream and the dream into reality. It is in this sense, perhaps, that Tart sometimes approaches this conciliation of opposites.
In the preface that he wrote to the catalog of one of my exhibitions, I note this sentence: “Good paintings are those which carry within them their double and thus lend themselves to all possible exchanges and passages from one to the other. » And in the draft which he made of this preface, and which he gave me a little later, these lines which seem very precious to me: “There has never been a shortage of men to admit, if not openly, at least in secret, that we were given to live at the same time in two worlds, one of which, the world of imagination and dreams, controlled the second, the world of observation and reason.
Where did intellectuals (in particular those we call poets) come from to believe in a pre-meaning which preceded all meaning...
“We don’t belong to each other,” they say. We are on all sides eaten by the great world in which we participate... a world where all things are respond according to their analogies and correspondences, which we can capture in dreams and the millions of passages and scales from the microcosm to the macrocosm...
It is a universe of dreams haunted by the dead and the gods, where everything and its opposite go hand in hand. It is a universe of clear life where every word equally designates everything and its opposite. »
But I let myself get caught up in it. Impossible to talk about painting being a painter... So I simply tried to let Paulhan speak. The image that results from these few quotes, I do not claim to be complete, nor completely faithful. Many knew him better and will say better what an astonishing man and fascinating writer he was. At least I thought I understood some of his intentions. The clearest, in my eyes, is a certain form of rigor.
Was it not himself that he was thinking of, writing in the Entretien sur des Faits divers: "Really, did he not intend so much to please some reader, or even to increase human knowledge, as to teach his friends, his parents, his concierge, to think correctly"?

ROBERT WOGENSKY