Jean Paulhan through his painters (text)

The man who recognized in Braque a hitherto unsuspected importance, then in quick succession that of Fautrier and Dubuffet - the latter completely unknown - and who thereby so unexpectedly disturbed the evolution of modern art, undoubtedly deserves today a few glances and a few reflections [...]

We must not hide from ourselves that the strange lucidity suddenly shown by Jean Paulhan in the field of painting, shortly after 1940, was as if underpinned by that which he had cultivated with extraordinary application in the field of literature - based, it is true, on exceptional gifts. We will not forget it. Nor the letter writer that he was (in fact, it is in his letters, even more clearly than in his other writings, that his point of view and his reasons emerge). Moreover, the very disconcerting judgments that he dared would perhaps not have had the impact that they had, if they had not benefited from the prestige of the NRF of which his name appeared a bit like the symbol. [...]

What does the manuscript of Fleurs de Tarbes do [in this exhibition]? Well! it does not seem at all indifferent to me that Jean Paulhan one day gave this manuscript to Jean Fautrier. It does not seem indifferent to me either that when questioned about his sudden reverence for Braque, Jean Paulhan replied, to Marcel Arland who was surprised, that Braque seemed to him to resolve, in the simplest, most natural way, on the practical level, the poetic problem that he himself, Paulhan, had posed, on the theoretical level, in the Fleurs de Tarbes.

And I think it is a good chance to be able to show, alongside the precious manuscript, the extraordinary copy “Blaizot”, riddled with an immense letter from Jean Paulhan to Joë Bousquet, where the said problem is, if I am not mistaken, more clearly exposed than anywhere else. [...]

This brings us to the crucial passage of Braque le Patron, to the fundamental notion, which, if I understood things correctly, commanded Paulhan's reactions to the painters of his time:

“Juan Gris very well noticed that there was no classical work that did not hide a meticulous calculation of plans and elevations and sections of gold. But Juan Gris has not always hidden his calculations: he displays them. Delaunay rightly observes that a beautiful painting always whispers some cosmic rhythm; but Delaunay does not murmur his rhythms at all: he screams them. Fernand Léger, if he has a sense of color, certainly does not have a sense of delicate allusion. André Lhote has perfectly established, through diagrams and plans, that the large landscape composed of Rubens or Patinir suggests, on a helical background, a whole gear of cylinders and cones. But André Lhote's paintings resemble theorems rather than suggestions... Braque, obviously, guesses what all the great painters have guessed: that nature is, at its base, a mysterious allusion and a mental thing. But Braque also knows what it was more difficult (to all appearances) to know these days: that by divulging the mystery, we take away its virtue. He knows a secret, it wouldn't be much. He has a sense of secrecy. He knows that the painter must be extremely wary of sensations and apparent nature; but also that he must nevertheless confide in it, to the point of crazy modesty and paradox: to the point of taking, in his words and his myths, against the painter the side of the painting..."

That the painter must, against the painter, take the side of the painting... is also what Paulhan advised one of the great poets of this time, still young and undoubtedly stumbling: "forget yourself, don't try to make a book in which you are exactly represented, simply try to make your book complete (phenomenologically), try to make it a perfect object...".

That the painter must be wary of apparent nature, And yet trust in it to the point of mad modesty..., is it not precisely this sort of bipolar and invertible rhetoric, that Paulhan, director of a review, painfully struck by a certain monotony, a certain poverty, that the prior systematic principles - even that of terror or anti-rhetoric fury - had as if imposed on the literature of our time, forbidding him in short freedom, luxuriance and grandeur, thought it necessary to propose, and which he proposes, in short quite crudely, in the Fleurs de Tarbes.

As early as 1927, commenting on À la grande nuit by Antonin Artaud, and wanting to warn the surrealists against the dangers of terrorist rhetoric, Jean Paulhan wrote (under the name of Jean Guérin): "If we happen to admire some writer without reservation, it is also because he did not hold to contempt for literature, but because he has it in himself completed, surpassed and reduced in some way to being only a function, only the means of an activity which goes beyond it and which goes beyond it”. Who would then have given all its importance to this little sentence (printed in very small characters on the last pages of a magazine), could perhaps have foreseen that Jean Paulhan, if he one day turned to contemporary painting, would inevitably be led to admire above all and “without reservation”, Georges Braque.

It is precisely, let us admit, through the reservations he expresses about Gris, Léger, Delaunay, André Lhote, that Jean Paulhan best makes us understand the reasons for his preference. To these systematics, prisoners of their system, and who proudly display the bars of their prison, he opposes the freedom of Braque and his discretion, which is not only the (aesthetic) sense of secrecy, but the (metaphysical) sense thanks to which the ellipses of his painting naturally echo the mysteries with which the world is filled. [...]

Despite the pleasure he certainly took in works like that of Max Ernst or Brauner, whose capacities for fantasy and twists he undoubtedly enjoyed, surrealist systematism no less than that of the neo-cubists aroused Jean Paulhan's reservations: "the monster of Théramène," he wrote in Fleurs de Tarbes, "is as amusing as a crocodile, but the surrealist monster has all the boredom of a demonstration”.

It was very obviously from the boredom that neo-cubist systematism like that of the Surrealists gave him that Jean Fautrier, already noticed by Malraux fifteen years earlier, finally seemed to Paulhan the strongest personality of his generation, the only one who knew how to resolve, like Braque in the previous generation, the dilemma posed in Fleurs de Tarbes: original, because fundamentally terrorist; great, because his extreme originality allowed him to draw without inconvenience from the treasure of pictorial rhetoric and its commonplaces.

In truth, faced with the Fautrier case, Paulhan remained hesitant for some time as he had also been for some time before Braque. The author of Fleurs de Tarbes was undoubtedly won over the day he understood that it was the extraordinary originality of his material that allowed Fautrier the imperial freedom of rhetoric. “The material is what makes the commonplace appear in painting. Exactly like in literature a certain atmosphere….”

Hence finally this praise: “it was a question of maintaining, in a state of modern painting which is content, if I may say, with the essential, neglecting eloquence, explanation... — it was a question of maintaining in such a painting and in such a small space all the prestige and the rich material, the precious color and the deep shadows, and in short, all the resources of the great painting of the past, of Titian and the Rubens, Greco and Turner. This required more than one discovery, and no doubt these whitewashes and these crushed pastels, these lumps and these crushed….”

Fautrier’s material created an atmosphere of extreme violence. “How close this painting is to insult and filth,” Paulhan wrote to Jouhandeau, “is close to insult and filth! I don't know another painter who is so angry. Near him Corot and Bonnard are anglers, small retirees in their garden. He would rather remind me of Rimbaud.”

He kept thinking about it. No subsequent outburst made him deviate from this comparison. The almost general anger that Fautrier experienced, the incomprehension that he himself encountered when he spoke about him, only reinforced his idea that, cursed like Rimbaud, the painter of Otages was, in painting, the equivalent and equal of the poet of Illuminations. Out of all painting, said Fautrier's adversaries, running out of arguments. Outside of all literature, he had precisely recognized the first man who knew how to put Rimbaud in his true place. Apropos of Illuminations: “a work finally outside of all literature, and probably superior to all,” Fénéon said in 1887.

Anyone who knows the past of criticism well, who has looked squarely at the history of its stupidities and its disappointments, is as if naturally armed against the arguments — indefinitely the same and indefinitely miserable — that a reasoner devoid of sympathy can always oppose to an innovative artist. When a critic criticizes Fautrier for "too much beauty", Paulhan immediately remembers that the same criticism was made around 1910 to Claudel. (This type of objection obviously makes no more sense whether it concerns painting or literature). If another critic (or the same one) is surprised, on the contrary, by so much fury in virtuosity, and asks: "who the hell has it?", Paulhan is happy to recall that the same question was asked around 1900 in front of Van Gogh's landscapes.

To his more lucid eyes, it is clear, in fact, that with Fautrier as with Van Gogh, painting is underpinned by something else, something like indignation or at least an emotion of a metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical order. Marcel Zahar had already felt it and expressed it in front of the works of his youth. Faced with those, dazzling, of 1944, Jean Paulhan, approaching the question as closely as possible, did not hesitate to write: “each of us, deep down, only gains meaning and taste for his life — for himself — through the resemblance (more or less vague, alas!) that he recognizes with a man of snow and fire, without contracts, without constraint, solitary and who vomits up our little tasks, our politeness, our weaknesses, our lamenting faces, our flealike life and finally does not tolerate - does not want to tolerate - so many familiar objects as an appearance, and like a shell, shiny and metallic. And it seems to us that in the eyes of such a man life would finally lose its taste and the forces of the world their meaning. There is no doubt that the writer has risen here to the same level as the painter.

Nevertheless, in the case of Fautrier, as in the case of Braque, the feeling (of a metaphysical order, in short), which ultimately won Jean Paulhan's conviction, only emerged after long hesitations and a long internal debate of an aesthetic and even, more and more precisely, rhetorical order. It is also that in Jean Paulhan rhetorical reflection is pushed so far that it inevitably reaches the metaphysical order. [...]

Jean Dubuffet's approach was of a completely different kind. Essentially physical one could say. It was suddenly, without hesitation, straight away, almost without reflection, that Jean Paulhan recognized in him, both a great painter, and a completely extraordinary man: brilliant, let's put it bluntly. Yes, as soon as he made his acquaintance (through Georges Limbour, who had long been excited). End of 1943, the authors say today, repeating each other. Ah! Wouldn't it be rather early 1944? It was on January 2, 1945 that Jean Dubuffet wrote to Paulhan: “About just a year ago our friendship began…” February and March 1944 were in any case the decisive time, when an exhibition was planned at René Drouin's house as soon as he was alerted, and where a sort of spiritual companionship and a friendship gradually took shape which lasted some thirteen years.

Whether we consider the Fautrier case or the Dubuffet case, the liveliness of their evolution, at the moment when Paulhan appears in their lives, is striking. Paulhan became interested in Fautrier in 1942; and even before 1944, they were the Hostages. In 1944 he became friends with Dubuffet and soon we moved from Métro to Mirobolus Macadam and the famous portraits. What good ferment did it secrete? The leaven, certainly, of greater freedom.

In truth, as far as Dubuffet was concerned, the action was reciprocal and excellent on both sides. The vitality, the tone of the painter, the joy of his company and his wonderful letters breathed into Jean Paulhan a new youth. This is very noticeable in his work, which almost immediately became more abundant and more cheerful. Metromania is at its best. The Selected Pieces, which he signed Maast in Temps Modernes, hardly resembles the Notes of Jean Guérin in the old NRF: the influence of Dubuffet is obvious. [...]

Almost entirely absent from the old NRF, Jean Paulhan's reflections on painting were quite abundant in the new one. The turning point had been curiously marked in 1939, not in the NRF, but in Verve, by a curious essay on the Portrait of Montaigne which is in Chantilly. Henri Michaux recently told me how much this essay had surprised and intrigued him. For several years he had been trying to interest Paulhan in a possible new direction in painting. As early as 1926 he had offered him a strange work of his own, a zoomorphic stain today famous under the name of City or Octopus, and which truly marks a milestone. But Paulhan was then immersed and almost drowned in his research on the psychology of literary creation. It seemed as if he would linger there indefinitely. Michaux, on the occasion of Montaigne, suggesting a diversion: a trip to the country of painting that has been completely upset - all upset and still to be. A few months later, it was the country itself that was. There was defeat, occupation. The NRF having been entrusted to other hands, Paulhan had unexpected leisure activities. It was thanks to these sad circumstances that Michaux’s suggestion took root and became a tree.
It is very interesting to follow in Braque le Patron, in Fautrier l'Enragé and elsewhere also, the developments of the first and fundamental question (that, if you like, of specters), which Paulhan had raised in connection with the portrait of Montaigne.

It was recently said that Paulhan only became interested in informal painting quite late. It is true that he, like Malraux, reacted without great enthusiasm to Jean Fautrier's lithos for Hell. It is nevertheless true that in terms of informality he was on the right track from 1946. He generally claimed to have been interested in it since the 1920s: he spoke of the time, certainly very old, when he began to develop a passion for Klee.

In the new NRF, Paulhan's reflections on informal art followed very naturally from his reflections on Cubist painting. The connection he saw between this one and that one may have surprised some. A whole part of the informal was in fact done rather against than by Cubism. But there is little denying that Kandinsky and Mondrian both knew Picasso and Braque, and that the extreme audacity of the latter must have been a inspiring example for them. Paulhan saw above all that, among all the manifestations of revolt against the space of traditional painting (that of perspective as well as that of impressionist postcards or not), nothing was more radical than what has been incorrectly called cubism, that is to say the twin pictorial adventure of Braque and Picasso, and in this adventure the particularly determining chapter of papier-collés. In Paulhan's eyes the decisive moment was in fact neither the painting by Braque (Les Maisons à l'Estaque) which gave rise to the famous word, nor the Demoiselles d'Avignon, but the first papier-collé, the papier-collé with ALE and BAR, of which he so often spoke, specifying the date each time, and naturally, whether he was wrong, or whether he corrected, or whether he had fun, not always giving the same. There is no doubt, however, that this pasted paper from Braque, this one, not another, was indeed the first. Picasso always agreed with this. Paulhan did not see it, of course, as the masterpiece of the century, but he saw it as the most important turning point, the work having definitively imposed in painting another way of seeing (or feeling), a different space, a space before reflection, a natural space. [...]

It is therefore on the notion of space that Paulhan's reflections on modern painting were ultimately centered. “We are no longer, he said, a spectator peacefully seated in his armchair. Like in the theater... No, we need to gain momentum. We have to get on the set and have an adventure. This is undoubtedly where the unexpected pleasure comes from... it is not enough to say that modern painting differs from classical painting. It takes another place in us... As if men had invented through it - or perhaps rediscovered - an emotion as different from the ancient aesthetic pleasure, as love differs from avarice, or the sacred from the profane... Because this is, it seems to me, the essential conclusion of Jean Paulhan.

No doubt this was a pretty good key. In any case, it allowed the great elder that he had become to consider the artistic activity of younger generations with as much sympathy and understanding as Fénéon had once considered his neo-impressionist or Nabis contemporaries, then some younger ones like Matisse. “Being informal,” Paulhan explained to André Parinaud, “is a state of mind. Young painters today are caught up... A very young painter will paint like Michaux or Fautrier, like Laubiès or like Mathieu, he will not think of painting like Dunoyer de Segonzac. There is a very consistent direction there. Will it last? It won't last? I don't know anything about it at all! Let us try to take advantage, to understand it, of the moment when we have it before our eyes. [...]

Paulhan therefore visited the galleries, when he had the leisure, and he welcomed with interest anyone, known or unknown, who came to show him their works. Thus classifications and hierarchies were established in his mind; and he could, with full knowledge of the facts — and the circumstances — distinguish between Karskaya, Yolande Fièvre, Robert Wogensky, Lambert–Loubère, Alexandre Bonnier and a few others. [...]

I would like to draw attention to a small historical point. Some, poorly informed, believe that if there had not been the NRF there would have been no Jean Paulhan. They are obviously unaware that, when he became secretary to Jacques Rivière in 1920, Jean Paulhan was already a figure of augur in avant-garde circles. The Applied Warrior had attracted the attention of Breton and Éluard in 1917. This is how Paulhan got to know them and introduced them to each other. It is moving to learn, thanks to a letter from Ungaretti, that Apollinaire himself had foreseen what Jean Paulhan would be. On the era that followed, Aragon provided an unforgettable testimony.

Who would like to study the earlier period, the training of Jean Paulhan, will have to consider his work on Malagasy proverbs (the Semantics of the proverb: the Hain Teny), the essays on applied logic that he gave around 1912 to the Spectateur, perhaps the books of his father Frédéric Paulhan. [...]

Fautrier's Inkwell? Jean Paulhan particularly liked this little painting. He kept repeating that this inkwell looked like a locomotive. For a writer, what a symbol an inkwell is! Jean Paulhan was wary of effigies. He constantly protested that Goethe could not have looked like a melon, Montaigne like a rat, Leonardo da Vinci like a chrysanthemum. But an inkwell, which is also a locomotive, necessarily brings to mind Jean Paulhan.

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See the exhibition Jean Paulhan through his painters