Paulhan, Painting, Perception

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

The search for my laws took advantage of the incident.
Something in us, or in me, revolts against the inventive power of the soul over the mind. Extracts from Mr. Teste's Log-book.

Isn't the major temptation for the Spirit - Genesis, some illustrious cases assure us - to merge with intelligence, to identify its nature with the sole powers that it offers us, to make, finally, this intelligence the privileged place from which the universe and the image that we form of it appear as the two faces of the same reassuring rationality?
But all the reflection in the world will not prevent The Jewish Bride, this collection of shapes and colors, from always surprising us, taken aback and almost alarmed that a painting could exercise such power over us, and even more so, if we push our thinking a little further, that they, this painting, this painter, could not have been...
In truth, the way we look at a work of art should not distract us from its aberrant reality, but make it necessary and paradoxical at the same time, familiar and totally other. It is then that Jean Paulhan appears, in front of a Braque or a Juan Gris: “A simple little rectangle of canvas with colors on it — and which gives us such emotion, which gives us such a feeling of deliverance! »

Unlike Valéry, with whom, as we will see, his method sometimes brings him closer, Paulhan is quite ready to admit "the great enigma that the arbitrariness of others presents to him." One would even say that "the existence of others, always worrying for the splendid egotism of the thinker" - I quote again Leonard and the Philosophers -, this immense scandal for pure consciousness is the very thing which excites it and which requires it. His first movement is to recognize this other - painter, poet, human character; then, by knowing him better, subtly dispossess him of himself.
Even if the works his eye encounters are strange to him, he accepts it and even wants it. Not that they remain foreign to him...

Paulhan has a warm welcome to risk. Calculated welcome, perhaps; emerges from a very confidential game of which he alone knows the rules, but where the intrusion of the Other, his intolerable contingency in the mind of the thinker is here as if encouraged, solicited, observed in all its sensory manifestations, - soon analyzed.
Because Paulhan is, deep down, convinced that any work of man - this painting, this poem, but also this gesture, or such "instinctive" reaction - must result in or correspond to some mysterious design (but mystery is not the incommunicable...), to some secret charter of the totality. Here he is, on the threshold of his study on Cubism, laying the clearest foundations: “Criticism is in great danger of talking about anything about painting – about modern painting in particular. I only see one remedy: it is - the starting point once well established - to ask questions so precise that in the end they only tolerate a single answer. » And elsewhere, worried. so much of a possible key to Poetry: “Who would nevertheless renounce, if he does not have a cowardly mind, to form here assurances which are not unequal to those of physics or geometry? » Wouldn't we say, questioning ourselves, no doubt more cheerful, but no less cautious, another Monsieur Teste?
But we need to take a closer look.

Cubist Painting or Space before Reasons is undoubtedly, among Jean Paulhan's various studies on painting, the richest and most disconcerting writing. Rich, in fact, by the intellectual approach that he reveals, he will confuse us for a long time by the observations and the quite unexpected judgments that he offers us. Paulhan attempts, with the seriousness that we know, the logical analysis of a pictorial sentence whose grammar he senses escapes him, and perhaps also escapes those very people who uttered it. But this primary strangeness and the seemingly insurmountable distance between the figure and our means of investigation enchant him, spur him on. From “modern” painting – which he unhesitatingly identifies with Cubism (1) – he first distinguishes the renunciations. Refusal of the subject (but why then give so much importance to this apple, to this packet of tobacco? Is it with the Cubists a social promotion of the object or a belonging to another order?...); refusal of composition (but Braque's mandolins, Picasso's landscapes, if we compare them to Turner, to Monet?...); refusal of the traditional perspective (but Goya, but Manet?..). The criteria put forward by the author hardly convince us, it must be admitted.
Nor, one would say, that of Jean Paulhan. The real argument lies elsewhere.

All the reasons that this reasoner gives us, all the assemblage of concepts that he constructs are not worth a small reason that he suddenly puts forward about the gaze, as if in silence: “We are no longer a spectator peacefully seated in his chair, as in the theater... We must take our momentum. We have to get on the set and have an adventure. This is undoubtedly what causes an unexpected pleasure. » The intellectual approach and reflection give way to sensation, and this to a clearer perception of the relationship between the work and our eyelash. Modern painting - and Paulhan rightly does not distinguish the adventures of informal art from Cubism - is that which demands from us a true visual collaboration, our presence in movement.
Anchio son pittore! will (perhaps) exclaim the dazzled spectator. Here, in fact, begins the history of modern sensibility. But logic would have known nothing about it, if a certain pleasure of the senses...

Paulhan curiously uses the experience of Cubism on a terrain where, it seems, it has no use; and for purposes that one would readily call extravagant. Thus he sees there the trial finally brought against the idea, against reason, against (false) perspective, against trompe-l'cil. As if Cubism were the epiphany of ingenuity... And he very reasonably demonstrates this phenomenon which he calls unreasonable.

I take admirable steps
Apart from the steps of my reason.

But suddenly, regarding the pasted papers, a sentence, which sums it up entirely: “It is a curious encounter of insistence and incompleteness. » This is indeed the ambiguous face of things which charms Jean Paulhan so much: this painting is like a new, fiery logic - but which does not succeed; a thought which seeks the most rigorous profile, and ends in dotted lines, in questions, in wandering. Something like the modern version of the Königsberg philosopher’s “endless finality”.

On Cubism again, this thought which would have angered Mr. Teste: "He who reasons and reflects at his ease is because he knows how to back each of his clear ideas with a dark idea..." What recognition of the rights and limits of the intellect in the all-too-well-kept hunt of aesthetics!
No prior buildings; by definitive reconstructions by virtue of a clear idea or an axiom. But the attention given to perception, which another perception clarifies, when it does not correct it. Cornerstone always uncertain on what we are given to build on: it is Descartes straddling Pyrrho.

Paulhan, in front of the painting, is a patient decipherer. He does not want to be the servant of an original logic, linked to some a priori of consciousness, but the zealot of a final rhetoric, which will reveal itself when the whole text is written. Because the code does not exist before writing; it only appears there, it only emerges gradually.
So when Paulhan stops at the work of a painter - and Braque is at the highest point the place on which he fixed his gaze - it is not to detect there the discourse of a logos inherent to the forms, but the very movement of a being accomplishing and revealing itself all together. Braque le Patron is in no way an Introduction to Braque's method (or to Cubism, which would have lent itself even better to general theories), but a parallel commentary on the facts - on the work and on the man; a sort of curious wandering, attentive to the episodic as well as the essential, which he does not attempt to dissociate one from the other, which he delivers in the ambiguity of the anecdote and the incompleteness of the moment.
A figure emerges here through the words, as elusive and complex as the original; a destiny becomes clearer from which we guess that a great Order guides him, about which nothing is said, but that all these moments, captured by a look where lucidity does not weaken, suggest and suppose.

It is not so much the reason for the existence of all these images that appeals to Paulhan, as their very particularity, their contradictory impacts on the mind which, in the last resort, this mad lover of norms must adapt to.

The writer, at Paulhan, knew how to give the devil his place - a little too generous at times, according to some. I mean that he willingly allows in his pages the absurd, the cock-and-the-ass, the absurd, that he always welcomes it with sympathy, eagerness - not without ostentation, sometimes. But it is a guarantee that he takes against the resurgent forces of reason, against the mechanisms of the mind and the systems.
In this way he will correct the excessive rigor that he believes he has grasped among the Cubists through the concerted disturbances of Dubuffet.

The work of art is not didactic. But our mind, accustomed to the readability of things, seeks, even without our knowledge, some hidden magisterium from which it can benefit. Hence Paulhan's approach, all broken. Render through the attack itself, through the tempo of the speech, a bit of this fundamental instability of the world that the contemporary artist preserves and that thought precipitates into concepts. Also the displayed disorder of the "piece" - in Fautrier l'enragé, for example - perhaps detracts from its formal order but in no way harms the efficiency of the enterprise.
For Jean Paulhan, modern art is an exemplary — and unexpected — liberation; in the land of the Great Rhetoricians, the truant school of style.

These paintings which provoke him, Paulhan recognizes neither “laws which speak to the eyes” nor “God sensitive to the heart”: clear mysteries, colorful equations whose unknown still escapes him.
He loves what resists him, and is nevertheless surprised by this resistance. He must not deny it, but diminish it, reduce it. Paulhan does not overcome the difficulty, he eats it away. Thus, speaking of art, he hardly calls upon — or credits — the great machinery of History. (He only sees it, I think, as a sort of rather crude grouping of events, a hastily thrown order on things.) But this is not to attribute everything to numbers and laws. It is to give strength and voice to the singularity, to the unstable, to everything that the mind judges inexplicable — and, ultimately, insignificant.
This is the case with Braque’s lemons, which seemed so similar: “Yet they retained something opaque – like an absurd sentence. Obscure, but complete - like a proverb. I wouldn't have wanted to add anything to them. »
But subtract a little of their opacity - of their light.

Today we find, in any somewhat serious reflection on art, a swing of consciousness between two horizons that we would call as well, and perhaps better, physical than metaphysical: one which seeks to discover in the "artistic phenomenon", like experimental science, mechanisms and relationships - and which, certainly, finds them; the other which only offers, at the end of the analysis, this extent of chance that Paulhan speaks of, this escape into the unforeseen and the uncertain. Paulhan is the scene of this double attraction, the moral conciliation of these irreconcilables. So he likes games, which are made up of rules, not laws; where the roll of the dice, the piece that is pushed, preserves and combines chance. He is, so to speak, the mechanist of randomness.

Perception is to sensation what the Cubists' space is to classical perspective: a multiplication of points of view. And perhaps more: a recognition of the elementary structures of the world. That the electron microscope agrees with the Wols meteors is more than enough, Paulhan tells us, to reassure modern man about the virtues of the gaze.

In the comedy - I use the word in the classic sense - that Paulhan gives himself in front of the painting, I discern several acts. It is first of all, at first, a way of wonder and concern in the face of the hustle and bustle of shapes and colors: the irrepressible assault of sensation. The second act is all about constancy, intelligibility and humor (but the humor is only perceptible after the fact...): Paulhan gives himself a broad cerebral scenario, of the Valerian type, attempting to submit his initial astonishment to the schemes and grids of simple questions. But the few laws that he thought he would discover, where others would stop, irritate him, one might say, by being too sharply angulous. So he never stops asking these laws to also assume their opposite. “I also know that there must exist, from the mystery to the law, a link such that the law only takes on meaning following the mystery. » He would like them, these laws, logical and mysterious at the same time, unshakeable and hazardous. And prefers to them, in the end, in a deferred outcome, the invitation of space, the door open to pure questioning, the play of possibilities, the shimmer of chance. But perhaps he thinks that we must in this way, through our infinite questions, our fragmentary, fragile answers, immediately disappointed, deserve, like Chagall whom Paulhan envies and celebrates, a new naivety.

CLAUDE ESTEBAN

Paulhan speaks indifferently about modern or cubist paintings. Thus, again, about Chagall (“Chagall in his right place”, in Derricre the mirror, n° 99-100): 'The purgative life, the sleep of the powers, the illumination respond quite exactly to the three periods of modern painting or, that's all one, of cubism...' But Wols, Fautrier, Dubuffet, to name only the painters to whom J. P. felt close, would they agree with him on this simple equation?