Dialogue with Fautrier

The following extracts from letters were published in the exhibition catalog Jean Paulhan through his painters organized by André Berne-Joffroy

Letter from Paulhan to Fautrier
dated: Monday

There was in the joy of our friends in front of your paintings yesterday, I don't know what was pressing, external, palpable... We had all very well arrived at this point of reversal where... it is no longer the man who seeks the painting, but the painting which seeks the man. We felt caught up in something else...
Doesn't Groethuysen exaggerate the particular gravity for you of the illustration of Dante, when he says that there is a pre-Dantesque period and a post-Dante period in your work? I only see a slow shift, a sort of inflexible progress. But it all starts with the plate of blue fish or rabbit skins (are they rabbits or kids?)
The best (I mean least unpleasant) thing that can be said in favor of gifts and their usefulness is that, to judge a painting, a certain duration is necessary. A completely bare painting is, in the moment, incomprehensible: it answers a thousand questions that we have not asked ourselves (...A beautiful painting initially gives you only one desire: the desire to go away; the feeling of a world that is not yours.) But a painting that you have close to you wins you over in a few days with its questions and its answers.
...
I really want to set up a small Fautrier museum in one of our rooms. But I would like to have five or six drawings...
I believe they would be necessary. We are only too tempted to believe that everything with you is reduced to color solutions.
Ah! and a bronze head. Maybe you could lend it to me. Or let me buy it too. (Do you know approximately what price Jeanne C. would ask me for kid skins?)

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Letter from Fautrier to Paulhan
undated

Paulhan. Yesterday after your departure, I took the famous manuscript with me. You don't know (or rather if, you know now) how much authentic and moving a manuscript can represent for me... Let the question remain clear between us. I'm keeping it, because already I would have difficulty giving it back to you... We will see together how to exchange it, if you are not completely disgusted by my painting by then. You know with what absolute contempt I treat all commercial transactions relating to art. You can well imagine that everything that has happened over the last few days would be without any interest if it had not happened in this way and in this atmosphere which, thanks to you, was created and which is infinitely pleasant.
I have the feeling that I don't yet realize what's happening to me because you know well, for me, it's only the work that counts.
...
Groethuysen is right and wrong. He is right in that quite a significant portion of my vocabulary has been abandoned. He is wrong in the sense that I already know that later, perhaps very soon, now that essential problems have been addressed and resolved, soon I will take over a part of this repertoire (but how much intensified) and only the one that was really mine_ - that he does not know -. He will then understand what you felt.

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Letter from Paulhan to Fautrier
dated: 29-6, Monday evening; i.e.: Monday June 29, 1943

I have always felt in front of your landscapes (and I feel in front of the large landscape with blue arches) the feeling that it is not authentic, that "it's a chicanery". Why? (I would not tell you this if I were not determined in advance to prove myself wrong.) If I try to clarify this feeling, I find more or less that a carafe or an apple of yours (even apart from its reason for being) teaches me something about carafes or apples, and that your pictorial discovery goes hand in hand with a real discovery (if you prefer that your writing is in collusion with things). But for the landscape on the contrary (which I think I find "eloquent", and strictly speaking decorative), you stick - to develop and embellish it - to the idea that each of us has, that I myself have of landscapes. Finally, to put it in a nutshell, your landscapes do not seem accompanied enough to me. But don’t they give a special impression to yourself? Tell me.

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Letter from Paulhan to Fautrier
dated: 5-7

Creation, yes. And yet...
I see very well the danger of creation, as the romantics and symbolists (and their grandchildren the surrealists) saw it: it locks the creator in his world, with no more outlets for the world where we are all... It is the creator condemned to indefinitely redo the same book, the same painting. And then, as soon as we judge the writer from this angle, how can we not say to ourselves: but Napoleon also created! (and even Citroën, or Félix Potin). And perhaps more solid worlds. Certainly more indisputable.
Here is where I am coming from: it is that the creator reviews himself, corrects himself, completes himself on an analogous idea of ​​creation, sees himself condemned to seek his writing, and nothing but his writing. Thereby deprived each day more of fear and loves and common emotions, withdrawn from the creation of all. Private from the common; deprived, after all, of the world.
I believe that we must distrust the satisfaction that comes from discovering one's writing in the moment. (I see very clearly, for example, what kind of madness she has thrown Miro into. Miro and others).
I come back to your landscapes. Perhaps I am wrong to ask if they are not in part (with the joy they were able to give you) the effect of a related discovery.
There are a thousand things that I would not tell you; if there was not, moreover, a painter that I am thinking of placing above you. It is not.
Have you read Francis Ponge? Isn't it big?

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Letter from Fautrier to Paulhan
undated

Quite often I have an inner pleasure when I have been able to bring something imponderable to fruition, but rest assured that I have enough lucidity to realize that there is nothing to be proud of in being a creator. Lamentably imprisoned in a small space, constantly rehashing little discoveries, rarely having the courage to escape by reducing life to a single aspect, there is really no reason to be devastated by vanity...

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Letter from Paulhan to Fautrier
dated: Sunday

Here is very clearly how the question arises in literature: there comes a moment when the poet can no longer say "rose lips" or "the enamel of the meadows". Therefore only two solutions are possible:
(A) We can frankly give up saying it, look for equivalents, other images (in themselves initially delicious but also doomed to become ridiculous). This is the Valéry solution - and we already see the Valéryan images surviving, languishing, in Lucien Fabre or Ganzo, or Emié.
(B) We can also continue to use the same images, but without thinking about it, being innocent of them, making it clear that the poet does not think them, that he simply lets the unconscious flow through them. This is the surrealist solution (which, of course, must deny art, and does not hesitate for a second to do so).
How is the question posed in painting? I don't see it very precisely, because I don't locate, I don't distinguish clearly what the pictorial commonplace is. This is where you could help me.

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Letter from Paulhan to Fautrier
dated: Saturday The matter.

I suppose that the big difference between decorative paint and paint paint is the quality of the material. What matter is is very difficult to say. But it is obvious that this is what is in Rembrandt (and is not in Bosch): what is in Soutine or Rouault (and is not in Picasso, who makes admirable colored drawings). What is in Fautrier. We have to start from there to try to see clearly.
This is not so far from the question of the commonplace. The material is what makes the commonplace translate into painting. (Exactly as in literature a certain atmosphere, a certain poetic understanding allows us to naturally say rose-lips.)

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Letter from Fautrier to Paulhan
undated

But there are also painters who have a great concern for the material while having a thin and apparently poor surface: Clouet, the Italians of the Renaissance, Dufy.
I told you some time ago, some part of the old vision will come back, but I definitely don't like the subject in painting. Everything can be expressed with nothing, almost nothing at all. This is the reason that makes me hate Delacroix.

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Letter from Fautrier to Paulhan
undated

I told you that Valéry's Degas was remarkable, it is above all pleasant, remarkably pleasant to read because it is romanticized, and even seen from this angle it would not be as romantic as we would like, - but it does not teach us absolutely anything.
Your Braque, although short, already says a lot, and despite that I immediately felt that something was missing. You can go much further, and you cannot know what my joy was yesterday when I read that you had decided to approach these questions with more courage.
A few months ago you asked me who I saw likely to be able to write a book on my painting. I didn't answer you, because in truth, in my life (apart from Bernard van Dieren), I have never met anyone who could satisfy me. Now, not only do I want you to write about me, but after that, later, you will have to approach all the problems of art and resolve them as completely as in Flowers. Very little has been said so far, everything has to be said, it seems to me that it should be tempting! And you are the man made for this...

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Letter from Fautrier to Paulhan
undated

Here's what you want to know:

-> The canvas is nothing more than a support for the paper.
-> Thick paper is covered with sometimes thick layers of a coating. It is on this coating that the picture is painted. This coating makes the paint adhere perfectly to the paper. It has the quality of fixing powder colors, crushed pastels, gouache, ink, and also oil paint. It is mainly thanks to these coatings that the mixture is so well achievable and that the quality of the material is achieved.
If indeed it is preferable for me to complete a painting in one day, this does not come from the process..., because even when I worked in the usual way, I always felt the desire to finish the same day...
-> The process used could also be suitable for a painter who works for six months on his painting. the material would be different.

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Letter from Paulhan to Fautrier
dated: Monday

I would have preferred to wait. But anyway, too bad! The article will be ready on October 25.
...
Here are the last lines (which I don't hate):
" In body too, Fautrier reminds us of Turner. He is small and would appear extremely thin, were it not for a sort of fury which gives him mass and density. Which sometimes bursts out. Or which erupts into head laughs. However, he has the air of a toreador rather than a sailor."
(This still needs to be reviewed. This is a reply to the first lines, where I say that France having taken on the whole field nowadays, with all the problems of painting, Picasso continues the Spanish school, Braque the French and Rouault the Venetian, but Fautrier the English school. From which come various misunderstandings. In France, we have never understood Constable or Turner very well).

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Letter from Fautrier to Paulhan
dated: Tuesday

He's small! and it is said in such a way as to leave no doubt... and remember that it will remain small... So find me the name of this animal or bird which, in fury, raises all its hairs or feathers around itself and to which I resemble so much. It’s true that you make up for it with the bullfighter’s move!
But obviously everything has to be redone all the same. I feel much more Spanish than Picasso. And nothing is more English than Braque and Picasso! with their renunciation of all excess emotion, with their overly calculated method.
And what is this English school you are talking about? Constable and Turner, are they not precisely those Englishmen who, through their temperament, pursue aims specific to schools foreign to their country? Nothing is less English than them.
I would be good to Monsieur Drouin.
But having said that, what is important is that I am going to try looping. A week of calm is not too much before the experience.

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Letter from Fautrier to Paulhan
dated: Saturday

You don't think they're stupid because they finally admire! all kinds of paintings that they were made to admit over time and with extreme patience. But that’s not why they’re ready to understand something else. They remain just as hermetically sealed off as before to anything that does not fit into one of the little boxes that have been built for them... Quite simply, they cannot feel since emotions are offered to them in a way that is not one of those to which they are accustomed. It's easy to dismiss a painting. So ask them why?
It is decorative: - that of Matisse, Braque is it not infinitely more so? If we admit that the essential elements of decoration are to renounce volumes, light effects, poetic emotion in favor of a surface considered flat by only holding the object insofar as it represents a coefficient of lines, surfaces, equivalences of black and white or colors, all selected to harmoniously fill this surface...
...
She's too clever: - that's the point that seems to bother you the most! Vlaminck is nothing because, apart from his technical skill, nothing remains in Vlaminck. There were probably many painters of his kind. Only I'll stop you: you especially admire "the black compotier" and "the day and the night", these are precisely the ones which are painted in the most stunning way! Eliminate once and for all these skilled painters who will never say anything, and tell them that Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Watteau, Chardin, Turner, Renoir, Van Gogh, Rouault, Dufy (and many more) are not worth much for the same reasons!!
Writing in painting is a long and difficult thing. It is simply an accessory, but so essential that everything that needs to be said risks every day being compromised by a simple error in thickness.

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Letter from Paulhan to Fautrier
dated: Thursday evening
The Juvenile Fautriers

I am ready to admit that I am wrong. However, let me give you my reasons.
We are in danger, this cannot be denied: the exhibition can be shocking. It can also (like the previous one) go unnoticed. What dangers?
These are dangers of two kinds. To the paintings of 1943 we can oppose: "They are chromos. It is a display of silks (Skyra dixit). It is too charming. It is too lovable." To the paintings from 1930, we can oppose: "it's virtuosity. it's decoration. It's too easily accomplished. It does not move. Neither this dying boar moves me, nor this naked woman excites me." GOOD. The whole problem is therefore: "in what order should we approach these dangers to reduce them with certainty?"
I imagine that the amateur goes from chromos to virtuoso canvases. Well - the question being posed on the level of aggregation - he will simply find, after the paintings that are too pleasant, paintings that are too unpleasant. Perhaps he will simply say to himself: "All the same, the first ones did have their approval, it's not so negligible", etc. But finally, the little value of this approval is already fixed. There is nothing there that can overturn his first impression.
It is quite different otherwise. The amateur who asks himself in front of old paintings: "But what is the reason for all this? the center of interest? the emotion?" When you arrive in front of the new canvases, you find this answer: it is that only the dramas of light attached you and occupied you: its surprises, its struggles - and your struggles with it. He finds an explanation. He is satisfied. It feels complete. The first paintings had (if I may say so) hollowed him out. These fill him up. He is desperately grateful to you.
I try to put the danger into an equation. Whichever way you turn it around, I believe you will arrive at a conclusion close to mine.
You would have already found it, I think, if - placed at the center of the thing - you were free to taste the old paintings for themselves, to see in them something other than a preparation for modern paintings. (But the amateur is in the exact opposite situation.)
I lent Fénéon the bunch of grapes. He seems delighted...
...
Old and recent paintings, it's the same question as the child. Should we consider a child as a sort of blueprint, a preparation for the man he will be? Or like something accomplished, perfect in itself, finished? Of course, I'm for this, against that. But the grown man (despite everything he may have lost in becoming a man) hardly avoids considering the child he was as simply the preparation for the man he is.

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Letter from Fautrier to Paulhan
Turn

You will be happy. My mother writes to me that as a child the two things I loved the most were turkeys and chestnuts and in painting only one painter, Turner! It seems that I never tire of going to the Tate to look at his drawings. And I retain all my admiration for Turner, because with him it is indeed an "unblocking" and a great freedom of attitude towards the object, but while retaining all the plastic qualities, not by accumulating renunciations as all the snobs since Picasso have done.
I am delighted with this exhibition. It helps me see even more clearly...
I feel like I've finally found what I've been looking for for so long.
The Egyptian torso greatly impressed me, I have never understood so well the poverty of the civilization in which we live...
The most impressive thing is that at this level of civilization the artist no longer even feels the need for personality. He subscribes to a unique form of beauty, and the most gifted among them reveals himself only in greater subtlety.
The question of virtuosity was resolved the day we admitted the difference between the "tra-la-la-itou" virtuosity of the gypsy, and that necessary for some in painting. Dufy, Watteau, etc. And then, be careful, clumsiness has also been highlighted through snobbery in recent times...

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Letter from Fautrier to Paulhan
Virtuosity

A painter should not be allowed to criticize the greatest of our critics. However, that’s what I’m going to do. For the catalog, no one expected something so advanced. From a preface it became an essay. But in the book, and you have time, your arguments must be tighter. You have to be infinitely harder and leave no escape. Any question asked must be answered on all its sides. And immediately...
The reader must be led with infinitely more brutality so that he feels out of combat from the first pages and only has to accept without discussion everything that follows.
Let's take an example, the first one I came across: "the first criticism was approximately... What virtuosity... Vlaminck himself. Etc." The question virtuosity is therefore posed.
However, in your study you do not answer immediately. You answer color!...
It is only on page 10 that you approach the question of virtuosity to answer it with admirable things, all of which should be preserved, which go to the heart of the question, but which will only be convincing if we expose them with other things...
Yes, virtuosity exists. It is the great ease, the great ease of the line, of the application of color, of the production of glaze paste effects, etc., it is the way of brushing transparent shadows, etc. without hesitation. So let's not deny that virtuosity exists, as we immediately recognize it from one pianist to another... We can even say when it ceases to be virtuosity and becomes gift. Thus: the exact choice of the much desired tone of yellow, the density of this transparent shadow in relation to the light, the exact choice of the quality of this light and its quantity, etc., are no longer virtuosity...
Is it desirable, necessary or despicable? Virtuosity is sometimes desirable. It is neither necessary nor contemptible. However, it is often dangerous. – It is not necessary, because true talent always exteriorizes... Very great painters have expressed themselves without any virtuosity: Cézanne, Braque, and that is enough for the proof to be made that it is not necessary. – It is however desirable for certain temperaments, and moreover we will notice that this virtuosity is less a natural gift than a gift acquired through work and research, because those painters who are virtuosos are precisely those who need this virtuosity, they are those who by their temperament need to paint very quickly. In this case it is desirable. Example Dufy, Manet, Van Gogh, who are no less great for that... - it is dangerous because many hollow temperaments have only applied themselves to this small side and have often succeeded: Harpignies, Vlaminck... This virtuosity itself ruins them...
It is above all dangerous for the public... because the public has great difficulty in distinguishing and even more difficult in understanding that Vlaminck is a bad painter who paints so well, Cézanne a very great painter who paints poorly, Manet a very great painter who paints well! – The only thing the public is able to see is the bad, poorly painted painting  So as soon as... a painting is even a little bit well painted... he thinks he is facing something...
...
On virtuosity, however, there is a parenthesis to open. In drawing, almost all the great designers are virtuosos in their drawings. A drawing in principle must be quickly done. Watteau, Vinci, Michelangelo, Rodin, Guardi, Guys, are all virtuosos. Only Degas is less so, and even then! This semblance of a repeated feature corresponds to his desire...