Letters to Marcel Arland

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

Ticket
About Fautrier and his multiple originals

Fautrier, I don't think you're right; It seems to me that Fautrier has grown up, to the extent that he got rid of his first fireworks. I find the rigor of his latest paintings, their simplicity, their poverty moving. But it doesn't matter. The question is elsewhere: here is a man who invents, against all routines (and financial combinations) a new mode of expression which is to the unique work what the book is to the manuscript. Well, I believe that our duty, against so much shameful, uncertain (or interested) silence, is to support it – at least to make it known. There is a question here that passes art criticism.

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Letter
dated: August 18
Touchant Chazal, outsider art, Jean Dubuffet, Édith Boissonnas

Look, this is all the same our raison d'être, to place emphasis in literature on what has the chance of making it bounce back, of opening up (too bad) new avenues for it.
As if there were also, in the Letters, what can only be understood by surprise, only by being started anew each time.
GOOD. From this point of view, for ten years I have hardly seen anything other than Chazal and Dubuffet (perhaps Édith Boissonnas, but still very much oscillating) who need to be taken into account. Chazal is a sort of solitary marvel: he said everything (and what he said seems perfectly lasting to me.) About art brut, I had many doubts; since D.'s latest discoveries I no longer have one. It will be a movement at least as fruitful as Negro art, and J.D.'s faults – his megalomania, a certain hardness of heart – serve him here instead of harming him. As for its literary impact, it largely depends on us...

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Letter
About Chagall, Picasso

It is impossible for you not to feel what is a little small in Chagall's latest paintings, which makes them resemble, rather than real paintings, enlarged watercolors or gouaches. It is so sensitive, it seems to me, that Maeght and Chagall gave them frames with marie-louises, frames of gouaches: frames which, all in all, suit them extremely well.
A little small, I mean a little petty, a little clever. This does not prevent the truth of everything you say about its color harmonies; but, less excessive (as in the watercolors of Arabian Nights), they touched me more.
(They still affect me, don't make me say what I don't say.)
What is behind this (a little) petty character? Perhaps this: Chagall lived in Germany then in France around 1908-1911. He knows [Franz] Marc (whom he imitates for a while), then the Cubists. He accepts all the freedoms of everyone, without accepting a single one of their problems, a single one of their difficulties. He continued. All in all, he gives us flowers that he didn't pay for.
These are flowers that never cease to enchant me. But ultimately the emotion that Picasso can give me is (it seems to me) of a completely different quality – of a completely different magnitude.
And does a painter need to have any difficulties? That's another question. Note at least that he thus escapes virtuosity (that's already a lot) – this virtuosity to which Chagall indulges.
You tell me that Chagall's paintings make you want to cry. Of course. Me too. But it’s not the very large paintings that move us. Nor in general great works. Grieg makes me want to cry, Stravinsky never does. Mauriac sometimes brought tears to my eyes (yes), never Joyce. I happened to cry after two or three films, Les Misérables for example. I don't think we should wholeheartedly approve of our tears. It’s the silliness that touches you.