WOLFGANG PAALEN.

Figure pandynamique, 1940

oil, 51 x 38 inches.
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When the intellectual habits of his culture
become radically changed, the artist must concern
himself with “theories”? whether he wants to or
not. The significant artists of any period have
been more or less theoreticians, it is true; but it
was not indispensable for them to go beyond the
field of their immediate experience in a period
which had a stable system of coordinated intel-
lectual activity based on commonly accepted
values. It is obvious that our period has no
such system. In our time, society is divided by
such antagonistic aims that its intellectual preoc-
cupations become manifest in contradictory and
diverse ‘‘movements”. This conflict reveals itself
in the realm of artistic creation by the general
refusal to accept, even within a single nation or
culture, standard meanings for such terms as
“beauty” and “ugliness”. The consequence is
that these terms can no longer be employed in
serious discussion, for their meanings are always
interpreted by the particular ideology of a given
“movement” or “ism”. It must be conceded
that of late remarkable efforts have been made
to analyze the foundations of an esthetic science;
but so long as even the possibility of such a
science remains subject to discussion, the basic
propositions are necessarily too controversial to
serve the ends of an objective analysis. Moreover,
aur recent encyclopedic knowledge in the matter
of art makes it evident that the usual notions
of “beauty” and “ugliness” are by no means
universal but characteristically limited to a certain
part of occidental culture. It was only at a date
which can be historically specified that the
concepts Of beauty and ugliness assumed such
importance as to seem the raison d’étre of artistic
IMAGE
creation. Other cultures, such as the so-called
“archaic” and “primitive’”’, have had no need of
the concepts. The great anonymous Indian
sculptors of the Pacific Northwest, for instance,
spoke of their work in terms of “right” or
“wrong”. This, and the very existence of
“modern” art, in spite of universal disagreement
in matters of art theory, would suffice to prove
that the notions of “beauty” and “ugliness” are
by no means necessary preconceptions for artistic
creation. The possibility of conceiving of works
of art in terms of “right” or “wrong” implies
their perfect interrelation with the fundamental
problems of the community which produces them.
For the authentic work of art is no “‘superstruc-
ture’ and never has been. Engels was in error
when he wrote: “Men must eat, drink, be
clothed and sheltered before they are able to
concern themselves with politics, art, science or
religion...” But, in their very beginnings pol-
itics, art, science, and religion, were among
the chief means of acquiring food and cloth-
ing. Men who were still sheltered like bears
in the prehistoric caves had an art the expressive
force of which has never been surpassed. And
the first tool of chipped flint was fashioned as
much by “‘science’”’ as by muscle. The irrefutable
evidence of anthropology and psychology is, that
art, science and religion are inseparable in their
origins, in their original meanings as interpreta-
tions of the external world, as the beginnings
of thought. Far from being a late superstructure
they are from the earliest times inseparably
interwoven with the growth and development of
human intelligence. It is hard to understand why
so many social theorists and art critics have over-
 THE NEW
looked the fact that it was an intelligence thus
developed that alone made it possible to achieve
little by little the economic conditions that lie at
the base of subsequent “progress”.
Yet the Marxist error is comprehensible, for
it was chiefly derived from a consideration of
the “official” art of the 19th century. A busi-
ness age founded largely on the idea of individual
profit could of course not achieve a spontaneous
collective expression, a style. In fact, in a civi-
lization in which the true motive is exploitation
of one another, every expression in anyway re-
lated to this motive is necessarily proscribed.
Such a civilization must feel repugnance, and
with good cause, before any sincere visualization
of its real desires — and allows the artists in
its pay nothing but “idealistic”? mummery. Thus
a “bourgeois” civilization, allowing only hypo-
critical expression, could produce nothing but
pseudo-art, a dull and ridiculous pot-pourri of
earlier cultures and styles. “Official art’, so
astonishingly uniform in all “civilized” countries
of the world from the beginning of the last
century to our days, proves it. It was no more
than natural that those art products became as-
sociated with other stupid articles of the luxury
trade and that such an art became a question of
“taste”. (Critics came to take their vocabulary
from the kitchen). In the midst of this civiliza-
tion, that art which is the true expression of
profoundest human needs and desires could only
survive at a terrible price: at the price of quit-
ting its place in daily life. Such was the sig-
nificance of the sad formula “art for art’s sake’.
The conflict appears for the first time without
equivocation in Baudelaire and Courbet. Natu-
talism could hardly be understood otherwise than
as the first “crise de conscience” of modern art.
If Flaubert and Cézanne afterwards came to
confound nature with reality, they only shared
the materialist error of their time. A time
which denounced the poets as another time de-
nounced those who practized -witchcraft. Any
innovating artist was condemned to misery. And
yet Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Van Gogh and some
others tried desperately to rebuild the bridge
between art and life. Since that time art has
been reaffirmed more and more strongly in its
IMAGE
authentic role as one of mankind’s most vital ex-
pressions. When the moulds of a sterile esthetic
were shattered, art became fatally concerned
with the crucial problem of our time: social con-
flict. This is not the place to discuss whether
the most conscious artists have been right in
partially associating their activities with such and
such an aim in the social struggle; but it is they
in any case and not the fashioners of new ivory-
towers in “pure” plastics, who have crystallized
the creative problem, the problem of the role of
the artist in our society. Yet it must be plain
that raising the ethical question in art, intrinsically
important as it may be, is no aid in discussing
the value of certain pictorial expressions, for the
simple reason that there is no less general con-
fusion at present about ethical values than there
is about esthetic values. Thus it is necessary
for the purpose of objective analysis to turn to
the sole (if most restricted) language which
today still can pretend to universality: the lan-
guage of science. But to be aware of the necessity
of scientific method in analysis, does not mean
that such analysis can ever take the place of im-
mediate experience in matters of art.
II
The most complex art movement of the last
fifteen years became particularly interested in an
attempt to give a new collective basis to artistic
creation through the liberation of the unconscious.
This attempt led to the invention of various
techniques belonging to a mode of expression that
is called automatisme. Despite the valid defini-
tions of this automatism by André Breton and
Max Ernst, there is still unfortunately some
confusion about the nature of veritably “‘auto-
matic’? expression. The relevant aspects of au-
tomatism here can be summarized as consisting
of various kinds of techniques of divination,
whose function is to sense unexpected images in
esthetically amorphous material. It is necessary
to distinguish subjective interpretation from au-
tomatism. ‘To interpret a given or to construct
virtual images out of anecdotal representations
can not be called automatic invention. Certainly,
 THE NEW
to dream (in the widest sense of the word) is
an automatic activity, but to relate a dream in
an academic style is with equal certainty not an
automatic activity. Salvador Dali has thus never
made paintings which could be qualified as auto-
matic. This point has to be clearly established,
because his defenders pretend that his academic
style does not matter since he uses it as a means
to relate automatically experienced images. But
it is precisely for this reason that his painting
instead of being automatic is simply an academic
copy of a previously terminated psychological
experience. If as is currently and erroneously
supposed, the symbolical value of an image must
depend on the possibility of identifying it with
an existing entity —even if that entity be a
dream— art would be reduced to the role of a
translator. But the function of the pictorial
image is not merely the prolongation of the
remembrance of a perceived entity or the organ-
ization of visual debris scattered in memory.
The true value of the image, through which
artistic activity is connected with human develop-
ment, lies in its capacity to #roject a new realiza-
tion which does not have to be referred for its
meaning to an object already existing. This
point will appear clearly below; however it may
already be considered as established by the very
fact that the symbolic value of the sign, in certain
cases, does not depend upon its possibility of
being identified with any concrete reality. For
even the sign — which is an intermediate abstrac-
tion between the painted image and the letter
—does not necessarily refer to existing objects.
The sign usually is used with a one way symbolic
meaning with a practical end in view. “V” for
“victory”, for instance, and other such signs are
not identified with actual objects. Instead, they
operate as visual symbols whose function is to
bring about behaviour conducive to the material
realization of the ideas which are so signified.
In the same way, the true value of the artistic
image does not depend upon its capacity to re-
present, but upon its capacity to prefigure, i. e.,
upon its capacity to express potentially a new or-
der of things. In order to distinguish between re-
actionary and revolutionary painting, it is enough
IMAGE
to distinguish between what I shall call the re-
presentative image and the prefigurative image.
Ill
Each conception of the world, each Weltan-
schauung of a given culture has a corresponding
“cosmogony” of pictorial representation; at least
to the extent to which it tries to record its preoc-
cupations in plastic form. ‘Thus each culture
has its own specific imagery. This imagery in
the domain of painting I shall call the representa-
tive image of the culture. The medieval man
had an idea of space quite different from our
own. And in order to reproduce its world, medi-
eval painting emphasized elements which would
be unable to express our world. When the world
of the Middle-Ages changed, owing to the dis-
coveries of philosophers, astronomers, explorers
and others, there came about a modification
(consciously and unconsciously) in pictorial rep-
resentation. This change was invariably brought
about (all the chronicles testify to it) by a mi-
nority, a “van-guard” whose mode of expression
seemed extremely arbitrary if not unintelligible
to most contemporaries, and certainly was not for
them a faithful representation of the world. At
least not until the new fashion of showing became
a habitual fashion of seeing. The duration of
this social lag depends upon the degree of intel-
lectual homogeneity in the society in question.
The majority responded to the- introduction of
perspective in painting with the same lack of
understanding that appeared in our time when
the cubists abandoned perspective. To the con-
temporaries of Uccello it seemed like an absurd
ambition to want to trick the eye of spectators,
asking them to enter into the picture. (Isn't it
Vasari who relates that it was not comprehended
why in those new (Renaissance) pictures the
buildings became actually smaller laterally — or
why the figures became surprisingly diminished
in size, approaching an “arbitrary” horizontal
line?) In following centuries those same “laws”
of perspective were so completely taken for
granted that until Picasso their application was
supposed to be indispensable in all pictorial work.
Our grandfathers could see nothing but coloured
 THE NEW
daubs on the canvases of the Impressionists. But
after Impressionism, coloured shadows had _ be-
come so much a convention, that the painters of
the 20th Century created a rumpus by reintroduc-
ing black shadows. I think that this should suf-
fice for the conclusion that what the average
public of any epoch demands as its comprehen-
sible and adequate representation, the represen-
tation that seems to this public its most exact
reflected image, is nothing more than a sum of
characteristics established by routine, that is to
say: a convention. Thus (and here the goal
comes in sight) the painter who uses the means
of expression considered most exact by his time,
the painter who expresses himself in line with
what is generally understood in his period, ex-
presses himself in a conventional fashion. He
is therefore a conformist, not a revolutionary.
He is in opposition to new experiences, if not
personally, at least through the influence of his
work. In the field of plastic expression what
has been called here the “representative image”
is therefore conventional; and today (for reasons
discussed later) it is reactionary.
IV
Now what —in the most general sense of the
word— is the peculiar representative image of
our time? What is the image in which everyone
recognizes his world without hesitation? What
image is such an unquestioned article of faith
that every experiment would like its testimony?
What image is considered as the ideal standard
of realism in art? The reply is obvious: pho-
tography. Since photography alone can reflect
reality directly and mechanically, all efforts
represent reality have become subordinated to
the criterion of photographic resemblance. It is
thus plain that in our time, realistic painting
produces the representative image. So much so
that it never occurs to the average public to judge
the truth of painting by anything else but its
resemblance to objects existing outside the frame.
To the public of today the invention of the
fixed mirror, photography, seems an ideal means
of control; but before photographic resemblance
IMAGE
became the criterion of truth in painting, no one
even thought of demanding that a painted tree
ought to look like an actual tree. It is therefore
possible to state now objectively for the first
time the major criticism of realistic painting in
our period: Since the realistic image is our rep-
resentative image, those painters who today use
exclusively this means of expression work as
reactionaries.
Considered in itself, realism does not have to
be reactionary. With Courbet realism was revo-
lutionary, in oppositicn to a society which wanted
in art the chic of the beauty-parlor; but realism
is reactionary today, for the very reason that it
is our representalive image sanctioned by conven-
tion. And I hasten to add that photography,
which as a simple mechanical technique is esthet-
ically neutral, can be used in an anti-realistic man-
ner. This, as is generally known, has been done
brillantly by Man Ray, Brassai, Manuel Alvarez
Bravo and others; such photography is the exact
opposite of a painter’s laboriously aping the
technique of photography. It goes without saying
that the general problem of reactionary versus
revolutionary tendencies in art has been posed
in so acute a fashion only since there has been
a modern art, since Courbet and Baudelaire,
i.e., since the innovating artist is found in his
social status to be inevitably an “‘outlaw”. When
painting still bore the whole burden of documen-
tary reproduction, the conflict was naturally less
deep and less visible. It does not exist at all in
the age of mythology, in the Golden Age of so
called “primitive” and “savage” art —because
at this stage of psychological development, as
in the stage of childhood, there is no full con-
sciousness of the distinction between what is per-
to ceived and what is interpreted. Likewise, in a
homogeneous society art is obviously neither re-
volutionary nor reactionary; in such a society there
is therefore no reason to distinguish between
representative and prefigurative images. This
homogeneity explains the apparently paradoxical
fact, that the art of so called “savage’’ peoples,
in spite of its enormous liberties with represen-
tation (liberties as judged from; a naturalistic
viewpoint) is actually the most rigidly traditional
art we know. But when, on the contrary, there
ro
WOLFGANG PAALEN II —Polarités majeures, 1940
oil, 61 x 48 inches.
 THE NEW
is no fundamental social cohesion there can-
not exist a living tradition of values to deter-
mine what subject-matter shall be worthwhile
in art. The truth of this appears in the very
fact (as has been said before) that there is no
longer any agreement today concerning the mean-
ings of “beautiful” and “ugly”. Therefore,
the artist of our time can be authentic only when
he creates new modes of seeing, only when
he is original. When this is understood, it will
become evident that the need for novelty and
originality is no caprice of individualistic ambi-
tion, but the sine qua non of contemporary art.
From which it follows that the modern artist if
not by definition, certainly by fact is revolutionary.
On the other hand all realistic propaganda paint-
ing is reactionary — no matter how many red
flags etc. are pasted into its lucubrations or no
matter whether its realism proclaims itself as
“socialist” or anything else. Everything that
opens the way for new possibilities of experi-
ence is revolutionary — without the need of
superimposed finalities. New experience does
not need deterministic or metaphysical justifica-
tion. Its objective value places it ipso facto in
opposition to any retrogressive tendencies. (Be
it said in passing that an intelligent critique of
style would furnish us with arguments of scien-
tific value against totalitarianism).
Thanks to the prevalent confusion in matters
of art, anybody today who is hopelessly incapable
of doing any sort of job, who cannot even be a
politician, can still proclaim himself an “art-critic”’.
The depth of a critic’s understanding can be meas-
ured only by the depth of his understanding of the
significant things of his own epoch. For past
periods can be interpreted only from the stance
of one’s own time. And apropos of a critic who
claims to understand art only up to the “old
masters” — what about a physicist who cannot
get beyond the physics of Newton?
Vv
It is difficult to understand how, in America,
Dali could be so much overrated at the expense
of Max Ernst, the invaluable inventor — and of
Joan Miré, Ives Tanguy, André Masson and
12
IMAGE
the other significant painters who used just
enough of the realist means to create authentic
works. For I have of course been speaking of
the exclusive use of the realist-representative
image. Dali uses it exclusively. Everything
that he paints can be identified with objects in
the external world which he is content to “liquefy”
instead of creating new forms. How could
Dali’s pseudo-photographic representations of
sorry objects and ragged creatures, who are
obliged to bedeck themselves with all the phoney
paraphernalia of a beggar’s outfitting shop in
order to beg attention, have been compared with
the elegance of Picasso’s fabulous beings, who
dress themselves nonchalantly with just enough
external reality to appear — as angels clothe
themselves to become visible? I esteem Dali as
a poet; he was valuable at the time when he
suggested that his pictures be regarded as anti-
artistic snap-shots, for at that time there was too
much talk of “plastic? value. But he went to
pieces when he began to pontificate as an old
master. His strange career is explained best of
all by the fact that it was he who let the smart-
set satisfy their secret academic predilections by
pretending to an interest in ‘‘modern art”. I do
not speak of Dali because he is particularly
important but because he is the most character-
istic instance of the problem under discussion.
Never having been his dupe, I feel no personal
rancour against him — and instead of attacking
him noisily, as do certain of yesterday’s admirers
of his, I prefer to develop a critique that may
perhaps save us from future Dallis.
VI
Of course Giorgio de Chirico and René Ma-
gritte have also employed exclusively the realis-
tic-representative image. However, it must be
understood that one of the finest accomplishments
of Surrealism was to break down the artificial
barrier between poetry and plastic art. Chirico
had a large part in this achievement. It was as
a poet that he saw a new aspect of reality. By
the time of Chirico’s early paintings, Picasso
had already revealed the new image, but André
Breton had not yet given the new poetry its
 THE NEW
language. The expressive possibilities of the
poetry of that time seemed perhaps less tempting
than those offered in painting. Although equal-
ly gifted for both poetry and painting (as is
proved by his poems and his great book “Heb-
domeros’’), still painting seemed more adequate
to Chirico for the full expression of his vision.
Which is more understandable as in this time
painting actually led the way, opening up many
possibilities that were later more fully discovered
by poetry — just as for instance cubist painting
influenced Guillaume Appolinaire. And so long
as Chirico used the representative image as a
poet he revealed a strikingly new aspect of things
by throwing the elements of reality out of their
usual relations. But the representative image
betrayed him when he placed his trust in it as a
means for himself to see, in place of simply using
it to show. I mean that Chirico as a painter
working against the grain of his times, took to
the wrong track when he stopped using his paint-
ing as a simple means of showing his poet’s
vision. For it was not his vision which deserted
him first. He wrote the stupendous ‘“Hebdo-
meros” at a time when his painting had sunk
into the worst kind of academism. This question
goes far beyond the usual futile discussions about
“better painted” or “‘less well painted”. (Writers,
by confusing specific technical means in painting
with general problems of expression in art, miss
the point).
Understood in this way, Chirico’s tragedy
remains filled with meanings and warnings; and
our mind will still search out a rendez-vous with
itself in the white occultation of his spacious
squares when no one will any longer be interested
in the vulgarities of Dali’s cross-image puzzles.
The picture-puzzle and the enigma — therein
lies the difference between Dali and Chirico.
René Magritte, like Chirico, a philosophical
painter, modestly employs the medium of paint-
ing to portray the mysteries of transparency
upon which he meditates in a very original way.
So long as he refines only his meditation and
does not insist upon academic virtuosity in his
painting, his work will retain a decided personal
and historical significance (which has to be.
denied his followers). Perhaps I can make
13
IMAGE
myself plainer by saying that Magritte (like
Chirico) associates in a purely poetical way; i.e.,
they transpose images of objects, transposing
them unchanged exactly in the manner in which
a poet uses words. (That is why these painters
are so intelligible to the poet and so fascinat-
ing to the painter). With the early Chirico
and (to a lesser degree) with Magritte, objects,
instead of being associated conventionally, are
allowed for the first time to make love-mar-
riages in free encounters which create the whole
drama of their paintings.
With Picasso it is a very different matter. In
his case, objects know only their immediate en-
counter with the painter — who does not give
them time to recognize themselves, but instead
drives them with passionate hate and love from
one metamorphosis to another, until, surpassing
Daphne, they can survive only in perpetual trans-
figuration.
VII
There is a wide-spread error (shared by Ni-
colas Calas) which claims that the image cannot
be more than a matter of memory. Calas for
instance, in the name of Dialectic Materialism,
holds that “the revolution” should never be
considered as “something outside concrete reali-
ty”. But in order to make a revolution, it is
necessary to imagine it first; i.e., it is necessary
to prefigure what could be as distinguished from
what is. In the same way the prefigurative
image does not re-present what exists, but poten-
tially anticipates some features of what will exist.
This is its chief characteristic, a characteristic
hy which it is linked to imagination and thus to
the future, and not like memory to the past. It
would take a book to exhaust this subject. Here
are a few examples of what is meant in the most
restricted: sense by the concept. Some “Jand-
scapes” of Paul Klee surprisingly resemble infra-
red ray photographs, and infra-red photography
was invented many years later. When at last
it became possible to photograph wind, the wind
appeared with the face of Max Ernst’s “Nageur
aveugle” (See “Life”, October 20, 1941, page
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 Hee NeW.
27 and: Max Ernst, Editions ‘Cahiers d’Art’’,
Paris 1937, pages 12 and 80).
Brancusi in sculpture, Tanguy in painting
anticipated streamlining. And a picture that I
was tempted to mistake for a reproduction of a
painting by Kandinsky, style 1912, proved to be
a representation of the very latest air battle of
1941.
The plant-like silhouettes of many of Arp’s
drawings strikingly anticipate the latest achieve-
ments of camouflage; see ““The New York Times
Magazine”, May 25, 1941; and even Gertrude
Stein did not miss the camouflage aspect of
cubism. (Later cubism was sometimes used as
camouflage for certain incurably academic struc-
tures...) Unfortunately, these feeble examples
which first come to my mind, refer mostly to
war. Yet — is it really by accident? Or is it
not that, employed even in this over-simplified
way, the prefigurative questionings are sponta-
neously answered by hints related to the most
crucial preoccupation of these times?
This is not the place to speak of the role of
the prefigurative image in poetry. This role is
generally better understood. As a matter of
literal proof I should like to mention the case of
a friend of mine who, in 1937 in Paris, wrote a
poem with the following line: ...‘‘des aubes
pales comme des axolotl en cristal’ (dawns pale
as axolotls of crystal). We discussed this poeti-
cal image, which seemed too arbitrary; moreover,
neither of us had ever heard of an axolotl of
crystal. Several years later this same friend
discovered in Mexico an Aztec jewel which was
nothing else than an axolotl of rock-crystal.
I do not mean to suggest that modern art
should be used like tea leaves or animal’s entrails
to read the future, but rather to show that the
prefigurative image indicates potentialities of
existence; and that in my -friend’s case, his
discovery proved the prefigurative validity of his
simile.
15
IMAGE
VIII
~ “Who”, said Philostratus in his ‘Life of Ap-
pollonius of Tyana” (3rd century A.D.), “led
Phidias to represent the God he never saw?
Something led him: something full of wisdom.
What? You are unable to suggest anything but
imitation. But it is imagination which created
those forms. Imagination can be thought of as
an artist more subtle than imitation. Imitation
represents things seen; but imagination represents
things which have never been seen’’.
At the dawn as at the setting of the mental
star, the image, like Virgil’s white shade, precedes
thought — and today more than ever we could
assume that it is the image alone which ores
one by one, the doors of Discovery.
For not only is the possibility of rientiieatont
with existing objects a matter of indifference to
the value of the prefigurative image, but, on the
contrary, its potential meanings exist in inverse
ratio to how immediately identifiable the image
is, i.e., how recognizable it is, how known. The
highest justification and the great lesson of
modern art which leaves us filled with hope, is
that what will be, need not be legitimatized by
what is.
The possible does not have to be justified by
the known.
This is the insight that in the midst of all our
troubles, gives us the certitude that some day
the bridge between art and life will be built.
Other men will cross over. And on the other
side it will no longer be phantoms that meet
them. The mountain of glass, whose reverber-
ations sometimes blinded us, which too often
reflected only our own faces, will open for them
and return intact the treasure of their childhood.
Wolfgang Paalen
(Translated from the French by
Robert Motherwell).