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All pictures by A/Z;
De la soi-disant gueule criminelle et blasphematoire, contre Grégoire Richter:
"Als Artist hat man keine Heimat in Europa außer in Paris; die delicatesse in allen fünf Kunstsinnen, die Wagner's Kunst voraussetzt, die Finger für nuances, die psychologische Morbidität, findet sich nur in Paris. Man hat nirgendswo sonst diese Leidenschaft in Fragen der Form, diesen Ernst in der mise en scene — es ist der Pariser Ernst par excellence."
(Nietzsche)
"Et Manet réinvente (ou peut-être invente-t-il?) le tableau comme matérialtè... cette barre qui redouble la verticale et l'horizontale de la toile... des paquets de volumes... le jeu de ces surfaces... les fibres, le tissu de la toile... cet entrecroisement de fils... ce jeu de plis, le mouvement qui va de l'horizontale à la verticale... deux regards dans les directions opposées, recto verso et aucune spectacle ne nous est donée... regards tournés vers l'invisible... l'invisibilité de ce qui est regardé..." (Foucault, La Peiture de Manet).
"... if we still add... a consideration of weight, pressure, resistance, movement, as distinguished from motion, we arrive at what may legitimately be called design in a fourth dimension, or the harmonic use of what may arbitrarily be called volume" (Morton Schamberg, quoted in Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension);
"In our three dimensional universe every body has a thickness in a fourth dimension, which is variable in different bodies, but invariable in the same body, and that fourth-dimensional thickness is the body's density..." (A. G. Blake, quoted in Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension);
"Cézannism then had an incredible effect, or affection of the painterly centers of the youth. The critics explained this effect by the fact that Cézanne was a bad painter, bad drawer, and bad colorist, generally mediocre, and as it is well known, young people are always influenced only by bad things. After him came Cubism, Futurism, and Suprematism, the last a very malignant foolishness" (Malevich);
"... ses peinture étaient des feux grégeois, des bombes atomiques, dont l'angle de vision, à côté de toutes les autres peintures qui sévissaient à cette époque, eût été capable de déranger gravement le conformisme larvaire de la bourgeoisie second Empire... Et même la nature extérieure, avec ses climats, ses marées et ses tempêtes d'équinoxe ne peut plus, après le passage de Van Gogh sur terre, garder la même gravitation..." (Artaud, Le suicidé de la societé);
"Elle s'introduisit donc dans son corps, cette société... et possédée effaça en lui la conscience surnaturelle qu'il venait de prendre, et telle une inondation de corbeaux noirs dans les fibres de son arbre interne, le submergea d'un dernier ressaut, et, prenant sa place, le tua..." (Artaud, Le suicidé de la societé);
"This pulse they employ is not understood to be structurally distinct from vision but to be at work from deep inside it... Insofar as they insist that it is not temporal, the beat they employ must, in some sense, be figural, but of an order of the figure that is far away from the realm of space that can be neatly opposed to the modality of time... there is a third order of the the figure, one that Lyotard calls matrix, beyond the reach of the visible, that works underground... passivity" (Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious);
"... only discrete frequencies of light can be emitted, corresponding to the discrete jumps between the various possible energy levels..." (David Bohm, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics);
"... un éclairage frontal et perpendiculaire... aucun relief, aucun modelé... une sorte d'émail... brutalement et d'en face... à plat..." (Foucault, La Peiture de Manet);
"Yesterday I had a mood of split consciousness where it seemed I was observing the globe from the outside... it was difficult to come back to the trivia of everyday life... displacement in the country of the fourth dimension is enacted by what one used to call transmutation... being continuous, no movement in the ordinary sense of the word can be produced... In our inner visions, the different fragments which float in our heads are incoherently situated... Some parts penetrate each other; others seem completely detached... we must draw lines and establish a structural coherence..." (Frantisek Kupka as quoted in Henderson's The Fourth Dimension);
"Duchamp begins by setting up his condition that a point does not cut [cross] a three-dimensional continuum whereas a line does. By analogy... a line does not cut [cross] a four-dimensional continuum but a plane does" (Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension);
"Il y a donc bien une intuition des continus à plus de trois dimensions et si elle exige une attention plus soutenue que l'intuition géométrique ordinaire, c'est sans doute une affaire d'habitude, et aussi l'effet de la complication rapidement croissante des propriétés des continus quand augmente le nombre des dimensions" (Poincaré, Pourquoi l'espace a trois dimensions);
"Isn't repeating oneself precisely what painting allows one to do, especially once one has found one's particular language, the stylistic invention that will allow one to move inside it and inhabit it, growing and changing within the new syntax one can call one's own?" (Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious);
"As the instrument of penetration the wedge is gendered male. And the wounded sphere is female. But as labial surface stroked by its active, possessing partner, the wedge reverses its sex, flipping into an unmistakable image of the genitality of the woman. Swish. Flip. Alter... Lips" (Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious);
"'Que pensez-vous de Rodin?' Matisse finit en affirmant très haut: 'Ses dessins, aquarelles, n'on pas été mis à leur place méritée: une place majeure. Il n'y a pas un artiste digne de ce nom qui ne lui doive quelque chose...' Seul, Alberto Giacometti, à qui je faisais part dans les années profondes de ce jugement, était tout à fait d'accord avec Henri Matisse, et j'ajouterai: avec moi."
André Masson (Conversations avec Henri Matisse/ Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)
"Déterminer des formes rigides et les remplir de couleurs, c'est Gauguin qui a commencé à nous jouer ce tour-là: ce que précisément lui reprochait Cézanne. L'influence de Gauguin fut considérable, souvent ignorée, parfois inavouée, et pourquoi inavouée? — Parce que 'en principe' l'oeuvre de Cézanne était, moralement, considérée comme majeure. Exemplaire. Mais la route indiquée était trop abrupte, et les pentes, redoutables. Il a été choisi, en général, de rester chez soi, ou de fuir... avec Gauguin."
André Masson (Commentaires sur Paul Cézanne/ Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)
"L'intelligence des avatars de la peinture chez Delacroix est illustrée par deux propos fameux. Le premier: 'Si on pouvait vivre cent-vingt ans, on saurait que Titien est le plus grand des peintres'. Le second: 'La tradition finit à David'. C'est indiscutable. Titien inaugure et fait triompher pendant deux longs siècles la picturalité."
André Masson (Le peintre et la culture/ Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)
"Le Brésil a collé sur sa rétine un fort attrait pour les tons francs, voire outrés, en tout cas tranchés, et il s'insurge contre tous les tarabiscotages, les demi-mesures, fondues et confondues dans un modelé trop soigné... Il n'a rien oublié du sort des esclaves au Brésil."
Sophie Chauveau (Manet Le secret)
"And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us... Nature sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master."
Whistler
"And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us... Nature sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master."
Whistler
"Cabaret Voltaire borrowed their name from Dada. Pere Ubu took theirs from Alfred Jarry. Talking Heads turned a Hugo Ball sound poem into a tribal-disco dance track. Gang of Four, inspired by Brecht and Godard's alienation effects, tried to deconstruct rock even as they rocked hard. Lyricists absorbed the radical science fiction of William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick, and techniques of collage and cut-up were transplanted into the music. Duchamp, mediated by 1960s Fluxus, was the patron saint of No Wave. The record cover of the period matched the neomodernist aspirations of the words and music, with graphic designers like Malcolm Garret and Peter Saville and labels like Factory and Fast Product drawing from constructivism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, John Heartfield, and Die Neue Typographie. This frenzied looting of the archives of modernism culminated with the founding of renegade pop label ZTT—short for Zang Tuum Tumb, a snatch of Italian futurist prose-poetry—and their conceptual group the Art of Noise, named in homage to Luigi Russolo's manifesto for a futurist music."
Simon Reynolds"Debussy ;cedo detectou essa crise [que se instaurou no código da composição ocidental, o chamado 'sistema tonal']... não hesitou em lançar ouvidos a outros repertórios musicais não ocidentais que iriam arejar ainda mais sua intuição criadora. A participar daquele estado de coisas, Debussy preferiu, às vezes, como Mallarmé, o isolamento, a reflexão e a própria inatividade."
"Não fosse o entusiasmo de alguns pintores, poetas e escultores que faziam parte de um júri de 28 pessoas, o prêmio [Prix de Rome] lhe teria sido negado mais uma vez... Roma, porém, torna-se para Claude Debussymais um pesadelo do que uma boa oportunidade para trabalho e reflexão."
"Não fosse o entusiasmo de alguns pintores, poetas e escultores que faziam parte de um júri de 28 pessoas, o prêmio [Prix de Rome] lhe teria sido negado mais uma vez... Roma, porém, torna-se para Claude Debussymais um pesadelo do que uma boa oportunidade para trabalho e reflexão."
"Dando aula e acompanhando solistas, Debussy obtém recursos para manter um padrão de vida modesto, porém, independente — pessoal e artisticamente."
"No início da década de 1890, numa de suas andanças noturnas pelos becos de Montemartre, Debussy vai ao cabaré 'Chat Noir'e surpreende-se com a figura do pianista local: nada mais nada menos do que o precursor do impressionismo Erik Satie.... Aí nasce uma amizade que se tornaria a mais fiel e duradoura cultivada por esse homem de poucos amigos em sua existência — quase três décadas. Os detratores falavam num relacionamento homossexual entre ambos. Satie passava dias inteiros em casa de Debussy, compondo e usando o seu piano, pois, na espelunca onde morava em Arcueil, bairro pobre, distante 16km de Paris, de onde vinha a pé diariamente à cidade, nem sequer um instrumento existia."
"Satie chama a atenção de Debussy para a importância dos pintores impressionistas, apresentando-lhe vários deles, entre os quais Monet, Cézanne e Toulouse-Lautrec. O mesmo aconteceu em relação à poesia da época, o simbolismo, cujo auge se deu no início dos anos 90."
"[o uso do silêncio como climax dramático em Pelléas e Mélisande] é, sem dúvida, mais um dado que Debussy legou às futuras gerações, ou seja, o silêncio como elemento estrutural da composição (lebre-se do 'branco da página' no 'poema-estrutra' de Mallarmé 'Um lance de dados')."
"Magoado com a incompreensão e indiferença com que foram recebidas suas últimas obras, traumatizado com a queda de bombas alemãs sobre Paris e seminarcotizado pelos efeitos da morfina que era obrigado a tomar, a fim de poder suportar as dores causadas por sua enfermidade, Debussy viveu angustiadamente os últimos momentos de sua existência: 'Se a morta-viva, irmã de Roderick Usher, penetrasse em meu quarto eu não me surpreenderia e iniciaria com ela um sereno diálogo..."
Júlio Medaglia (Música Impopular)
See also (ce qui n'est pas d'inspiration diabolique):
And also: