Status Updates From چشم پاینده: جستارهایی دربار...

58/295 pages

Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He bombards it&each time the smoke clears,the castle is as solid as ever. Thwarted,he declares the site of no strategic interest anyway.Braque,he says, merely has 'charm'; he has gone back to 'French painting', becoming the 'Vuillard of Cubism'.He tells him his pictures are 'well hung.' Braque replies that Picasso's ceramics are 'well cooked'.

Colour was regarded as suspect by classical Cubism: it was 'anecdotical', it blurted, it carried too much information, it distracted from the pursuit of form. So it had to be whipped into line - literally: that old French battle between colour and line was now taking a new turn. By 1910-1911 you could have any colour you liked, so long as it was grey, brown or beige.

Bonnard is the painter of the Great Indoors, even when he is painting the Great Outdoors. One London critic,infuriated by such dense luxuriance, described the gardens glimpsed through Bonnard's windows as 'over-planted'. At last, a painter brought before the tribunal of Gardener's Question Time ('And whiles we're about it,that Douanier Rousseau's feller's bin plantin' too many of them giant succulents on his patch').

Cézanne was well read in the classics; and also proved that it is possible, if rare, to be a Balzacian, a Stendhalian and a Flaubertian all at the same time. Monet called him 'a Flaubert of painting': certainly, Cézanne had the monkishness required; also the belief that the artist behind the art should remain obscure. Though he was also - unlike Flaubert - rather prudish and proper when it came to women.(1/2)