"I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and mind, "Pablo said,...

"I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and mind, "Pablo said, "played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate", any more than I "like". I love or I hate. When I love a woman, that tears everything apart- especially my painting. Everybody criticizes me because I've had the courage to live my life in broad daylight- with more destruction than most others, perhaps, but certainly with more integrity and truth also. What annoys me even more is the fact that because Im uninhibited and live that way, everybody thinks I dont like refined things. When I became interested , forty years ago, in Negro art and I made what they refer to as the Negro period in my painting, it was because at that time I was against what was called beauty in the museums. At that time, for most people a Negro mask was an ethnographic object. When I went for the first time, at Derain's urging, to the Trocadero museum, the smell of dampness and rot stuck there in my throat. It depressed me so much I wanted to get out fast, but I stayed and studied. Men had made those masks and other objects for a sacred purpose, a magic purpose, as a kind of mediation between themselves and the unknown hostile forces that surrounded them, in order to overcome their fear and horror by giving it a form and an image. At this moment I realised this was what painting was all about. Painting isnt an aesthetic operation; its a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires. When I came to tht realisation, I knew I had found my way. "

From:     
Category: Art
Date:     01 July 2009
Time:     06:23 PM

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