Original subtitles

A VlSlT TO THE LOUVRE

l don't like the primitives.

l don't know Giotto well. l would have to see him.

l am too old now to go off travelling through ltaly.

l hardly ever go into

the room of the primitives. lt's no painting for me. What should they do

for me, the awkwardnesses of Cimabue, the naiveties of Fra Angelico

and even the perspectives of Uccello?

There is no flesh on those ideas.

See. Just look at this.

lt's an idea, it's a whole people,

a heroic moment in the life of a people,

but the fabrics cling, the wings beat, the breasts swell.

l don't need to see the head to imagine the look,

because all the blood

that lashes, circulates, sings

in the legs, the hips, the whole body,

has streamed through the brain, has risen up to the heart.

lt is in motion,

it is the motion

of the whole woman, the whole statue, the whole of Greece.

When the head became detached,

well, the marble bled.

Whereas up there, with the executioner's sword, you can cut

the necks of all those little martyrs.

A little vermilion, some drops of blood, yes!

They have already flown off to God,

bloodless.

One doesn't paint souls.

And see, the wings of Victory,

one doesn't see them, l no longer see them.

One no longer thinks about them, so natural do they seem.

The body doesn't need them to fly off in full triumph.

lt has its own impetus...

Whereas the haloes,

around Christ, the Virgins and the Saints,

they are all one notices. They assert themselves. They disturb me.

What can you do?

One doesn't paint souls. One paints bodies;

and when the bodies are painted well,

damn! the soul, if they had one,

the soul shines forth and shows through from all sides.

lngres, by God, has no blood either.

He draws. The primitives drew.

They coloured,

they carried out a colouring of the missal on a large scale.

Painting, what's called painting,

is born only with the Venetians...

Oh, it's very beautiful, lngres, Raphael and the whole crowd.

l'm not more dense than anyone else.

l find pleasure in line, when l want to. But there is a pitfall there.

Holbein, Clouet or lngres have nothing but line.

Well, that's not enough. lt's very beautiful,

but it's not enough. Look at this Spring.

lt's pure, it's tender, it's suave, but...

it doesn't circle in the air.

The pasteboard rock exchanges none of its stony humidity

with the marble of this damp flesh, or so it should be.

Where is there any pervading penetration?

And since it is the spring,

it should emerge from the water, the rock, the leaves;

it is stuck to them.

By wanting so much to paint the ideal virgin,

he no longer painted a body at all.

Through a systematic mind. The system and mind both wrong.

David killed painting.

They introduced the commonplace.

They wanted to paint the ideal foot, the ideal hand,

the perfect face and stomach,

the supreme being.

They banished character.

What makes a great painter is

the character he gives to everything he touches,

the spurt, the motion, the passion,

for passionate serenity exists.

They are afraid of it,

or rather they didn't think of it.

Through a reaction perhaps

against the passion, the storms, the social brutality of their time.

l know nothing colder than his Marat! What a skimpy hero!

A man who had been his friend,

who had been assassinated, whom he should have glorified

in the eyes of Paris, of all France, of the whole of posterity.

Did he not

patch him up enough with his sheet and blanch him in his bath?

He was thinking about what they would say about the painter, and not

what they would think about Marat.

Bad painter.

And he had had the corpse in front of his eyes.

See, something hideous

are his caricatures. They revealed to me, all at once,

the creaky mechanism of this spirit.

He was perhaps the last who knew his craft,

but what did he do with it, for God's sake?

The trouser buttons of his Distribution of the Eagles.

When, with grand pomp, he should have given us,

in the manner of Titian,

the psychology of all those grooms and all those boors

around their crowned debauchee.

Filthy Jacobin, filthy classicist.

You know

what Taine, in his Origines, says about the classical spirit! Ah! David

is certainly a dreadful example of it. That paragon of virtue!

He even managed

in his art to castrate that lecher lngres,

who nevertheless adored females.

But this is painting. This is painting.

The detail, the whole, the volumes,

the values, the composition, the frisson,

everything is in it.

Just listen, it's terrific.

What are we?

Close your eyes, wait, stop thinking about anything.

Open them.

Well? All you perceive is a large coloured undulation, an iridescence,

colours, a richness of colours.

That is what a picture should give us first, a harmonious warmth,

an abyss, into which the eye is plunged, a muted germination.

A coloured state of grace.

All these tints flow in your blood, don't they? One feels reinvigorated.

One is born into the real world.

One becomes oneself, one becomes painting.

To love a picture, you first have to have drunk it thus,

in long draughts, to lose consciousness,

to go down with the painter

to the dark, tangled roots of things,

to ascend again with the colours, to blossom out into the light with them.

To know how to see. To feel.

Look, this one was happy. And he makes all those who understand him happy.

Things, beings entered into his soul with the sun,

without anything separating them from the light for him,

without drawing, without abstractions, all in colour.

They emerged one day,

the same, but one doesn't know why, dressed in gentle glory.

Completely happy,

as though they had breathed a mysterious music.

The radiant person, look, in the middle of this group,

to whom the women and dogs are listening,

which the men are stroking with their strong hands.

The richness of thought in pleasure and of pleasure in health,

just listen, l think it is Veronese, the richness of the idea in colours.

He covered his canvases with a huge grisaille, yes,

as they all used to do in that period, and it was his first undertaking,

just as with a piece of the earth, before the sun or the spirit rise.

Underpainting, underpaintings. Didn't l say so? He prepared,

out of an immense grisaille, the fleshless, anatomical,

skeletal idea of his universe, the mellow framework he needed,

and which he was to clothe with nuances,

with his colours and his glazes, accumulating the shadows.

A big pale, sketched world, still in limbo.

l seem to see it,

look, between the weave of the canvas and the prismatic warmth of the sun.

Today, they impaste straight away,

they plunge in uncouthly, like a mason,

and they think themselves very skilled, sincere. Go to blazes! They have lost

that science of preparation, that fluid vigour,

that underpaintings give.

Modelling,

no, modulating.

You have to modulate.

Today they go back over, they scrape,

they scrape again, they thicken. lt's mortar.

Or else, the most cursory of them, you know,

roughly outline their figures, their objects,

with a crude, schematic, emphatic line,

and then fill in right to the edge with plain tints.

lt's as shrill as a poster, painted as though stencilled, all neat and tidy.

Nothing lives.

Whereas you see that dress, that woman, that creature,

against that table-cloth,

where does the shadow begin on her smile,

where does the light caress, drink, imbibe this shadow?

One doesn't know. All the tints interpenetrate,

all the volumes rotate, fitting together. There is a continuity.

l don't deny that sometimes, with nature, there are

those abrupt effects of shade and light in violent strips,

but that's not interesting. Above all, if it becomes a procedure.

What is magnificent

is to bathe a whole immense, infinite composition like this one

in the same subdued and warm light

and to give the eye the living impression that all these breasts

are really breathing, just like you and l,

the golden air that suffuses them.

Basically, l'm sure, it's underpaintings,

the secret soul of underpaintings,

that, keeping everything bound together, gives overall strength and lightness.

One has to begin neutrally.

After that, he could enjoy himself to the full, do you understand?

Good Lord! The perfect, exquisite, bold knack

of all the branch work of material that matches,

the intertwined arabesques, the gestures that carry on.

ls that enough? No, but really, is that enough?

You can examine details.

All the rest of the painting will always follow you, will always be present.

You will sense the murmur around your head,

of the fragment you are studying.

You cannot tear anything out of the whole.

They were not painters of fragments, those,

like us.

Beside that, something in the moderns flinches.

What? Tell me, what? We shall see. Look, start from the left there,

set off from that pillar, is it made of marble, damn it!

And slowly, with your eyes, go round the table...

ls it beautiful? ls it alive?

And at the same time, is it transfigured, triumphant, miraculous,

in another world and yet completely real.

The miracle is there,

water changed into wine, the world changed into painting.

One swims in the truth of the painting.

To think, l once wanted to burn that.

Out of a mania for originality, invention.

When one doesn't know, one thinks that it's those who know

who block you. Whereas, on the contrary,

if you frequent them,

instead of obstructing you they take you by the hand and nicely,

next to them, make you murmur your little story to you.

This, for example,

is perhaps still more terrific.

This silver scale...

The whole prism melting into white.

And what l love

in all these pictures of Veronese

is that you can't ramble on about them.

One loves them

if one loves painting.

One doesn't love them

if one looks for literature on the side,

if one gets carried away

by the anecdote, the subject.

A picture doesn't represent anything,

shouldn't represent anything at first

except colours...

l loathe that, all those stories,

that psychology,

that tittle-tattle surrounding them.

By God, it's in the painting,

painters aren't stupid,

but you have to see it with your eyes,

with your eyes, do you hear me?

The painter didn't intend anything else.

His psychology is the meeting

of his two tints. His emotion is there.

lt's there

that his story is, his truth, his depth.

Because he's a painter, don't you see!

And not a poet, or a philosopher.

The story goes that

during the night the Saviour was born

the vines blossomed

throughout Palestine.

We painters should paint

the blossoming of those vines,

rather than the whirls of angels

trumpeting the Messiah.

Let us paint only what we have seen,

or what we could see...

Like him, look.

Let us beautify and ennoble

with a grand carnal dream

all our conceptions.

But let us bathe them in nature.

Let us not drag nature to them.

So much the worse if we can't.

You understand,

in Le D�jeuner sur l'herbe

Manet should have added, l don't know,

a frisson

of that nobility,

one doesn't know what, that, here,

transports all our senses to paradise.

See the golden flow of the large woman,

the back of the other one:

they are alive,

and they are divine.

The whole landscape in its russet colour

is like a supernatural eclogue,

a balanced moment of the universe

in its perceived eternity,

in its more human joy.

And one participates in it,

one doesn't hold anything

of one's life in contempt.

lt's like there... Over there is a stupendous still life.

Murillo must have painted angels,

but what ephebes,

see how well their nervous feet rest on the flagstone.

Truly they are worthy of peeling

those beautiful vegetables, those carrots and cabbages,

of seeing themselves in those cauldrons.

The painting was commissioned, wasn't it?

He let himself go, for once. He saw the scene,

he saw dazzling beings enter that convent kitchen,

young celestial cart-drivers,

the beauty of youth, bursting health,

in all those mystic, exhausted, tormented beings.

See how he contrasts the sallow thinness,

the hysterical ecstasy, of the praying saint

with the calm gestures, the radiant certitude

of all those beautiful workers.

And the vegetables!

You pass from the turnips and the plates to the wings

without a change of air. Everything is real.

Tintoretto, there is the painter.

Just as Beethoven is the musician, Plato the philosopher...

l have glanced at all of his work l could find.

lt's gigantic. Everything is there,

from still life to God.

lt is an immense arc. All forms of existence,

and in unbelievable pathos, passion and invention.

lf l had gone to Venice it would have been for him.

lt seems that one can only know him there.

Chaste and sensual, brutish and cerebral, as voluntary as inspired,

apart from sentimentality, l think this Tintoretto knew everything

of what gives man joy and torments him.

Listen, l can't talk about it without trembling.

His tremendous portraits

made him familiar to me.

The one that Manet copied...

lt's like a C�zanne.

Ah, l wouldn't mind!

You know, it seems to me that l knew him. l can see him,

crushed by work, exhausted by colours,

in that room, hung with purple, of his little palazzo

like me in my shed at Jas de Bouffan,

but he always, even in broad daylight,

illuminated by a smoky lamp,

with the kind of marionette theatre

where he prepared his large compositions.

An epic puppet show!

lt seems that when he left his easels,

he came there, and fell down exhausted.

Always unsociable, he was a surly person consumed by sacrilegious desires.

Yes, yes... there is a tremendous drama in his life.

l daren't say what it is.

Sweating in large drips, he got his daughter to put him to sleep,

he got his daughter to play the cello for hours.

Alone with her, in all those red reflections.

He sank into that enflamed world into which the smoke of ours vanishes.

l can see him... l can see him... The light divested itself of evil.

And towards the end of his life, he, whose palette vied with the rainbow,

declared he no longer valued anything but black and white.

His daughter was dead.

Black and white! Because colours are malicious, they torture,

you understand. l am familiar with that nostalgia.

Does one know? One seeks a permanent peace.

That paradise.

Come on, to paint this whirling rose of joy

one has to have suffered a lot, suffered a lot, you can bet your boots.

We are at the other pole, here.

Down there, the handsome prince Veronese.

Here, the galley slave Tintoretto.

That poor wretch

who loved everything,

but whose every desire was consumed by a fire, a fever

as soon as it was born.

Look at his sky. His gods circle, circle.

Their paradise isn't calm. This rest is a storm.

They continue the momentum which,

like him,

has devoured them all their life.

They rejoice in it now after having suffered from it so much.

l like that.

And look at this white foot here on the left. The underpaintings again.

He prepared his flesh tones in white.

Then, with a red glaze, bang!

see next to it, he gave them life.

Black and white. l no longer want to paint except in black and white,

he cried at the end. How would he have done it?

How could he have done without his torture?

One can expect anything from a fellow like that. ln his youth

he had the cheek to assert: Titian's colour

in Michelangelo's drawing. And he managed it.

Titian had thrown him out.

Basically, he who could reproduce, simply,

the Seine, Paris, a day in Paris,

could come in here with his head held high.

You have to be a good workman. Simply to be a painter.

Orange colour to express Achilles' anger and the flames of Troy,

green, the voyages of Ulysses and the swirl of the ocean.

But that isn't the formula!

Yes, yes, the formula that grips you.

Here there are only two: Delacroix and Courbet.

The rest are scoundrels.

We are all there in this Delacroix.

When l talk to you about the joy

of colours for colours' sake,

see, this is what l mean.

These pale roses, these stuffed cushions,

these slippers, all this limpidity,

goes into your eye like a glass of wine

down your throat,

and one immediately becomes drunk.

One doesn't know how,

but one feels lighter.

These nuances lighten and purify.

lf l had done something wrong,

it seems to me l would come here

to set myself straight.

And it is packed tight. The tints

flow into each other like silks.

Everything is stitched together.

And that's why it turns out.

lt's the first time someone painted

a volume since the greats.

And with Delacroix, needless to say,

there is something, a fever,

that the ancients lack.

The happy fever of convalescence.

With him, painting

emerges from stagnation,

from the disease of the Bolognese.

He casts David aside.

He paints by iridescence.

And he's convinced that the sun exists

and that one can dip one's brushes in it

and do one's washing.

He knows how to differentiate.

lt's not like with lngres, over there,

and all those who are here.

A silk is a fabric,

and a face is made of flesh.

The same sun, the same emotion

caresses them, but becomes diversified.

On this negress's side, he knows

how to hang a material

that doesn't have the same scent

as the perfumed breeches

of this Georgian woman,

and it is in the tints that he knows this

and puts it.

He contrasts.

All these peppery nuances,

with all their pungency,

the bright harmony they give.

And he has a sense of the human being,

of life in motion,

balminess.

Everything moves, everything shimmers.

The light!

ln his interior.

There is more warm light

than in all Corot's landscapes

and the battles over there.

Look. His shadow is coloured.

He gives a sheen to his shade

that softens everything.

His Entry of the Crusaders, it's dreadful,

one might as well say you don't see it. We no longer see it.

l who am speaking to you, l saw

this picture die, grow pale, fade away. lt makes you weep.

From decade to decade it's fading.

One day, there will be nothing left of it.

lf only you had seen the green sea, the green sky.

lntense.

And how much more dramatic the smoke was then,

the burning ships,

and how the whole group of knights presented itself.

When he exhibited it, they protested

that the horse, this horse, was pink. lt was magnificent.

A glow.

But these damned romantics, with their disdain,

used atrocious materials. The suppliers

robbed them in broad daylight.

lt's like G�ricault's Shipwreck,

a superb page. One no longer sees anything.

Here there still remains the gnawed melancholy of the faces,

the sadness of these people with spurs,

but all of that, we remember, was in Delacroix's hues,

and the background having dimmed,

its effect, its soul, is no longer there.

l still saw them, those pallid wreathed people.

They no longer stand out in a blaze,

in that oriental breeze.

There, see, is what proves

better than anything that Delacroix is a real painter,

a devil of a good painter. lt's not the anecdote about the crusaders,

they were cannibals, they say,

it's not their seeming humanity,

it was the tragic nature of his tints that made his picture

and that expressed all the rotten soul of those dismal conquerors.

At that time the beautiful dying Greek lady,

the woman in silk abandoned in her rich finery,

the old man's beard, the carapaced horses, and the dark lance-poles,

in their lilting fusion assumed all their meaning.

They died, cried and snorted. ln colours. Now

all that is left is an image.

As for The Women of Algiers, they have not altered.

The Entry was painted just as vividly.

Delacroix is romanticism, perhaps.

He gorged himself too much on Shakespeare and Dante. He remains

France's most beautiful palette.

And no one beneath our sky, just listen,

more than him has had charm and pathos at the same time,

vibration in colour.

And Courbet?

A builder.

A crude temperer of plaster.

A colour-grinder. His masonry was like a Roman's.

And he, too, a real painter. There's no one in this century

to beat him.

And however much he rolls up his sleeves,

pulls his felt hat down over his ears, dismantles the column,

his technique is classical beneath his big brawling airs.

He is profound, calm, velvety.

Some nudes by him, as golden as a harvest,

l dote on. His palette smells of corn.

Yes, yes, Proudhon turned his head with his realism,

but basically this famous realism is like the romanticism of Delacroix,

he only made it appear, come what may,

with large brush-strokes in a few canvases,

his rowdiest and surely the least beautiful.

And even then his realism lay more in the subject, after all,

than in the craft. He always sees compositionally.

His vision is that of the old masters. lt's the same with the knife:

he only used it for landscape. He is a refined person, a stickler.

You know Decamps' saying:

Courbet is a crafty one. He paints crudely,

but he puts fine work on top.

And me, l say that it is the strength, the genius

that he put underneath.

However much he may paint large, he is subtle.

Courbet is the great painter of the people.

And of nature. His great contribution is the lyrical introduction of nature,

of the smell of damp leaves, of the mossy surfaces of the forest,

into nineteenth-century painting,

the murmur of the rain, the shade of the woods,

the progress of the sun under the trees.

The sea.

And the snow.

He painted snow like no one else!

Those large white, flat landscapes,

beneath the greyish twilight, without any unevenness,

completely smooth.

Fantastic, a winter silence.

And the sunset, the strip tinged with blood, the pond,

the tree taking flight with the animal, in the animal's eyes.

All those Savoyard lakes with the lapping of the water,

the mist that rises from the banks, envelops the mountains.

The big wave, with its tangling of foam, its tide

that comes from the depths of time,

all its ragged sky and its ghastly harshness.

They say he painted this after the death of his mother.

He had shut himself off at Ornans for a year. lt was the villagers

who posed for him, without posing. He had them in his eye.

ln a sort of attic.

They came to recognise themselves.

He mingled these grotesque figures with his grief.

Flaubert.

But that's what they said. Legend is stronger than history.

His mother was not dead. She posed. She is in a corner.

But to say how moving the instrument is.

lt recreates, it imagines life. Yes, just as Flaubert drew the novel

out of Balzac,

Courbet,

perhaps, out of the romantic upsurge,

the expressive truth of Delacroix, drew...

Do you remember

in that journey he makes, old Flaubert,

in Par les Champs et par les Gr�ves,

that burial he recounts,

and that old woman who is weeping as it rains.

Each time l re-read it, l think of Courbet. The same emotion.

Damn! how beautiful it is... look at this dog.

Velazquez! Velazquez!

Philip's dog is less of a dog, for all that it was a king's dog.

You have seen it. And the choirboy, that red chubby...

Let Renoir try and match it.

Only Courbet knows how to lay on black,

without making a hole in the canvas. Only he.

Here, like in his rocks and his tree trunks over there.

ln a single stroke he could descend through a slice of life,

the wretched existence of one of those beggars, look,

and then he came back, with pity,

good-natured as a gentle giant who understands everything.

Caricature is drenched in tears.

Who understands Courbet? They throw him in prison in that vault.

l protest.

l shall alert the newspapers.

Vall�s...

Let this canvas be taken to its place in the light.

Let it be seen.

We have something like this in France and we hide it.

Why not set fire to the Louvre, then...

straight away, if one is afraid of what is beautiful.

l am C�zanne.