The New Object

We are now freely informed, not only by the usual crocodiles, one eye full of tears and the other on the market, but by perfectly serious and respectable connoisseurs, that the Paris School, whatever that means, is finished, whatever that means, or finishing, its matters dead or dying, its little master also, and the epigones lost in the ruins of great refusals.

This must either mean that the effort, the efforts of the past half-century in France are spent, the problems solved, the road closed, or that the affair has turned short for want of executants. Either that nothing remains to be done in this connection, or that what remains to be done remains undone, because there is no one to do it.

I suggest that the painting of Bram and Geer van Velde is an assurance that what goes by the name of the Paris School is in its infancy and has a promising future before it.

An assurance, a double assurance. For they go very different ways, on the same search, the search for an object.

Ici on chante.

The history of painting is the history of its relation to its object, a relation evolving, necessarily, in terms first of extension, then of penetration. What keeps painting alive is first that there are more and more things to paint, then more and more possessive ways of painting them. I don't mean a first phase all expansion and then when this is exhausted a second all concentration. The two attitudes are bound together, turn in turn fatigue and rest. I mean only that the instinctive shudder of painting from its limits is a shudder toward the confines of those limits, and the reflective all in depth, from without to within. I mean only that the object of representation is at all times in resistance to representation, either on account of its accidents or on account of its substance, and primarily on account of its accidents, because in consciousness accident is anterior to substance.

The first systematic investment of the object apprehended, irrespective of its qualities, as indifference, inertia, latency, that is perhaps a definition of the Paris School not more ridiculous than those familiar. It has the advantage, without being in any sense a judgment of worth, of excluding the surrealists, whose concern with repertory, with the renewal of genre, remains as remote from the great enquiry as the Siennese Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo from the effort in depth of Massaccio and Castagno. Giovanni di Paolo is a charming obscurantist. It obscures also those estimable abstracteurs de quintessence Mondrian, Lissitzsky, Malevich, Moholy-Nagy. And it states what is common to such independents as Matisse, Villon, Braque, Bonnard, Kandinsky, Rouault and—what's the man's name?—Picasso, all the usual inevitables. The Christs and clowns of Rouault, the most Chinese still-life of Matisse, a conglomerate by the Kandinsky of 1943 or 1944, proceed from the same effort, the effort to state that in which Christ, a potato and a square of red are one, and from the same distress, the distress before that refusal of that oneness to be stated. For that in which Christ and the rest are one, as far as the painter is concerned, and beyond all question of idiosyncracy, or exteriority or interiority, is that they are things, the thing, thingness. It seems absurd to speak, as Kandinsky did, of a painting freed from the object. What painting is freed of is the illusion that there is more than one object of representation, perhaps even of the illusion that this one object of representation is representable. Object is another word that speaks for itself.

If that is the latest state of the Paris School, after its long pursuit less of the thing than of its thingness, less of the object than of its condition of being object, then it seems justifiable to speak of crisis. For what remains to be represented if the essence of object is to elude representation?

There remain to be represented the conditions of that elusion.

These conditions will appear in one of two ways, according to the subject...