The "Ensemble Concertant" of Reverdy and Picasso's Le Chant des morts

THE COMPARATIST THE "ENSEMBLE CONCERTANT OF REVERDY AND PICASSO'S LE CHANT DES MORTS Richard L Hattetxkxf Painters' books, or livres depeintres, present the critical reader with a problem: what is or can be the relationship between literary and visual "texts?" Are both to be read on an equal basis, or is one element to be seen as ancillary, or even, superfluous? Are there points common to both poetry and the visual works, or are they each, as Lessing and others have insisted, subject to the estrangement and closure of their temporal versus spatial aspects? In considering an artist's book, the critical reader finds himselfface to face with the necessity of discovering a theoretical approach, without which little can be said. The theoretical literature in the field ofinterartistic relationships offers many solutions, but seems to be divided into opposing camps. The oldest of these (Aristotle, Simonides of Ceos, Horace) appears to revolve around a conception of art as mimetic, a point of view that traditionally assumed the priority ofthe external world, i.e., a realist approach to artistic creativity. Artistic merit in all the arts was measured according to its degree ofcloseness to nature, ofpresence and natural being (enérgeia). Painting was valued above poetry, as it was thought that the iconic scene of the visual arts described the external world more directly than the verbal arts. Poetry was seen as an art of imitation and counterfeit, and strove to be the speaking picture mentioned by Simonides of Ceos. Art, both literary and visual, aimed at the confusion ofboundaries illustrated in the story about the painting ofgrapes by the ancient Greek artist, Zeuxis. The self-referential artificiality ofthe arte was ignored, or rather assumed to be the weakness that had to be overcome by an ever-increasing degree ofdescriptive and visual resemblance to the commonly experienced exterior world of sense impressions. The opposing evaluation of interartistic relationships is based on non-mimetic values andfollows the emphasis on inwardness during the Romantic Period (see Praz, Steiner). Art in that perspective was no longer concerned with the mimetic reproduction of the universally recognized exterior or perceptible world, but rather concentrated its creative energies on the expression of personal, inward feelings. Worlds were created beyond the phenomena ofthe receptible universe; reality became subjective, to a point where, with the Symbolists, the true reality was the one beyond and invisible to the apparent world of the physical senses, and perceived only obliquely through art. While, in this tradition, the signifié of aesthetic images remained, in part, a reality beyond the art form itself, greater emphasis was given to the form and material ofthe arts: sound, word, typography, paint, surface, etc. This increase in self-referentiality reflected, in the realm of technique, the inwardness of the Romantic poets and artiste, and was 123 REVERDYAND PICASSO'S CHANT DES MORTES carried over into some aspects ofmodernist poetry and painting, which put into question the nature of mimesis, as well as the ontic mode of the subject matter ofpainting and poetry. There was a growing awareness of the conventional, artificial character of all semantic systems. The insistent linking of all art forms to empirical reality in the ut pictura poesis tradition broke down. The Moderns no longer saw creative expression as a mirror oriented on the exterior world, but rather on the interior world; original and personal, creative expression was not a mere reflection ofthe artist-poet. It reflected worlds imagined by the poet and contributed an aesthetic reality of its own that could be included among the other objects of the exterior world. The arts, in a structuralist perspective (see Mukafovsky),1 differ according to the various media they employ, and not according to their degree of mimetic iconicity. Modern inquiries into the nature ofthe sign have made it possible to reconsider interartistic relationship from a new perspective. Charles Sanders Peirce, philosopher and semiotician, thought that almost anything in the world may function significantly, that is as a sign. According to Peirce, any sign that signifies must be seen as triadic in nature: A sign or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respects or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is...