And So the Circle Closed

     Between 1908 and 1910 I made my first attempts at overcoming
the legacy of conventional biases and art forms.  This was a tormenting
period for me.  I lived alone between Weggis and Greppen in Switzerland,
at the foot of the Rigi.  In winter I would go for months at a time
without seeing another human being.  I read, drew, and looked out the
window of my small room at the mountains hung with clouds of snow.
The landscape surrounding me was an abstract one.  I had sufficient
leisure to devote myself to philosophy.
     In December 1915 I met Sophie Taeuber in Switzerland; she had
already freed herself from traditional art.  First we suppressed
everything in our work that smacked of playfulness and good taste.
We even felt the personality to be burdensome and useless, since it
had developed in a world now petrified and lifeless.  We sought new
materials unburdened by tradition.  Alone and together we embroidered,
wove, painted, and pasted static, geometric pictures.  The results
were rigorous and impersonal constructions of surfaces and colors.
Any element of chance was eliminated.  No spot, no rip, no fiber, no
inaccuracy was to perturb the clarity of our work.  For our paper
pictures we even discarded scissors, which we had originally used 
but which all too readily betrayed the life of the hand.  We used 
a paper cutter instead.  In our joint work-- the great embroideries,
weavings, paintings, collages-- we humbly tried to approach the pure
radiance of reality.  I would like to call these works the art of
silence.  It rejects the exterior world and turns toward stillness,
inner being, and reality.  With rectangles and squares we built radiant
monuments to deepest sorrow and loftiest joy.  We wanted our works
to simplify and transmute the world and make it beautiful.  Our art,
however, in no wise disturbed the bourgeois in his ostentatious mad-
house in which he feasted his eyes on his old masters.  At various
times in our lives Sophie Taeuber and I collaborated on works.  First
in Zurich between 1917 and 1919; then in Strasbourg between 1926 and
1928, with Theo van Doesburg, for the refurbishing of the Palais de
l'Aubette; next in Meudon in 1939, during the first year of World War
II (some of these joint works are reproduced in my book of poems The
Seat of Air, 1946); and finally in Grasse, in 1941, with Sonia De-
launay and Alberto Magnelli.  I believe, even more than I did in my
youth, that a return to an essential order, to a harmony, is necessary
to save the world from endless bedlam.
     I continued to develop the collage, eliminating all volition and
working automatically.  I called this working "according to the law of
chance."  "The law of chance," which comprises all other laws and sur-
passes our understanding (like the primal cause from which all life
arises), can be experienced only in a total surrender to the uncon-
scious.  I claimed that whoever follows this law will create pure life.
     Around 1930 I did my first papiers déchirés.  A human opus now
struck me as being inferior even to disconnected work, as being totally
removed from life.  Everything is approximate, even less than approximate,
for if you peer more sharply and closely, even the most perfect painting
is a filthy, wart-infested approximation, a dried-up pap, a desolate
landscape of lunar craters.  What arrogance is concealed in perfection.
Why strive for accuracy and purity if they can never be attained?  I now
welcomed the decomposition that always sets in once a work is ended.
A dirty man puts his dirty finger on a subtle detail in a painting to
point it out.  That place is now marked with sweat and grease.  He bursts
into enthusiasm and the painting is sprayed with saliva.  A delicate
picture of paper, a water color is thus lost.  Dust and insects are also
efficient destroyers.  Light makes colors fade.  Sunshine and warmth
create blisters, loosen the paper, leave cracks in the paint and make
it chip.  Moisture creates mildew.  The work decomposes and dies.  Now,
the death of a painting no longer devastated me.  I had come to terms 
with its ephemeralness and its death, and included them in the painting.
Death, however, grew and devoured the painting and life.  This decom-
position ought to have been followed by the negation of all action.
Form had turned into formlessness, the finite into infinity, the indiv-
idual into totality.
     It was Sophie Taeuber who through the example of her clear work and
her clear life showed me the right path, the road to beauty.  In this world,
up and down, light and darkness, eternity and ephemeralness are in perfect
balance.  And so the circle closed.

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