The State of Painting in 1954

(In reply to an inquiry by Charles Estienne and José Pierre)

     The younger generation's painting, for which the names "tachisme"
and "Nuclear Painting" have been suggested, refuses to be dubbed.  It
is not very far from an automatic painting.  The bond connecting it with
the vast world of Chinese and Japanese art, and often simply with a new
interpretation of nature, does not allow it to be fixed as yet.  These
young painters are concerned with the most moving problems, with chance,
with constellation-- problems that were already my concern in the dadaist
period and to which a number of reliefs, collages, and papiers déchirés
bear witness.  Chance and constellations lead us to the unreal, to games,
dreams, apeiron.--Careful now, please do not inadvertently or out of kind-
ness insert "arpeiron!--  If surrealism did away with certain overdetermi-
nations, then the painting of the younger generation might evolve in that
direction, for those are the elements with which it achieves that connec-
tion.
     Throughout my travels in Greece, I noted that the human content in
Mycenaean and Cretan pottery, Cycladian figures, or the vases of the geo-
metric age, is more powerful than in a classical work such as the famous
Charioteer of Delphi.  The pronouncements of certain painters and espec-
ially certain art critics to the effect that abstract art has no content
is erroneous.  Each work has a content.  "Decorative" abstract painting
is bad abstract painting.  If there are no apparent signs of a bird, a
woman, or some other element of nature in the "geometrical" paintings of
Mondrian, van Doesburg, Taeuber-Arp, or Moholy-Nagy, there is nevertheless
a totality of them amalgamated in a mythic, spiritual, and religious
presence.
     I have always interpreted my works.  I give them such titles as
"flower shadows," "cobra-centaur," "cloud shepher," "wind outline."
My admiration for the poetry of Breton, Péret, Eluard, and 
others is what binds me indissolubly to surrealism.

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