and fingernails does not make a horse’s mane. It’s something apart. … However, when I get into a predicament of this sort I know that I can extricate myself later when it comes time to apply the color. The drawing is simply the excuse for color. The color is the toccata: drawing belongs to the realm of idea. (Michelangelo was right in despising Da Vinci. Is there anything more ghastly, more sickishly ideational than the “Last Supper”? Is there anything more pretentious than the “Mona Lisa”?
As I say, a little color will put life into the mane. The stomach is still a little out of order, I see. Very well. Where it is convex I make it concave and vice versa. Now suddenly my horse is galloping, his nostrils are snorting fire. But with two eyes he looks still a bit silly, a bit too human. Ergo, rub out an eye. Fine. He’s getting more and more horsey. He’s gotten kind of cutelooking too-like Charley Chase of the movies… .
To keep him well within the genus he represents I finally decide to give him stripes. The idea is that if he won’t lose his playfulness I can turn him into a zebra. So I put in the stripes. Now, damn it all, he seems to be made of cardboard. The stripes have flattened him out, glued him to the paper. Well, if I close my eyes again I ought to be able to recall the Cinzano horse-he has stripes too, and beautiful ones. Maybe I ought to go down for an aperitif and look at a Cinzano. It’s getting late for aperitifs. Maybe I’ll do a little plagiarizing after all. If a lunatic can draw a man on a bicycle he can draw a horse too.
It’s remarkable-I find gods and goddesses, devils, bats, sewing machines, flowerpots, rivers, bridges, locks and keys, epileptics, coffins, skeletons-but not a damned horse! If the lunatic who compiled this brochure had wanted to draw a truly profound observation he would have had something to remark about this curious omission. When the horse is missing there is something radically amiss! Human art goes hand in hand with the horse. It’s not enough to hint that the symbolists and the imagists are, or were, a little detraques. We want to know, in a study of insanity, what has become of the horse!
Once more I turn to the landscape on page 85. It’s an excellent composition despite the geometrical stiffness. (The insane have a terrific obsession for logic and order, as have the French.) I have something to work from now: mountains, bridges, terraces, trees…. One of the great merits of insane art is that a bridge is always a bridge and a house a house. The three little men who are balancing themselves on their canes in the foreground are not absolutely necessary to the composition, especially since I already have the Ionian horse which occupies considerable space. I am searching for a setting in which to place the horse and there is something very wistful and very intriguing about this landscape with its crenelated parapets and its sugar-loaf escarpments and the houses with so many windows, as if the inmates were deathly afraid of suffocating. It’s very reminiscent of the beginnings of landscape paintingand yet it’s completely outside all definitive periods. I should say roughly that it lies in a zone between Giotto and Santos Dumont-with just a faint intimation of the post-mechanical street which is to come. And now, with this as a guide before me, I pick up courage. Allons-y!
Right under the horse’s ass, where his croup begins and ends, and where Salvador Dali would most likely put a Louis Quinze chair or a watch spring, I begin to draw with free and easy strokes a straw hat, a melon. Beneath the hat I put a face-carelessly, because my ideas are large and sweeping. Wherever the hand falls I do something, following the insinuating deviations of the line. In this manner I take the huge phallus erectus, which was once a fifth leg, and bend it into a man’s arm-so! Now I have a man in a big straw hat tickling the horse in the rumps. Fine! Fine and dandy!
As I say, a little color will put life into the mane. The stomach is still a little out of order, I see. Very well. Where it is convex I make it concave and vice versa. Now suddenly my horse is galloping, his nostrils are snorting fire. But with two eyes he looks still a bit silly, a bit too human. Ergo, rub out an eye. Fine. He’s getting more and more horsey. He’s gotten kind of cutelooking too-like Charley Chase of the movies… .
To keep him well within the genus he represents I finally decide to give him stripes. The idea is that if he won’t lose his playfulness I can turn him into a zebra. So I put in the stripes. Now, damn it all, he seems to be made of cardboard. The stripes have flattened him out, glued him to the paper. Well, if I close my eyes again I ought to be able to recall the Cinzano horse-he has stripes too, and beautiful ones. Maybe I ought to go down for an aperitif and look at a Cinzano. It’s getting late for aperitifs. Maybe I’ll do a little plagiarizing after all. If a lunatic can draw a man on a bicycle he can draw a horse too.
It’s remarkable-I find gods and goddesses, devils, bats, sewing machines, flowerpots, rivers, bridges, locks and keys, epileptics, coffins, skeletons-but not a damned horse! If the lunatic who compiled this brochure had wanted to draw a truly profound observation he would have had something to remark about this curious omission. When the horse is missing there is something radically amiss! Human art goes hand in hand with the horse. It’s not enough to hint that the symbolists and the imagists are, or were, a little detraques. We want to know, in a study of insanity, what has become of the horse!
Once more I turn to the landscape on page 85. It’s an excellent composition despite the geometrical stiffness. (The insane have a terrific obsession for logic and order, as have the French.) I have something to work from now: mountains, bridges, terraces, trees…. One of the great merits of insane art is that a bridge is always a bridge and a house a house. The three little men who are balancing themselves on their canes in the foreground are not absolutely necessary to the composition, especially since I already have the Ionian horse which occupies considerable space. I am searching for a setting in which to place the horse and there is something very wistful and very intriguing about this landscape with its crenelated parapets and its sugar-loaf escarpments and the houses with so many windows, as if the inmates were deathly afraid of suffocating. It’s very reminiscent of the beginnings of landscape paintingand yet it’s completely outside all definitive periods. I should say roughly that it lies in a zone between Giotto and Santos Dumont-with just a faint intimation of the post-mechanical street which is to come. And now, with this as a guide before me, I pick up courage. Allons-y!
Right under the horse’s ass, where his croup begins and ends, and where Salvador Dali would most likely put a Louis Quinze chair or a watch spring, I begin to draw with free and easy strokes a straw hat, a melon. Beneath the hat I put a face-carelessly, because my ideas are large and sweeping. Wherever the hand falls I do something, following the insinuating deviations of the line. In this manner I take the huge phallus erectus, which was once a fifth leg, and bend it into a man’s arm-so! Now I have a man in a big straw hat tickling the horse in the rumps. Fine! Fine and dandy!
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