Page 47 - Studio International - May 1965
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atmosphere, although fairly austere and one guesses
behind this discretion the taste for slow meditations,
together with an attentive silence. He does not look
any more for a novelty which can startle, but lives
within himself.
His work could have finished there, found his
achievement in this serenity more and more detached
from fashions, more and more solitary and all impreg
nated by intimate poetry. Suddenly, towards 1954, we
witness a deep transformation, a phenomenon of a
new found youth which is frequent in great painters.
Cubism was not, for him, an end within itself, a formula
in which he would have wanted to shut himself in
and make a career of it; it was but a passage, a brilliant
and profitable exercise, even if the artist seemed to
have pushed it aside from his memory during the
following years, he keeps-maybe unconsciously-its
deep marks; he took from it the taste of simplifications,
the right to transfigure the 'real' to attain a reality other
than that of photography. The moment has come to
utilise both his gifts and his knowledge.
Hayden is then seventy years old; he thinks that he
has gone to the maximum of the 'possible' in the road
which he pursues since he has detached himself from
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