Page 32 - Studio International - March 1967

to be comfortable, to have something secure to hang on inherent poetry and mystery of the image. People who
to, to save themselves from the void. They are quite look for symbolic meanings no doubt sense this mystery,
willing to use objects without looking for any symbolic but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking
intention in them, but when they look at paintings, they `what does this mean?' they express a desire for everything
can't find any use for them. So they hunt around for a to be understandable. But if one does not reject the
meaning to get themselves out of the quandary, and mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks
because they don't understand what it is they are sup- other things. A poet friend of mine, for example, when he
posed to think when they confront the painting. first saw L' aimable vérité, said, Tor a moment, I was struck
Lautréamont's image, for example, the chance encounter by panic.' It is precisely this moment of panic which
on a dissecting table of an umbrella and a sewing counts and not any explanation of it. I am repatriated by
machine, could also be described in a manner of speaking a moment of panic. These are the privileged moments
as symbolic: of disorder, since things are not where they that transcend mediocrity. But for that there doesn't
are supposed to be. But to say that is to fail to grasp the have to be art—it can happen at any moment. q

René Magritte with
his painting The Great War,
photographed by Bill Brandt
in 1966—one of the
remarkable illustrations in
Brandt's Shadow of Light,
published by Bodley Head
at 63s. with an introduction
by Cyril Connolly. The book
covers the work of the
great photographer from the
early thirties onwards, and
includes a series of
portraits of writers and
artists, among them Miró,
Bacon, Moore, Chirico, and
Picasso. A series of painters'
and sculptors' eyes,
reproduced more than life-
size, has about it a quality
which Connolly calls
'leathery, almost reptilian'.