anatole jakovsky (1907/1909 ? – 1983) - Bibliothèque Kandinsky

La trajectoire d’un critique d’art au XXe siècle.
The old masters painted with the trompe l’oeil : the Spaniards of the twentieth century,
Picasso, Miro, Gonzalez, employ the trompe coeur.
Art always deludes and sculpture always was and always will be, not a casting of the
human body, but a casting of its spiritual condition.
There were periods of groping when sculptors used the body ; there are those which
fill the vacuity, left by the absence of man, with nothingness. At such times one says : night
has come.
Night and day, not the famous clair obscur – which are the limits of plastic expression.
When Gonzalez encloses space, murdering light, there is never any shadow – it is always
night.
Art at times of transition is nocturnal ; it begins at midnight. In the darkness of the
ages. In the unconscious soul. We buy cinema – tickets to-day as they used to go down to the
catacombs of the early christians.
Gonzalez lets rust eat away the contours of his forged-iron sculptures. Thus prehistoric
shells preserve the sand around them, an ambit with a vanished core. How much blood, how
many tears – what centuries of moistness do these forged tokens of Gonzalez preserve.
Miro crucifies «objects» with rusty nails.
Almost all these atavisms, these rudimentary feelings, this anguish rooted in the depths
of the soul, are foressen by Kandinsky.
The old sensibility flowing through U-tubes rises again to the level of day for the last
time, to supply the flagrant want of subject-matter in the new forms created by the electrometallurgic
civilization.
His last picture : the lines luminous, as if lighted from within by neon tubs, intersect a
number of archaic forms, subconscious, without a formula.
So drawing microscopically precise proves to be merely the delusions of the soul.
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