Intermission: In Search Of Lost Sources?
"And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“Who, indeed, can say whether, in the event of his having gone, that evening, somewhere else, other happinesses, other griefs would not have come to him, which, later, would have appeared to have been inevitable?”
In The Merchant Of Venice, William Shakespeare says through Antonio, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” For me, that devil consists of articles on art with no mention of where they cite from—especially if they cite quotes from the artists themselves. I think these types of writers should be strung from the ankles and stoned with large boulders.
Imagine you are researching on Henri Matisse, and you stumble upon this quote, “Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated.” From the articles you read, you understand it was either written or said in the later half of his life; you might recognise that in 1941, he underwent surgery for an abdominal cancer that left him permanently in a wheelchair. And thus, being unable to stand, the old Frenchman worked with his assistants to create a new medium of paper-based collages—his gouache découpée phase, or the gouache-paper cutouts—the best of which can be seen in his 1947 book, Jazz.
You understand the context and the works insofar as you have read about them now; and yet this one quote, among others, keeps resurfacing everywhere and never has any source attached to it—no specific bond other than to Matisse himself. You ask yourself where the quote is from, and you are not satisfied with good faith, and to an extent, with nebulous Matisse either, and so you continue searching for its source. Was it written in correspondence, in an interview or saved in a secondhand memoir? There is no immediate way to tell, and scouring these sordid articles has no relief for you.
But if you have read my work, you may suspect me a hypocrite. I often use quotations without citation, especially if they are translated; I use quotations as a thematic or ironic counterpoint and thus slip a second or third layer to the writing. I do not cite page numbers—my page numbers will surely be different from someone else’s—nor do I mention the specific publisher unless it matters, which is more necessary for older works with several rounds of republishing. If I do cite a work, it is only broadly and to simply mention the author and the title, and perhaps the chapter at most, if relevant. To me, the rest is quibbling with details and the reader is more clever than that, so this is my excuse.
However, in the cases where I offer no citation, I at least leave enough clues for any reader to figure it out for themselves, and without much difficulty on their part too. If the theme is Don Quixote, the quotes will be Don Quixote; if the theme is Jules Verne, the quotes will be Jules Verne; and in this case, if the theme is Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, then naturally it should follow.
Humans are no slouches with pattern recognition; we see patterns everywhere and literature has few exceptions. The exception here is when an article bears no clues to the source of quotation itself, and upon further searching, offers no quarter to the curious reader but instead frustration. One is made to feel like a disgruntled archaeologist or scribe; inevitably, I will strangle anyone who does this, even myself.
“This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings, was, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.”
As Lord Say pleads for his life in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, “And seeing ignorance is the curse of God, Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven,” I suspect I am being struck by some brethren hex—by a progeny of ignorance, I am withheld from heaven.
In other words, I have unknowingly staggered into some bewildering tradition, with all these people having cited each other secondhand, but all of them having forgotten or misplaced the original source too. Or perhaps, none of them even bothered to do the work in the first place. As the expression goes, one looks down and finds its turtles all the way—one sympathises but does not necessarily forgive, because there are enough simulacrums.
But read any of these futile articles and you will find the same phrases over again: Matisse once said this, Matisse famously said that, Matisse once said of his later work—each time a citation without a source.
It took a dogged effort to find the source of this quote, so let it never be lost again. Matisse once said, “Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated”; this particular quote originates from a 1942 interview with Comœdia, the French artistic paper, for an article entitled “Henri Matisse le Méditerranéen nous dit", or when translated, “Henri Matisse the Mediterranean tells us”. The interviewer was Gotthard Jedlicka and the full transcript can be read in Jack D. Flam’s 1995 Matisse on Art. Was that so hard?
“I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.”
To think that this quote was cited so frequently and was never identified with an actual time and place. It reflects a pinheaded love for ahistorical quotations very quotidian in the early 21st Century. Nebulous quotes seem to float everywhere and they are shared everywhere without as much regard and without citations, and without clues to their origin besides the bare minimum signs of the artist. It borders on the anti-intellectual.
Take, for instance, another quote from Matisse: “I didn’t expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I’m living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions.”
It originates from Françoise Gilot’s scandalous memoir, Life with Picasso, which was co-written and published in 1964 with the French art critic, Carlton Lake. But it was quoted without a source in the article I read—imagine my surprise—with no mention of Gilot whatsoever. It is baffling to imagine the thought process of this writer: one makes the effort to find the quote and to mention it, yet one withholds the marginal extra effort to mention where the quote is even from.
A reminiscence on her decade-long affair with Pablo Picasso, Gilot’s memoir is a worthwhile read. It records Gilot’s conversations with Picasso as both the artist and the man, and features the latter’s noteworthy opinions on painting and other artists, such as his comment on Pierre Bonnard’s “potpourri of indecision” and his admiration for Matisse. As Gilot recalls from Picasso, “Painting can't be done that way. Painting isn't a question of sensibility; it's a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice. That's why I like Matisse.”
It is useful for anyone interested in painting, what makes good art and the life of Gilot. You need only to withstand Picasso as a person—Gilot was the only lover to leave him, and by the end, it is not difficult to see why.
But this is enough of a jeremiad. The moral lesson is to cite your sources, or to at least leave a paper trail for others to follow and to discover for themselves. If they have the interest, they will follow the trail. Not everyone has that interest, and that is expected and fine; I suspect that most people will take most quotations at face value anyways. This is not a criticism of them; instead, this is an appeal to mercy for the opposite demographic, or for the ones who are looking past the surface, which in any field of interest, are going to be the minority.
As Marcel Proust summarises in Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search Of Lost Time, “The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice”. These might be thin slices of information, valued by a select few individuals, but for those individuals, it means so much more to them by proportion. If you write articles on art, be compassionate to those who are passionate about art too.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.