I detested the word “artist” and find the word “creation” –so often used by those who call themselves artists.—pretentious. In Tintin, I find it amusing that Captain Haddock’s ultimate insult is always “Artist!” As Picasso once said: “I am not an artist.” As for me, I would simply call myself a craftsman. The word artist is synonymous with individualism and the assertion of one’s personality, two predominant notions in today’s society. I remember a Polish painter once asked, “What must one do to paint?” I replied that the first thing to do was forget oneself and quickly get rid of one’s personality. The important thing is anonymity. He who believes in personality remains unclear. Of course, people often say, “One must be oneself.” But what is “oneself”? Who really knows?
“Personality,” as the Americans says, is one of the plagues of modernism. What I find likeable about Americans is that they don’t really have a past. Modernity, which began in the true sense with the Renaissance, determined the tragedy of art. The artist emerged as individual and the traditional way of painting disappeared. From them on the artist sought to express his inner world, which is a limited universe: He tried to place his personality in power and used painting as a means of self-expression. But great painting has to have universal meaning. This is sadly no longer so today and this is why I want to give painting back its lost universality and anonymity, because the more anonymous painting is, the more real it is. The oriental philosopher Kumala Suami explains all this admirably. In particular, he recalls the Middle Ages, when there was no frontier between Western and Oriental art and the artist was also much more in contact with the spiritual world, the world of God. But after the Renaissance, everything centered around man and personality. The universality of medieval painting stepped aside to make way for the primacy of the individual. This decline of Western art was slow and gradual, but it led finally to forgetting the love of painting for painting’s sake.
In 1935, I believe, I painted a canvas evoking a grand view, The Mountain. I included seven people in it, remnants of those I knew and who stayed close to me, graven in my memory; there are curious tourists at the edge of a chasm, a young girl at a dazzling gorge, some childhood friends, one of whom died of appendicitis,and another, a shepherd in a purple vest with puffed sleeves. A silhouette seen from the back--doubtless the painter himself-walks alone, leaving his figures. I recall the slow and difficult labor required for this painting, I sustained it for two years, helped by advice from Giacometti and Derain, both of who offered judgments on the design.
Let's not sin through false modesty. Alberto greatly liked the painting's structure, and the rock's arrangement. In it, he saw some kind of Freudian interpretation that made me smile, as I myself knew I have painted The Mountain exactly as it still is today, with its herds that clear a narrow path between the valleys, moos-green topsoil, and slanted shadows that bring into relief the rock's brightness, ridges and anfractuosities that reveal frightful, mysterious geological upheavals. Derain, surely motivated by friendship and the flow of sympathy he always felt for me, compared them to Giotto's rocks, which can be seen at Padua.
I have preserved this mountain intuition until today, with the understanding and learning to which it leads. In the same spot, while reading the Chinese masters, I had a revelation of certainty that the Occident and Far East are identical. The rocky, gravelly slopes of the Niederhorn are sisters of ancient China's Sung mountains.
Everything converges and combines. There is only vast earthly beauty to be grasped in its youthfully vibrant and intact luster.