Osip Mandelstam

THE FRENCH

And here I stretched my vision and sank my eye into the wide goblet of the sea, so that every mote and tear should come out of it.

I stretched my vision like a kid glove, stretched it on a board,¹³ out onto the blue neighborhood of the sea.

I swiftly and rapaciously and with a feudal frenzy inspected the demesnes of my eye’s measure.

In such a way one puts one’s eye into a wide goblet full to the brim so that a mote will come out.

And I began to understand the binding force of color—the fervor of sky-blue and orange T-shirts—and that color is nothing other than a sense of the start of a race, a sense tinged by distance and locked into its size.

Time circulated in the museum according to the hourglass. A brick-colored trickle ran, the goblet was emptied, but then the same golden stream of a dust storm from the upper part of the glass into the lower.

Hello, Cézanne! Good old grandfather! Marvelous worker. Best acorn of the forests of France.

His painting was certified on the oak table of a village notary. He is incontestable, like a will made in sound mind and firm memory.

But what captivated me was the old man’s still life. Roses that must have been cut in the morning, full-fleshed and rolled tight, unusually young tea roses. Exactly like scoops of rich vanilla ice cream.

On the other hand, I took a dislike to Matisse, an artist for the rich. The red paint of his canvases fizzes like soda. He is not privy to the joy of ripening fruits. His powerful brush does not heal the vision, but gives it the strength of an ox, so that the eyes become bloodshot.¹⁴

I’ve had enough of this carpet chess and these odalisques!

Persian whimseys of a Parisian maître!

The cheap vegetable pigments of Van Gogh were bought by calamitous accident for twenty sous.

Van Gogh spits blood like a suicide in a cheap hotel. The floorboards in the night café are tilted and stream like a gutter in their electric madness. And the narrow trough of the billiard table looks like the trough of a coffin.

I never saw such barking colors!

And his streetcar-conductor’s vegetable-garden landscapes! The soot of suburban trains has just been wiped from them with a wet rag.

His canvases, smeared with the omelette of catastrophe, are as clear as visual aids, as the charts in a Berlitz school.

The visitors move about with little steps as though in church.

Each room has its own climate. In Claude Monet’s room there is river air. Looking at the water painted by Renoir, you feel blisters on your palm as if you’d been rowing.

Signac invented the corn-colored sun.

The woman who explains the pictures leads the culture and education officials behind her.

To look at them, you’d say a magnet was attracting a duck.

Ozenfant worked out something surprising by using red chalk and slate-grey squirrels on a black slate background and modulating the forms of glass blowing and fragile laboratory equipment.

You would also be greeted by Picasso’s dark-blue Jew and Pissarro’s raspberry-grey boulevards, flowing like the wheels of an immense lottery with their little boxes of hansom cabs, their fishing-pole-whips pitched on their shoulders, and the shreds of splashed brain on the kiosks and chestnut trees.

But perhaps you’ve had enough?

Generalization is already waiting, bored, at the door.

To anyone recuperating from the harmless plague of naïve realism I would recommend the following method of looking at pictures.

Under no circumstances go in as if into a chapel. Don’t be thrilled or chilled, and don’t get glued to the canvas . . .

With a stroller’s stride, as on a boulevard—straight on!

Cut through the large heat waves of the space of oil painting.

Calmly, without getting excited—the way Tatar children bathe their horses in Alushta—lower your eye into what will be for it a new material environment—and remember that the eye is a noble, but stubborn, animal.

Standing before a picture to which the body heat of your vision has still not adjusted itself, for which the crystalline lens has not yet found the single suitable accommodation, is exactly like singing a serenade in a fur coat behind a double set of windows.

When that equilibrium has been attained, and only then, begin the second stage of restoring the picture, the washing of it, removing its old peel, its outer and most recent barbaric layer, the stage that links it, as it does every work of art, to a sunny, solid reality.

With its extremely subtle acidic reactions, the eye, an organ that possesses its own acoustics, augmenting the value of the image, exaggerating its own achievements to a degree that offends the senses and then making a great fuss over it, raises the picture to its own level; for painting is much more a matter of internal secretion than of apperception, that is, of external perceiving.

The material of painting is organized in such a way that nobody altogether loses, and that is its distinction from nature. But the probability of a lottery is inversely proportional to its feasibility.

And it is only here that the third and final stage of entering a picture begins—confronting the intention behind it.

And that traveler, the eye, presents his ambassadorial credentials to the consciousness. And then a cold agreement is reached between the viewer and the picture, something rather like a state secret.

From the embassy of painting I went out into the street.

Right after having left the Frenchmen, the light seemed to me the phase of a waning eclipse, while the sun itself was wrapped in silver foil.

At the entrance of the cooperative stood a mother with her son. The boy was emaciated, respectful. Both were in mourning. The woman was sticking a bunch of radishes into her reticule.

The end of the street, as if crushed by a pair of binoculars, swerved off into a squinting lump; and all of this—distant and deceptive [lipovyi]¹⁵—was stuffed into a string bag.