¹ "Kandinsky is said to have invented the first abstract painting in 1908 (however, it wasn't he, but Picabia in 1907)," states Georges Mathieu (L'Abstraction prophétique, Gallimard, 1984). In any case, Apollinaire initiated at the time the notion of "pure painting," "entirely new art," in reaction to both narrative painting, daughter of the historical "grand genre" painting of the classical age and to the instantaneous translation of nature sought by the Impressionists and the Fauvists, following Courbet and Manet. The notion of "pure painting" benefited from an abundance of highly diverse stimuli, such as the a priori theories of Seurat, Cézanne, the Cubists and Constructivists as well as the dream-like tendencies of Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Maurice Denis, the Nabis and Surrealists, in which it was practically dissolved.

² In France, for example, after painters like Ceria, Caillard, Gromaire, Goerg, Desnoyer, Roland Oudot, Legueult, Planson and Brianchon, and sculptors like Despiau, Niclausse, Wlerick, Navarre, Janniot, Belmondo, Hilbert—and many others as well!—all now gone, many artists still alive today have been unjustly "forgotten" by the majority of those who hold cultural power, or even openly put down as representing an "outmoded" trend.

³ Even if we overlook the purely decorative expression found in fully abstract creations or in the elements of abstract decoration surrounding figurative motifs, for example in Irish illuminations, in the Ravenna mosaics, in stained glass windows and Romanesque frescoes. But is it possible to distinguish with certainty among artistic creations, in order to assign them a, by definition, pejorative coefficient, works that could be called "decorative"? In any case, and to return to our topic, we may recall the remark made by Robert Rey, in a pamphlet published some thirty years ago (Contre l'art abstrait, Flammarion, 1957): "Abstract art is, literally, the oldest thing in the world! The first cave man who dragged his muddy fingers along the wall of his cave, for no other reason than to alleviate its bareness, was a great ‘abstract artist'. And, no matter how far we go back in time, everything that men have touched crawls with abstract art." And he added, "Abstract art theory-makers always begin by referring to ancient ceramic and textile dec orations."

⁴ In this way Marcel Brion demonstrated the rigid construction of paintings by Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca as an underlying abstraction, pre-figuring the overt abstraction of Kandinsky and Hartung.

⁵ "Nor less so!", some genie (good or bad?) may challenge me, taking up the apology for the chromo, the only supposedly "artistic" images that at that time crossed the thresholds of most homes, bringing with them new visions into unchanging horizons. And the role of "passageway" is in fact the vocation of a work of art. But for there to be communication over the passageway, someone has to move, one way or another. If the audience is sterile, the work is useless. If the work is devoid of any message… but who can ever swear that a work is devoid of any message? It may be that the person encountering a work discovers in it what he has within himself and what he brings to it. Maybe for certain persons imprisoned by their existence at that time, chromos conjured up suddenly liberating visions, and who knows how far an excited imagination might go? Today and always perhaps there is no work of any kind—figurative or abstract—that is a chromo without any potential.

⁶ This is what people of all tendencies have felt and expressed in a thousand different ways. Bossuet: "There is so much art in nature that art itself consists in nothing other than understanding nature well." Anatole France: "The artist should love life and show us that it is beautiful." Manet: "Art should be the writing of life." Marcel Jouhandeau: "Art… adds to life just what it lacked for being truer than itself." Edmond Jaloux: "The work of art has a mystic mission that is to redeem the real." Alain: "All the arts are like mirrors in which man knows and recognizes something about himself of which he was unaware." Elsa Triolet: "Art… gives new possibilities for the conception of the universe." Paul Valéry: "What we call ‘a work of art' is the result of an action whose finite purpose is to provoke infinite developments in some persons." Georges Mathieu: "A work of art begins from the moment when a fragment of the world becomes itself a world." Jacques Despierre: "The alchemist sought to transcend what nature gave him. He gathered the morning dew, a natural element, and then he transmuted it and transfigured it. He forced it to undergo monstrous forms, at the end of which this morning dew became alchemical dew, which is both the symbol of love and the symbol of gold. Artistic creation, a most mysterious phenomenon, can be compared to these ancient practices of the alchemists." Gromaire: "The substance of things must be relentlessly sought… To take an apple as a starting point and to end up with a moving plastic entity is a highly spiritual act." Bernanos: "Art has a purpose other than itself… its perpetual search for Being." Claudel: "Poetry is an art. (…) The task of poetry is to find God in all things and to make them assimilable." Carlyle: "Eternity looks at us across time."

⁷ "Les scories du savoir"; Georges Mathieu: L'Abstraction prophétique.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.