René Gimpel was one of the most successful dealers flourishing between the great world wars. He was interested in Rembrandt and Watteau and medieval French tapestries, and also in the Impressionist masters and in controversial young Turks like Picasso and Matisse, whose stars were just beginning to rise. While Gimpel was the brother in-law of Joseph Duveen, he had quite a different character and approach to art. He was very much a gentleman, refined, unflagrant, and a perfect courtier behind the scenes. He was also an alert, canny observer. He had one further distinction: he kept a diary – not about himself, but about the great men and changing mores around him. When the Germans took Paris in 1940 Gimpel,though a Jew and therefore in particular danger, was too much a Frenchman to leave. He was interned and sent to a Nazi labor camp, where he passed the time by teaching his fellow prisoners to speak English. He died there four years later.
René Gimpel contribution to the development of the art market in the interwar period is very significant. This can be appreciated trough the personal notes he kept in his diary. These notes offer a view into prominent artists, collectors, the tumult of newly developping art styles and the dynamic of the international art market, from Europe to the United States. René Gimpel contribution within the context of the interwar can be further appreciated through a recent publication where the role of jewish merchants, collectors and artists during this period is analysed (Belonging and Betrayal – How Jews Made the Art World Modern, Charles Dellheim, Brandeis University PressEdition). An interesting article about Gimpel by Diana Kostyrko can also be found in the Burlington magazine.
Partly adapted from the introduction by Sir Herbert Read to the “Diary of an art dealer”.
Abraham Mintchine and Gimpel
The acquaintance between R. Gimpel and Abraham Mintchine was relatively short. It began in 1928, when the collector bought the first works from Manteau. A year later Gimpel bought thirty-five works and in June of that year fifty-four further paintings. A few days later Gimpel finally met the artist and this marked the beginning of a continuous association, which was interrupted occasionally by Gimpel’s business trips or by Mintchine’s trips to Auvergne and later to Provence.
This friendship grew stronger with time in the course of their common visits to the Louvre, the Gothic cathedral and the discussions about Gimpel’s collection. A year later, in December, Mintchine signed a contract with Gimpel, after leaving the Manteau brothers and severing his ties with Deydier. As we know, this friendship stopped abruptly in a tragic way, as a result of our artist’s death. Gimpel, who used to record meticulously the artist’s life in his diary, entered his friend’s death, commenting on July 15th 1931 that he was mourning the death of an era… That time many artists passed away, some in their prime, like Mintchine, and some in ripe old age. The sense of death and decline were perhaps a portent of what would happen later, at the end of that decade.
Gimpel played a special role in his relationship with Mintchine. He had a strong wish to mold Mintchine’s personality after he realized his special quality, which was partly obscured. An expert like Gimpel, who was capable of overviewing the whole gamut of artistic expressions, from classical Greece to Impressionism, must have set free the qualities of an artist such as Mintchine. This friendship may have symbolized for Gimpel his own vitality, his aspiration to immortalize the works of the present for the sake of the future. Mintchine, on the other hand, succeeded through Gimpel in understanding his own expression and technique. He compared his friend Deydier’s “fleeting” superficial comments with his new erudite friend’s wise criticism, which could discern through mistakes.
In order to better understand Abraham Mintchine as an artist, but also as a person, it is essential to understand this friendship and the interactions he had with René Gimpel. To that purpose, the Mintchine Society is republishing online the notes found in the first published edition of Gimpel’s diary. Through these notes we better understand the personality of Abraham Mintchine, his background, his sensitivity, his artistic genius. These notes are truly invaluable and an exceptional legacy left by Gimpel for our artist and future generations.
Partly adapted from an article of Alberto Veca
Extracts from the Diary of an Art Dealer
May 7 / Mintchine
Since becoming acquainted with this painter’s work, I have bought about thirty-five of his canvases, Some are quite uneven, but that in itself is some proof of talent. I recently met the Manteaus, husband and wife, the dealers who have a gentlemen’s agreement with him. Mintchine arrived from Russia about four years ago, and his poverty was appalling. Married, and with one child, he barely managed to scrape together a hundred sous a day to live on; he wouldn’t eat, and, dying of hunger, he would say to his wife: “Eat. Mintchine isn’t hungry.” Now that he’s attained a measure of comfort and his health has deteriorated he continues to deprive himself for his wife, repeating: “Mintchine doesn’t need anything.”
July 2 1928 / Mintchine
He is an unknown Russian painter whose canvases sell for a few hundred francs, but he will have the talent of a Renoir. It seems that he is very young, around twenty-four. For three weeks I’ve been buying everything of his I could find, about eight pictures in all. Only in this past year has he freed himself of various influences: Cézanne, Utrillo, Marie Laurencin. His color is fluid, and that’s where the great masters can be recognized. To be a Velazquez, a Rembrandt, a Manet, you have to get free of your medium. When these men paint fluidly, they are at the peak of their talent. Mintchine already has that art in his palette, with the beauty of colors that Renoir was master f at thirty-five. I shall speak of him again.
September 21 1928 / Deydier
I don’t know if I’ve spoken of him. It was he who showed me a Mintchine for the first time. Today he brought me six, and I am going to buy five of them from him for 10,000 francs. This Mintchine will attain a beauty like Renoir’s. He hasn’t yet extricated himself from certain influences, not even from Cézanne’s as yet. Not as solid, not as well drawn, but fluid colors, delectable as creams.
May 7 1929/ Mintchine
Since becoming acquainted with this painter’s work, I have bought about thirty-five of his canvases. Some are quite uneven, but that in itself is some proof of talent. I recently met the Manteaus, husband and wife, the dealers who have a gentlemen’s agreement with him. Mintchine arrived from Russia about four years ago, and his poverty was appalling. Married, and with one child, he barely managed to scrape together a hundred sous a day to live on; he wouldn’t eat, and, dying of hunger, he would say to his wife: “Eat. Mintchine isn’t hungry.” Now that he’s attained a measure of comfort and his health has deteriorated, he continues to deprive himself for his wife, repeating: “Mintchine doesn’t need anything.”
June 12 1929/ Mintchine
This painter is a genius. I have fifty-four of his canvases, many very uneven. But when they bring me high prices, I shall exchange two or three mediocre canvases for one good one. Some are marvellous. They must have cost me around 70,000 francs. Mme Manteau, who sells them, was talking to me of the artist’s conscience and the intensity of his emotions. When he starts painting, he is more absorbed in the subject than in the painting. In Toulon last summer he did vagabonds, which I like rather less, as they resemble Cézanne’s figures, but he prefers them. As he studied his models, he thought only of them and their life. He told himself that it was beautiful to be a vagabond, to sleep in a thousand places, to have the open road to oneself, to belong to no one and have nobody as one’s slave. He painted, and on his canvas he no longer saw his vagabonds. If he paints a flower, he thinks of nothing but the flower and is lost in a reverie, a reverie with a flower.
When he saw Soutine’s ox at a dealer’s, he turned pale, remained in front of it for ten minutes without saying a word, then left, arrived at the Manteaus’ after a quarter of an hour and said to them: “Soutine has robbed me.” “He has robbed you? How has he robbed you?” “He has robbed me of something I shall never again be able to do.” For three days in Montparnasse he was so haggard that his friends thought him demented. It was admiration.
June 21 1929 : Mintchine in person
I met him in the Alice Manteau Gallery; he was with his wife and their baby girl, whom they wanted to show to the dealer. He has painted her often and she is very much like her portraits; she has a little disk of a face. He is terribly Slavic, with the winding, Asiatic lines of his eyes. His nose protrudes, the nose of a tamed eagle. He must stand five foot three, he is thin, dressed in gray and very neat. His upper lip caps the other like a penthouse roof. I imagined him so wretched that I was astonished to find myself confronted with this man who is not at all lacking in gaiety. He was playing like a boy with the child! His wife, tiny and thin, looks like some Turkish girl born under the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and has a perpetually astonished air. Just now the first Mintchine exhibition is being held in the gallery. I showed him the pictures I have bought like flowers in a florist’s shop window (fig.2): a pink house, a green house (fig.1), The Cathedral of Paris (fig.3). He speaks French very badly, chewing his words to the point of indigestion. He tells me he worked on that cathedral for a fortnight without stopping, that it gave him unimaginable trouble, that The Cathedral of Paris is a ship, that any cathedral is a bridge, a bridge leading to heaven. He added that he is very religious. There is a bridge’ far to the right, in his picture, leading toward the cathedral, and there is another on the left, this one ascending to the sky.
At this point I took Mintchine off in my auto, stopped in front of the cathedral itself, and said: “No one has ever rendered the Gothic cathedral because no one has rendered its weight, no one has understood the immensity of its weight. Look how weighty it is, look at the way it sits, look at its base; it is as heavy above as below, except for the towers, as they are of a later period. So long as you, Mintchine, do not render this weight, you will fail, like Claude Monet, like Utrillo.” Mintchine pointed out how tiny, how Lilliputian, the people are against the portal. I had never noticed this, and was startled at the discovery. He asked me if he ought to paint them, as no one would ever believe that they were so little. I could not reply. We returned to Alice Manteau’s, he placed himself before his picture The Cathedral and at once hit on the least well painted part; he hadn’t known how to shore up the stones; and he was fully aware of this. He is leaving for the Auvergne, as he has been hearing about the red soil. He asked me if the churches in Italy were as beautiful as our cathedrals. I told him that they weren’t, because they were less solid. He wanted to know if he was making progress and I replied that his progress was quite marked even within six months and that his flowers were best. They were of less interest to him, he said, because they were easier, too easy, and did not entail any deep study.
June 27 1929/ On Mintchine
Mme Manteau told me that the criticisms I offered the painter have made a strong impression on him. “Before,” he said, “I didn’t understand stone, not the union of stone and earth, nor their solidity; now I shall try to capture stone.” He is leaving on a two-month trip.
July 16 1929/ Mintchine
Mme Alice Manteau showed me a letter dated from Toulon, where the couple have gone with their little girl Irene. The Auvergne didn’t inspire the artist and he has made for Toulon, where he painted last year.
September 19 1929
Mintchine is still in Toulon and has sent several canvases: one of them depicts a man with a bottle seated among large rocks. I’ve bought it (fig.4). This picture will be shown in the Salon d’Automne. I also took a canvas depicting only rocks with beautiful red colorations (fig.5). I don’t care for a view of the port of Toulon, barred by an enormous steamer ugly as a German toy. And he has painted some curious canvases with vines looming rather gigantic in the foreground; on one of these a town perched like an eagle’s nest can be glimpsed very far off. I prefer a little vine stalk, very convincingly knotted, a labor of love. He has produced less this summer, but has lingered over his work. Mme Manteau tells me that Mintchine has greatly profited by my counsels in his study of stone; indeed, his rock has a remarkable feeling of weight. The artist will remain in Toulon until October.
November 9 1929/ Mintchine
He had been to lunch nearby at Deydier’s, with his wife and little girl, who came to see me with him. He stayed from two to four and wanted me to talk all the time; he wouldn’t even let Deydier interrupt. I gave him my point of view on what I call beauty in the art of painting, and he said to me on leaving: “You are the person who will have had the greatest influence on my art.” I was flattered by this. He reminded me of our walk before the Cathedral of Paris and said that he had been thinking all summer of our conversation. I said I have noticed, he really has given precise weight to some of his rocks. He is terribly anxious and asks himself how this blessing could have come to him, to have the makings of a great painter and perhaps be called to a high destiny! He is assailed by doubts about his own talent. He is immensely troubled by his ignorance of painting technique, and he doesn’t know where to learn it. I assured him that it was a lost art, that Rubens was probably the last painter after the primitives who had known it, and supremely. We decided to go to the Louvre together. He didn’t like my Polish Woman by Soutine, but he did not say why. I placed two of his canvases, Field of Tomatoes and the Fortifications of Toulon, near my lovely Derain, a beautiful sunlit pathway in the Midi, and showed him that he hadn’t yet acquired fluidity, that his shadows still lacked transparency, that badly painted parts alternated with better ones; one feels that he hasn’t yet got full possession of his abilities, like a tennis player or a golfer who must concentrate on the position of his feet, legs, knees, forearm, elbow, and each individual finger—all at the same time—and who always forgets something anyway.
He accepted all my criticisms, almost with joy in his heart. He greatly admired my Monets and especially The Pink Boat. Although he admires the ancients, he finds ancient painting sad. He told me that his constant preoccupation, when he paints, is much more to give life than to represent an object. To paint a tree is to paint a corner of nature, to put it on the canvas is to isolate it and give it. an immense place, whereas in the vastness of nature it is such a little thing; the tree takes on value through what it receives from its environment, by direct or indirect reflections, near or far off; from a color projected by the shadow of a distant hill or by a wide green or yellow field near at hand. These aren’t the exact words used by Mintchine, who has a certain diffculty in explaining and expressing himself, but this is what he was thinking. He saw a Saint in my house, a red polychrome, Pisan, and he would love to paint it. I gave him a piece of eighteenth-century red velvet with which he was very pleased. Deydier asserted that art was nature embellished by the artist, and Mintchine replied: “Perhaps not.”
November 16 1929/ Mintchine
I’ve seen his three latest canvases at Alice Manteau’s. A sort of concierge in a large blue apron, cutting apples. The painter still lacks solidity; certain parts, like the nose, are too sketchy. A life-size head is very hard to treat sketchily and demands a skill which Mintchine doesn’t yet possess. Fragonard needed years of accumulated work to be able to do his beautiful heads in the Louvre. The sketch is more acceptable when it is small, and it is easier. I much prefer the baby standing in its cradle, with flowers in a vase, a little trumpet with a bit of red thread, it is in a small touch like that that Mintchine reveals greatness (fig.6). I liked an extended view of Paris less, with a white house at a distance and a brick wall to the right with a flight of stairs. Two or three human figures beneath a heavy, rather leaden sky.
November 20 1929 / Mintchine
In the Manteaus’ back room there is a collection of average Mintchines, really not a bad collection. I bought two good canvases for 5,500 francs: a child holding an apple, seated behind a table covered with a cloth on which two books rest, one Open and the other shut and of a beautiful red. There is a fruit bowl full of gleaming apples. I also bought the child in the cradle, which I mentioned the other day; it is marvelous (fig.6).
The painter Terechkovitch has started to pursue Mintchine with his hatred. He went to a collector’s house to advise him not to buy from him, but our painter said: “We’ll see where Mintchine is in five years.”
The Manteaus mentioned that two Cézannes of his first period had been discovered by a young man in his father’s attic, painted on bedspreads. When Cézanne’s son was told about them, he remembered perfectly that his father had painted on bed covers. They are going to show them to me.
On my advice, these dealers have just signed a five-year contract with Mintchine, who also gives paintings to Deydier surreptitiously because he is an intimate friend, his little girl’s godfather, and was the first to discover him, to buy from him, and give him the wherewithal to eat.
December 17 1929/ Mintchine
He came in to the Manteaus’ with a very fine eagle on a red background and said to me: “When I painted it, I was thinking of you the whole time: take the feather and give it its weight.”
Just now Mintchine is working every morning on a nude done from a model. “It’s difficult, that,” he said. He goes on painting, afterwards, till dark. Tomorrow I’m taking him to the Louvre, we’ve arranged to meet at two o’clock; he asked me what I would be showing him and I said: “Ancient Greek art; the Peaches and Loaf of Bread by Chardin., The Condottiere by Antonello da Messina; Raphael’s Castiglione, as an example of a studied background; the Botticelli Portrait of a Young Man, believed to be Filippo Lippi.” He wanted to know what I think of his latest picture, The Child at the Puppet Show in Front of a Balcony. “It’s the first time,” I told him, “that you’ve given the impression of having studied a background.” And he replied: “I studied the other backgrounds a lot, but I didn’t succeed with them.”
December 18 1929 / Mintchine at the Louvre
I took him up to the ancient Greek statues, first showing him the Hera and then the most beautiful of the motion studies of athletes. I explained to him that our eye sees only masses (that may be why the discovery of anything infinitesimal is so slow) and details not at all, that the detail which we see is only an illusion, for if I look at the stuff of my coat the way an inspector would, I receive quite another impression of detail. The artist is concerned only with those masses which his eyes take in; the supreme art is the exact balance between the masses seen and the detail perceived. Too much detail causes the feeling of mass to be lost; too great a stress on mass eliminates the detail. The Hera, which is perhaps the most beautiful work of art in the Louvre, lets no detail be seen; its surface is prodigiously worked over, though we see this only by liter ally putting our noses up against it, and that’s how the Greek artist was able to preserve the mass. In the athlete in motion, I showed him that every inch of flesh has its pigmentation; the buttocks have their weight, the skin of the belly is stretched and breathing, the arms fall with a weight accelerating down to the fist, Even the scrotum has its weight and its interior vitality. Looking at the Hera, he said: “It starts out like a column, it’s matter transformed into life.” He asked me if this was Greek art, if this was what it meant. Despite the legend of Galatea, told him that Grecian art was something vaster, and I took him before the head of Athena, which to my eyes is above all the head of a warrior chief, an empire builder. I described to him the battle of Salamis, at which the Greeks dared to engage the colossal Persians, whom at a later date the Roman Empire itself dared not attack. Themistocles, commander of the Greek fleet, sent a spy to the enemy to tell them that the Greek ships could escape through a channel the Persians didn’t know about, which was true, and that the Persians ought to block it, which they did. When the enemy maneuver had been executed, Themistocles told his troops and sailors: “We are trapped like rats. We have no choice but to conquer or die.” All this can be seen in this head of Athena: the sacrifice for their country, the abnegation, the courage under duress, the order within the city—all of it making up a vast part of the Greek sensibility. I showed Mintchine the Greek athlete and said: “It was with the athlete that Themistocles was able to conquer at Salamis, the athlete, in whom the chieftain could always find an instrument to carry out his decisions. And their mothers were built with the solidity of Hera, to give birth to these sturdy warriors and produce beings whose minds held the depths of the spirit.”
I furthermore explained to Mintchine the union of the Greeks with nature; with the air, the vital element! I gave him a brief account of that religion of nature which Christianity has not encompassed, a religion which gave the Greek artist the power to make the air whirl tumultuously around each of his personages. Then we came to stand before the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which he knew already and adored. I pointed out to him the soft nap of the feathers, a nap of marble, then the bony structure of the wings and their interior armature. I insisted on the fact that the Winged Victory was nearly as immobile as the Hera, for grandeur resides in quasi-immobility; it is the whirling of the head wind that forces her into this attitude of flying-buttress like resistance.
I took him up to Chardin’s Peaches; he didn’t like the colors, I don’t know why; I suspect that he prefers his own red. I wanted him to look at Lépicié’s Child Drawing beside it, a mediocre work because everything in it is too light. What a difference between that chair and the baby’s chair in The Blessing! I had already explained to him that a masterpiece is a work which shows us the highest values of a race on the day the work is created. “France,” I said to him, “comprised at that time 15 million men, 14 million of them like those whom Chardin painted; you, Mintchine, see these simple French interiors every day, and in them find the qualities of The Blessing, and that’s why we are in front of a masterpiece. Fragonard, who showed only one side of France, doesn’t at tain the greatness of Chardin with his 14 million models. Now look at Chardin’s La Pourvoyeuse, and the loaf of bread she is holding, which is only an inch or so square and which none the less weighs several kilos; any baker would give you the exact weight of that loaf; and I promise you, the less great the artist, the less exactly he renders weight. Look at Chardin’s candle standing amid the musical instruments; it’s the best painted part of this canvas since its substance and weight are exactly rendered.” It was Mintchine who took me up to a Poussin; he rhapsodized over an Adam and Eve in the terrestrial Paradise, especially the woman, and he murmured that it was a fragment comparable to Da Vinci. We passed by French primitives and I stopped only in front of two panels, the Avignon Pieta, to make him note the mass represented in the donor, and the apparent suppression of detail, as in the swaddled baby with its milk-fed hands. He wanted to go to the Rembrandts, and was transfixed in front of the St. Matthew, remarking: “Rembrandt painted with white and then glazed over it. He couldn’t possibly have done otherwise, he wouldn’t have achieved his subtlety of tones. Look at the brush strokes all in one direction, one direction only, and so vigorous, then the glazed colors running in every direction. See the angel behind St. Matthew. There’s an angel for you; he’s ugly, but he is a man, he is intelligent; that’s what an angel should be: intelligence and virility!”
Then we retraced our steps and paused before the Vermeer and one or two small Rembrandts. We returned by the large gallery, stopping before Rubens’ The Artist’s Wife, and here he could see how the artist prepared his backgrounds. Mintchine adores Tintoretto, and in a somewhat reddened woman with a child, he found the robust qualities of the Hera, that matron who gave her race its solidity.
We lingered before La Gioconda. Mintchine was full of contradictions and said: “It isn’t the picture I was expecting. When you’ve waited for something for years and years, you want something more tremendous. And then I don’t understand the picture. What is it? It’s the photograph of an angel.” When I pointed out the Mino da Fiesole in the Gustave Dreyfus Collection, he described the personage in one stroke: “What a politician!” He was pleased that I liked Tintoretto’s Paradise and said: “Take away the personages, and the clouds remain, prodigious clouds, an immensity of clouds, a very paradise of clouds.” I asked him whether he often went to the Louvre. Once a week. Did he feel he learned anything there? He said he did. I took him up to Raphael’s Castiglione and declared that the background was one of the most beautiful in the world. “Yes, and it is insubstantial,” he added. “It isn’t a wall, it isn’t stone, wood, or paper, it’s nothing known to us and it’s extraordinary. As for the man, he is so obviously an intellectual and has such finesse, such Jewish diplomacy.” I had Mintchine pause before the Antonello da Messina and he said: “Above those qualities that you extol, substance and weight, there is light. I prefer Renoir and Cézanne to your Antonello da Messina; they would have put in the light which is lacking here.” He had already said to me in the large gallery: “Dark backgrounds aren’t for us anymore; we shouldn’t look for them; our rooms are bright. There was a time when people were placed near a window; in our time the dark background is a heresy.” “Light has a weight of its own,” I replied, “and is also a sensibility. The sensibility for light was perhaps as keen then in Venice as it is today with us, but what gives it more breadth in our time is that it is within everyone’s reach.” We came to stand in front of the portrait of Botticelli’s young man, and Mintchine was both moved and astounded at the harmony of this troubled countenance. “This picture,” I said to him, “is more beautiful than The Condottiere, because this young man more than the other represents the greatness of his country. It is the image of the Renaissance Italian, disturbed, melancholy in his joys and in his aristocracy, whereas The Condottiere represents force, surprise, cruelty.” He said by way of conclusion: “I have still more to learn from Renoir, from Monet, from Cézanne. I’ve thought a lot about Cézanne. I agree with you,” I replied. “The painting of Rembrandt, of Poussin, was contained in Cézanne, but that of Cézanne is not yet in you, you are too close to it; it will be in our children by the miracle of ancestral memory.”
January 9 1930/ Mintchine
Yesterday I bought a nude by Mintchine for 3500 francs; it is prodigious, a very vigorous woman, head lowered, drawing down the whole body, breasts pendant but full; there is a prodigious foreshortening of the head, and thick bushy hair thrusting up like a forest, and it’s splendid (fig.7). Mintchine said: “To do a head or hands isn’t all that much, with the rest of the body covered by clothing. Material is easy. But in a nude every square inch of flesh has to be studied.”
January 11 1930/ Mintchine in person at the Manteaus’
“I am glad, M. Gimpel, that you have the nude of my wife; I did it thinking of the athlete in motion, the Greek athlete you showed me at the Louvre. It isn’t smooth, that marble, it’s composed as if in thicknesses superimposed just like paint; it’s fantastic. I tried that with my canvas, which is no smoother and whose surface, whose substance resembles stone. Now I am working on flowers. I used to think it easy, but the flower is lighted from the other side, always by transparency, and that’s what is difficult.”
June 27 1930/ Mintchine comes to see me
He was shaven and neat; I remarked on this and he told me that it was especially for me, that he’d come to say goodbye to me, I showed him his canvas that I had just bought from Manteau for the Toledo Museum (fig.8). Three thousand francs. I then advised him to study the transparency of shadows, which is a failure of his. I brought out some ten Claude Monets; he saw my point and assured me that after each of our conversations he makes enormous progress. He is leaving for the Dordogne.
December 4 1930/ Mintchine
The Manteaus can no longer manage him and I am going to take him over from them next January, giving them compensation. Th painter won’t deliver me pictures every month. “It’s terrible,” he was saying, “this obsession, these canvases that must be handed over on the thirtieth or the thirty-first, unfinished, Often all wrong, about which there hasn’t been time to form an opinion: which need to be reconsidered and lived with. Ah, M. Gimpel, I’m pleased to be working with you, because I know it will be more diffcult than with Manteau. You see, I couldn’t work with Deydier, he’s sensitive but he wearies me. ‘%at’s pretty, that’s ugly,’ he’ll say to me. That isn’t criticism, You say to me: ‘Here you lack transparency, here weight, there relief.’ That’s criticism; you put your finger on the spot. But Deydier’s ‘That’s pretty’ or ‘That’s ugly’ means nothing. A lot of canvases it’s better not to sell; they’re studies, thoughts, annotations, they’re rough drafts. A writer is allowed his drafts, but not a painter; it’s madness. One day one may start a canvas well and finish it badly; one wants a layout. A picture is a thou sand things, a thousand things which the collector doesn’t think about, but it’s not for him to think over a picture, it isn’t made for words but for the eyes. In Russia one day a group of artists were arguing in front of a rather incomprehensible picture by a painter who was close to genius, and while they were raving, a peasant said: ‘It’s beautiful.’ ‘But what do you know?’ the artists demanded. ‘This blue, this blue,’ he told them, ‘look how beautiful it is.’ He was right, he had understood.”
April 25 1931/ Mintchine, the genius, is dead
I received the following telegram from his wife, dated 4:25 P.M.:“Mintchine died suddenly. Alone, without money. Coming at once.Madame Mintchine.”I was thunderstruck. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. It is terrible to learn that a genius has died in the prime of life. I weep for the future. I weep above all for the works he did not create; the unknown now vanished. I weep for what the world is losing, for the joy he would have spread, the joy he brought forth from grief. During his nearly four months in the Midi he wrote to me three times. There are one or two magnificent passages, one especially, on grief. And it must not be forgotten that he was a Russian; he spoke French very badly but could write it with beauty. He would have become a Renoir, perhaps even greater! I weep for him. He had told the Manteaus and Deydier of his privations in Russia, and even in France; it must have been tragic to hear him. Two years ago, I believe, he had had a kidney removed. I went to see Deydier’s cousin, as Deydier is away, and she told me that the painter must have been suffering from tuberculosis. Where will he be laid to rest? Perhaps at Toulon, which he so loved. A few years more and the world would have been kneeling at his tomb; today it is almost a common grave. Poor corpse! Deydier, the Manteaus, and I are the only ones who realize the disaster. All three of them had given him hope and confidence in his genius. He had fire and would speedily have acquired repose. He was of the stuff of Rubens, Fragonard, Delacroix. It was in fire that he too would have created his most beautiful works.
I believe that in his last months he really looked on me as a tutelary spirit. He had found material repose, and peace was essential to him. He knew that my counsels were wise, that they didn’t fasten on details but were general comments. He was irritated when others told him, for example, that he ought to have placed a trumpet to the right and not to the left; to make progress he didn’t need anyone. What he was anxious to know could quite simply have been taught him in school, if such a school had existed; a school in the ancient manner, a school on discipline, tradition, tools, technique—he would have liked to learn all this, so as not to waste time finding it out—a school on preparation, foundation, blendings, chemical reactions.
Of all that I could tell him nothing. Not “poor Mintchine”; but “poor world,”; which has lost him! I was alone when I heard the news and fell asleep in this darkness, this hell. Of what consequence is it to note down facts, when beings like Mintchine are facts in themselves, creators of facts? He envied Soutine for having been in France fifteen years longer than he. Paris and France were an inspiration to him, the spring of his talent, the first source. He wanted to become naturalized; he didn’t know how ill he was.
July 15 1931/ The French spirit
I have the impression that they are all dead, those who have passed through these pages: Renoir, Monet, Marcel Proust, CaroDelvaille, Nungesser, Mary Cassatt, and how many others! A star was rising: Mintchine, whose first hopes I was to shelter, and the first wind has him off.