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capable, and despises what is within his powers. The artificial and the mon 
strous seem to him the goal of perfection. Whatever he can achieve, he covers 
with blood and mud. Only in the monstrous is man creative; those unfit for 
this work compose verses, strum the lyre or brandish the paint brush. This 
last group devote themselves with enigmatic frenzy to the painting of still- 
lives, landscapes, nudes. Since the days of the caves, man has been painting 
still-lives, landscapes, nudes. Since the days of the caves, man has glorified 
and deified himself, and has brought about human catastrophes by his mon 
strous vanity. Art has collaborated in his false development. To me the con 
ception of art that has upheld the vanity of man is sickening. 
Man loves what is vain and dead 
In art also man loves what is vain and dead. He cannot understand that 
painting is something other than a landscape prepared with oil and vinegar, 
and sculpture something other than a woman’s thigh made out of marble 
or bronze. Any living transformation of art seems to him as detestable as 
the eternal metamorphoses of life. Straight lines and honest colors exasperate 
him above all. Man doesn’t want to get to the bottom of things. The radiance 
of the universe makes his degeneration and ugliness too apparent. That is 
why man clings desperately to graceful garlands and makes himself a special 
ist in values. Out of his nine openings framed in curls, man exhales blue 
vapor, gray fog, black smoke. Sometimes he tries like a fly to walk on the 
ceiling, but he always fails and falls with a crash on the table covered with 
the best crockery. 
Man calls the concrete abstract. This is not surprising, for he commonly 
confuses front and back even when using his nose, his mouth, his ears, that 
is to say, five of his nine openings. I understand that a cubist painting might 
be called abstract, for parts of the object serving as model for the picture have 
been abstracted. But in my opinion a picture or a sculpture without any object 
for model is just as concrete and sensual as a leaf or a stone. 
Art is a fruit 
Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its 
mother’s womb. But whereas the fruit of the plant, the fruit of the animal, the 
fruit in the mother’s womb, assume autonomous and natural forms, art, the 
spiritual fruit of man, usually shows an absurd resemblance to the aspect of