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coexistences, it is impossible to conceive of them at one and the
same time, and death is the result of their juxtaposition, of their
mingling, of their love.
Each divinity creates after his own image: so too, the painters.
And it is only photographers who manufacture reproductions of
nature.
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♦ ♦
Neither purity nor unity count without the truth, which can
not be compared to reality, since truth is always the same, out
side all nature, which exerts itself to hold us within the fatal
order of things wherein we are only animals.
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Above all, artists are men who wish to become inhuman.
They seek painfully the traces of inhumanity, traces which are
never found in nature.
These are the real truths, and beyond them we know no reality.
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♦ ♦
But reality is never discovered once and for all. The truth
will always be new.
Otherwise, truth would be a system even more miserable than
nature.
In this case, the deplorable truth, every day more distant, less
distinct, less real, would reduce painting to a state of plastic
writing destined simply to facilitate the relations between peo
ples of the same race.
In our day, a machine would quickly be invented which with
out comprehension reproduced such signs.
II
Many of the new painters paint only pictures which have no
actual subject. And the titles which one finds in the catalogues
play merely the role of the names which designate men without
characterising them.