Minor preoccupations,major endeavors: The community of poets and painters

Maya Boutaghou and Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François include a provocative declaration in their description of the concept of “minor transnationalism” as put forth by Shu-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet in their 2005 collection of essays bearing that title. In the light of the wide acceptance of the notion of the “transnational” in critical theory, they wanted to focus on the “minor”—phrasing their enquiry in this fashion: “How can we think the minor and its triggers? The minor as a critical and political category functions as a counter discourse to hegemonic discourses and structures of power particularly in nationalistic and imperialistic contexts.” The minor as a category presupposes the existence of an opposing and dominant group, the major. If our topic were music, that pair—major and minor—would not be oppositional, but complementary; the two keys make the listener aware of contrast and complexity. But our topic is literature, writing. An anecdote of a visit decades ago to the Strand Book Store in Union Square with the American poet, T. Alan Broughton, perhaps a recognizable name to those who live in Burlington, Vermont, serves as a means of introducing the direction of my contribution to this task. At the time, Alan had just published his first volume of poetry, In the Face of Descent (Broughton, 1976). The poetry section at the Strand contains rows upon rows of thin volumes which bear the names of authors who were completely unknown to me, most of whom never achieved notoriety or even recognition. When speaking in terms of what Jacques Dubois (1978) deems “the institution of literature,” the minor in this case refers to those who are forgotten. Alan uttered some truly memorable words while we looked at all those volumes of poetry relegated to a secondhand book store: “So many unfulfilled dreams.” In an age when poetry as a genre seems to be increasingly invisible, when performance has replaced the written artifact, what is the use of speaking of poetry? Or to aggravate the situation, what is the use of speaking of the minor writings of poets, their discourse on painting? Minor Transnationalism treats a variety of interdisciplinary subjects ranging from cartography to the Jazz Age in Montmartre, but it does not include that more intimate and personal exchange by which poets establish their mental image of a place and a people through the visual arts, that dialogue of response and imaginary appropriation. They express major human preoccupations when producing these “minor” forms.

The examples used in this essay are borrowed from both major and lesser-known American and French poets: T. Alan Broughton, Michel Deguy, Nicolas Pesquès, Yves Bonnefoy, and Mark Strand. They seem not only to underline life’s brevity and the fragility of fame, but the solitude of the writer, a lonely figure who confronts the dilemma of his task, an endeavor which rarely ends in satisfaction, but necessitates the endless repetition of the effort, much in the same way a painter sketches innumerable studies in preparation to produce a painting. It would be too categorical and naively self-evident to say that writing and all writers constitute the minor. The solidarity of poets and painters and those who write about them might be considered the formation of a socio-political form of resistance. Considering this thought has led me to return to the reflections that preoccupied me 12 years ago, when I wrote extensively on this subject (Russo, 2007). In his 1995 collection of poems In the Country of Elegies, T. Alan Broughton devotes 18 poems to Van Gogh. Each of the texts in the subtitled section “Letters to Van Gogh” starts with an epigraph taken from Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo (Broughton, 1995: 77–103). Van Gogh’s letters to his brother return time and time again to how the painter suffered from his lack of recognition, the suffering he endured from separation and the very difficulty of the task of painting (Broughton, 1995).

The first poem in Broughton’s series seems relevant to this discussion because of the opposition that Van Gogh remarks between his art and his perception of beauty in the world around him: “on the other side of life we shall see good reasons for the existence of pain, which seen from here sometimes so fills the whole horizon that it takes on the proportions of a helpless deluge . . . it is better to look at a wheat field” (Broughton, 1995: 77). Broughton’s poem parallels but reverses the opposition in the quote he has chosen from Van Gogh. The perception of beauty precedes the recognition of pain. The first four lines can be considered an ekphrasis of a landscape: “White straggler of cloud/ is no omen. Even a mountain/ heaving the planes of green/ toward blue does no harm/ to roofs of shed and barn” (Broughton, 1995: 77). The concluding four lines depict a man toiling in pain: “Then not the man/ in his rut/ pale splotch staggering/ under a load/ blinded by sweat” (Broughton, 1995: 77). The wheat must be harvested. Broughton uses Van Gogh’s words to accompany his own perception of the inevitability of the inextricable link between suffering and the perception of beauty. He uses the painter’s words to confirm what he too perceives and recreates in his own poetic landscape.

In the conclusion to my 2007 essay Le peintre comme modèle: du surréalisme à l’extrême-contemporain, poets’ dialogues with painting were explained in the paradoxical terms of the Latin etymology of the word hospitality—hospes, hospitis—host and guest being derived from the same roots, and hospitality defined in terms of reciprocity. In terms of literature and painting as institutions, the poet who writes on painting seeks to understand the artistic process of a fellow creator, and if that painter is known, benefit and enhance his reputation by becoming a commentator on the painter, asserting his perspicacity as someone able to receive, respond, and understand the painter. The writer is enhanced by his association with an already established painter. If the painter is unknown and the poet of note, the painter’s name becomes more visible. The exchange in all cases is transformative. The writer who sees and recounts his reception and the painter who inspires the response are joined. The word “reception” itself embodies the semantic duality of responding and entertaining. Jacques Derrida’s commentary on Emmanuel Lévinas’s Totalité et infini (Lévinas, 1984), Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas (1997) and Michel Deguy’s volume Donnant, donnant (1981, and his essay on Pignon’s Grands nus rouges in Aux heures d’affluence (1993)) inspired this understanding of the reciprocal hospitality shared by poets and painters.

In Au fond des images (Nancy, 2003) Jean-Luc Nancy introduces concepts in his first chapter, “L’image – le distinct,” about the images which are pertinent to understanding the minor genre of poets’ writings on paintings and painters. Nancy begins his meditation on the image by making the statement that the image is always sacred, clarifying that the sacred should not be confused with the religious, which is based on rituals which form ties with a community, a superior being, or with one’s self. The sacred signifies that which is separated, excluded, taken away, distanced (Nancy, 2003: 11). The image’s attraction is derived from this distancing, this distinctiveness, from its untouchable nature. Because of its separation from the viewer, the image attracts, inspires a desire for intimacy, draws the spectator to it. The seductiveness of the image comes from its power to be touched by the eyes, and the intellect. Nancy expresses this attraction erotically in terms of “penetration,” another word whose semantic duality conveys the physical and rational nature of the contact (Nancy, 2003: 26). The image’s power of attraction and its ability to inspire the desire for penetration recalls the contemporary painter-writer François Rouan’s fascination with Joan Miró’s 1919 Autoportrait. He copied the painting repeatedly in a series of distinctive graphic impressions which he titled Mirotopos. Frustrated by his own inability to penetrate the intricacies of the details of Miró’s painting, and to translate them into his own graphic language, Rouan physically coupled with his monotype, imprinting his own body on his creation (Rouan, 1993). In writing on painting, poets experience simultaneously this desire to grasp and possess, and their frustration from the inadequacy of their response. They embrace the painting with their bodies, surrounding and enrobing it with their words (Rouan, 1983).

Metaphorically, each time a poet writes about a painter, he or she is emblematically imprinting his or her psyche, touching the untouchable, creating an intimacy with that which is unattainable. Canadian-born former US Poet Laureate Mark Strand contributed a volume devoted to Edward Hopper to the Ecco Press series “Writers on Art.” In the preface to Hopper (1994), Strand recounts how he had written an article in the New York Times reviewing the exhibit of the Hopper bequest to the Whitney Museum. This article, “Crossing the Tracks to Hopper’s World,” is reprinted in J. D. McClatchy’s 1990 anthology Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth Century Poets. Daniel Halperin, editor of Antaeus, and later of Ecco Press, urged Strand to write on Hopper for his journal. Two other lecture invitations, the first, shortly after Strand was appointed Poet Laureate, at the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the second a year later at the Art Institute of Chicago, produced the drafts of Strand’s book on Hopper. As McClatchy points out in his introduction to Strand’s essay, from 1956 to 1959 Strand studied with Joseph Albers at the Yale School of Art. McClatchy underlines the pertinence of Strand’s final comments on Hopper to the description of the poet’s own enterprise:

Strand ends this essay with an image of Hopper “being with us, but always with his back turned.” Many years later, Strand took up that same image and applied it to himself: “Increasingly, I have felt that I don’t see a painting until I turn away from it and I don’t read a poem until I have closed the book. What I know or retain of either depends on what I have invented in their place. Oh I refer to them, but mostly I draw on my own blindness and ignorance, insight and knowledge.” (McClatchy, 1990: 339–340)

In his essay Hopper, Strand establishes an identical analogy. He starts his essay with a quotation from Hopper’s writings on the painter Charles E. Burchfield (1893–1967), noting that Hopper must just as well be writing about himself, justifying his commentary by adding: “He is the painter of American life at its most hopeless and provincial. Yet he has rescued it from its workaday rhythms in which it is demeaned and has given it a preserving character” (McClatchy, 1990: 340). The first painting which Strand describes in his 1971 essay is the 1925 “House by the Railroad” which he will use as the cover illustration for his 1994 volume. These railroad tracks, roads, and highways which reflect Hopper’s “fascination with passage” (McClatchy, 1990: 340) inspire Strand’s and his reader’s reaction as being “transients, momentary visitors to a scene which will endure without us and that suffers our presence with an aggressive reticence” (McClatchy, 1990: 340–341). Strand describes this painting in terms of the emotions it inspires in him:

Separated from the house by the tracks, we feel separated by change, by progress, by motion, and ultimately by the conditions our own mortality imposes. The house glares at us from what seems like an enormous distance. It appears, in fact, so withdrawn from us that it appears as an emblem of refusal, a monument to the idea of enclosure. (McClatchy, 1990: 341)

Strand considers Hopper’s explanation of his intention that he merely wanted to paint the effect of sunlight on the side of a house as highly misleading, simplistic, “for the sunlight in his paintings illuminates the secretive without penetrating it” (McClatchy, 1990: 341). As Strand points out, the painting in its eternal suspension of time invites us into a forbidden land which “makes us feel more than we care to like time’s creatures. Each of us would have to cross the tracks to inhabit Hopper’s Victorian mansion with its coffin-like finality” (McClatchy, 1990: 341). Strand takes his clue from what Hopper conveys in this painting and uses the presence of travel, “passageways and temporary stopping places” (Strand, 1994: 3), and the description of the traces of sunlight in his analysis of the other paintings he addresses. These minor formal traits become his major tools of analysis. In spite of the fact that Hopper’s paintings seem to be scenes of his own past, nostalgia is not his motivation. He recognizes the experience of looking at Hopper’s paintings as the “invitation to construct a narrative for each painting” (Strand, 1994: 3). The repeated suggestions of travel and the absorbing gaze required to create a narrative form represent competing paradoxical tensions in Hopper’s work: “These two imperatives—one that urges us to continue and the other that compels us to stay—create a tension that is constant in Hopper’s work” (Strand, 1994: 3). Strand repeats his technique of following the rays of sunlight in each painting as an organizing principle for the narrative he constructs to accompany Excursion into Philosophy (1959):

Light from an open window has imprinted itself on the floor at the man’s feet and on the wall behind the bed. A book lies open beside the man. Clearly there is a story here, but unlike most of the paintings I have discussed, it is not a story accomplished by the shrewd disposition of formal or abstract elements. Here the burden of meaning falls on the man, the woman, and the book, and to read the painting we must construct the narrative of their relationship to each other. (Strand, 1994: 49–50)

The viewer soon abandons the painting to become engrossed in his own narrative: “In no time we leave the painting behind and are involved in the banality of the melodrama, which depends, unfortunately, on the look of disillusionment that is writ large on the man’s face” (Strand, 1994: 50). In constructing the narrative, Strand engages the words of an unidentified critic who quotes Hopper’s wife, Josephine, a critic herself who documented Hopper’s paintings in his ledgers. Hopper sketched his paintings and gave an account of where each work was exhibited, its market value, and sales history. In her annotations she comments and Strand quotes her: “the open book is Plato, reread too late” (Strand, 1994: 50). Strand finds this information unsettling, the quest for interpretation reducing rather than expanding the spectator’s involvement. In fact, the impenetrability cannot be sustained, and this painting inspires a very different sentiment than Hopper’s famous Nighthawks (1942), the first work he discusses (Strand, 1994: 5–7): “Excursion into Philosophy does not sway its viewers to feelings of isolation or exclusion. It invites us into its static center where the man, the woman, and the book are gathered in an odd triangulation of forces” (Strand, 1994: 50). Strand’s phrase “odd triangulation of forces” leads me to describe a constant triangular relationship which characterizes the meditation involved in the gaze. The poet looks at a painting in much the same way that a painter looks at a landscape or a figure. The object of the gaze is always at a distance, separated from the spectator, curiously impenetrable and beyond the grasp of the gaze. Painters and poets are still confronting and not surmounting Plato’s reflections on the challenges of representation.

Hopper’s paintings inspire Strand to create narratives and to question representation. He also speaks about them in terms of their formal qualities and the impressions they suggest. Hopper’s use of light evokes a detailed comparison with that of other painters, especially Monet’s use of light which “dematerializes” objects, turning “the great façade of the Rouen Cathedral into an airy wedding cake [. . .]” (Strand, 1994: 31). In contrast, Strand (1994) deems Hopper’s light as “peculiar”: “it does not seem to fill the air. Instead, it seems to adhere to walls and objects, almost as if it comes from them, emanating from their carefully conceived and distributed tones” (p. 31). Strand reminds his readers that when Hopper painted in oils, he did so in his studio and his use of light was created from memory, not from the direct transposition of a perception. Strand (1994) has an explanation: “Actual light changes too quickly for a man who worked as slowly as Hopper did. He had to imagine a light to go with his world of fading particulars, and this was best done in the studio” (p. 31). Strand (1994) describes Hopper’s relationship to light as “memorial” and not “celebratory,” it resists darkness: “Hopper attempts to fix it, to give it a life that would resist dissolution, may account for the geometrical severity of its shapes” (p. 32). Poets cannot avoid commenting on the formal aspects of paintings. Transcribing acts of seeing turns them into art critics.

Certain painters capture the imagination and become emblematic of a perception of place. Edward Hopper seems to embody the quintessence of how contemporary French poets represent the American urban landscape. In his 2016 volume La vie subite, Michel Deguy expresses the deeply felt and contradictory reactions which Hopper’s paintings inspire in his poem “Avril à Manhattan.” The subtitle of La vie subite, Poèmes Biographèmes Théorèmes, is pertinent to the understanding of this poetic text. It is simultaneously a biographical anecdote and a theoretical reflection on the nature of mimesis. Deguy’s affinity with the city of New York dates back to his visiting appointments at SUNY at Buffalo in the mid 1970s. The title of “Avril à Manhattan” recalls Vernon Duke’s “April in Paris,” most memorably sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Duke was also the composer of “Autumn in New York.” Although Deguy’s poem is a meditation on Edward Hopper’s painting and what it means to be American, the lyrics of this song seem to be just below the surface of Deguy’s text: “April in Paris, this is a feeling which no one can ever reprise.” The poem starts with a direct reference to Hopper’s use of light: “Chez Hopper les choses ne sont pas éclairées, recevant d’ailleurs une lumière. Ce sont elles qui éclairent: elles sont lampes, comme perles à Delft” [In Hopper things are not illuminated, receiving light from elsewhere. They illuminate; they are lamps, like pearls in Delft] (Deguy, 2016: 79). The reference to “perles à Delft” is the not only evocation of Vermeer in Deguy’s text. Deguy refers to “un petit pan de mur jaune,” recalling the episode in Proust’s La prisonnière, the sixth volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, in which the fictive writer Bergotte is afflicted while visiting an exhibit of Vermeer’s paintings and dies (Proust, 1923/1989). Bergotte had read a critic’s comment on that patch of yellow which he could not himself remember and wanted once again to see the painting he admired so much to verify the critic’s perception. Bergotte admires two paintings: Girl with a Pearl Earring and the View of Delft. Bergotte’s final words contain a remark about “un petit pan de mur jaune” [a little patch of yellow wall]. He wished his writings could have had the effect as this small detail had on his manner of perceiving Vermeer’s “View of Delft.” In Deguy’s poem, the use of the reference is even more enigmatic and suggestive. Deguy first presents a general statement about the existential nature of painting and then equates Hopper’s paintings with a specific type of representation. He identifies the referents of the paintings, the thing of things, so to speak.

Le tableau est une chose de choses, un ensemble posé

 que son nom peut rassembler à ce titre, comme un petit

 pan de mur jaune.

  Si le monde a lieu en choses, alors un lieu de monde,

l’américain, se montre : des bouts de monde aux bouts

du monde font un monde : the bar, the railway, the

gas station, the hotel room, the girl, the corner bar in

Manhattan . . . C’est où on pourrait vivre, attachés à y

être.

 [The painting is a thing of things, a unity posed

so that its name might assemble as such in this respect, like a little

patch of yellow wall.

If the world takes place in things, then a place in the world

shows itself, the American: the bits of the world at the ends

of the world make a world: the bar, the railway, the

gas station, the hotel room, the girl, the corner bar in

Manhattan. . . It’s where one could live, attached to being there.]

(Deguy, 2016: 79; translated by Adelaide M Russo)

Instead of enumerating the actual titles of Hopper’s paintings, Deguy identifies them in terms of the things they represent “Le tableau est une chose de choses” [The painting is a thing of things] (Deguy, 2016: 79). This attention to the object depicted, to the referent in Saussure’s terminology, leads him to meditate on the nature of representation, not only on how Hopper uses mimesis, but on how America represents itself. Deguy, like Strand, is attracted to these spaces and enters them, while including a comment on how America’s self-involvement, its egotism, adds to its power of seduction to such an extent that it inspires a desire to immigrate:

 Ce n’est pas à l’artiste d’imiter – les arbres, les ombres,

le lit, le corps, l’ustensile. C’est «l’Amérique» qui s’imite

elle-même; et la séduction de ce narcissisme est d’autant

plus forte, le spectateur d’autant plus jaloux de tant d’au-

thenticité, que ces modèles se préfèrent visiblement; il

suit et rentre dans le tableau reclos, silencieux, d’où l’abs-

traction écarte les sensibles, fumets ou sonorités. Quand

le modèle s’imite lui-même, remake du live in America, il

enflamme le désir: son contempleur se fait immigrant.

 [It is not up to the artist to imitate—the trees, the shadows,

the bed, the body, the utensil. It is “America” which imitates

itself; and the seduction of this narcissism is all the more

strong, the spectator all the more jealous of so much au-

thenticity, that the models are perceptively favored; he

follows and reenters the silent reclosed painting, from which

the abstraction separates the sensate, aroma or tones. When

the model imitates itself, remake of live in America, it

inflames desire: the contemplator becomes immigrant.]

(Deguy, 2016: 79–80; translated by Adelaide M Russo)

Deguy’s fervent admiration for and critical curiosity about the United States are expressed throughout his work, and others such as Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck have addressed it directly in her essay “Michel Deguy chez les mutants” (Cardonne-Arlyck, 1996). In “Avril à Manhattan,” Deguy simultaneously points out what he considers the flaw in the national character, America’s narcissism, its uncompromising exceptionalism, and its power of seduction, its appeal which would even turn the most Parisian of Parisians into an immigrant. The notion of remake is a concept that Deguy uses frequently in speaking of visual images produced and reproduced in the United States. In “USA, un film,” an essay included in his 1990 volume Arrêts fréquents [Frequent stops], Deguy elaborates the concept of the remake, the model which imitates itself, in comments on two films starring Paul Newman, The Color of Money (1991) and The Hustler (1961), films based on adaptations of Walter Tevis’s novels bearing the same titles (1984 and 1959 respectively) (Deguy, 1990: 81–82; see Russo, 2005). Deguy uses the past participle reclos of the archaic verb reclore (to close again) and the neologism contempleur, instead of the standard French contemplateur, in a revealing manner. In both cases it seems that the English language is infiltrating his French. The use of reclos stresses the theme of confinement which Strand had identified in Hopper’s paintings. In the resolution to “Avril à Manhattan,” the poet’s interior monologue is replaced by a more objective account of the anecdote of his visit to see Hopper’s painting. He refers to the young guide’s commentary. Imbued with an ideological, sociological interpretation of the significance of Hopper’s paintings, she remarks that the painter is denouncing all the ills of capitalist society: machines, the financial crisis, the price of petroleum, and so on. Deguy replies to this explanation by stating emphatically that the painter is not denouncing any such thing: “Nous nous regardons: le peintre ne dénonce pas: il peint” [We look at each other: the painter does not denounce: he paints] (Deguy, 2016: 80). Ultimately, in “Avril à Manhattan” Deguy is responding to the seduction of Hopper’s paintings, scenes that embody America and attract him to it, in spite of what America represents.

In an interview with Alain Veinstein recorded on July 15, 1989, at the time of the first retrospective exhibit of Edward Hopper’s work in France at the Musée Cantini in Marseilles, Yves Bonnefoy explains his reaction to Hopper. His reactions are similar to Deguy’s in his comments on the American painter’s ability to distill the American psyche. Bonnefoy encountered Hopper’s paintings when he visited New York for the first time in 1958 at the Museum of Modern Art. Note that thirty-one years passed between Bonnefoy’s first encounter and the organization of a significant retrospective of Hopper’s paintings at a major French museum. For Bonnefoy, Hopper is a great American artist who has that ability to transpose the metaphysical dimension of America into his work. Bonnefoy uses the expression “la photosynthèse de l’être” [the photosynthesis of being] to express the nature of this transformation, the evocation of presence. Bonnefoy uses this concept as the title of his contribution to the catalog of the 1989 Hopper exhibition (see Cendo et al., 1989).

Bonnefoy’s choice of emblematic paintings is different from Strand’s. He considers the 1912 painting Squam Light as exemplary of what he wants to say about Hopper’s use of light and color, and his ability to transpose the American reality, to make his spectator aware of the presence of that reality. Like Deguy, decades before “Avril à Manhattan,” Bonnefoy, when speaking of Hopper’s use of color, compares him to Vermeer, using the same Proustian reference to a “petit pan” of color (Bonnefoy, 1995: 234). In fact, Bonnefoy considers Hopper at first a colorist, using Baudelaire’s distinction in the Salon de 1846 between painters who use color and those for whom drawing is the principal artistic dynamic. He stresses Hopper’s trips to Paris in 1906, 1909, and 1910, and his discovery of painting “en plein air” and how they changed his palette and sensibility to color. He also considers Hopper’s use of etching which would place him in the camp of painters whose inspiration was found in drawing (Bonnefoy, 1995: 237–238). This contrasts with Strand’s insistence that Hopper painted from memory in his studio, which, of course, is also true depending on the period in the painter’s career. Bonnefoy compares Hopper to Vermeer in his description of Squam Light. Hopper’s use of color is only a pretext to ask more important questions about humanity: “Sous l’étude de la couleur, la vraie recherche du peintre est psychologique, ou, disons plutôt existentielle” [Under the study of color, the painter’s true search is psychological, or rather let us say existential] (Bonnefoy, 1995: 238; translated by Adelaide M Russo).

Par sa couleur sur la toile qui se fait justesse, et intensité, à simplement entendre et recommencer la beauté du monde, le peintre peut opérer sa propre transmutation, remembrer son être psychique, faire de sa détresse d’avant, née du doute sur ce qui est, le matériau où flambe une joie: et Squam Light y a réussi, à preuve dans l’animation des rapports de couleurs, de valeurs, cette petite cheminée rouge qui semble un acte plus qu’un objet, une pensée plus qu’une apparence, si vive est sa discussion joyeuse avec les tons alentour. Si le «petit pan de mur jaune», chez Vermeer, comble la soif d’absolu, permet à qui l’a aimé de mourir, ce petit pan-ci de brique rouge redonne le goût de vivre, c’est Hopper réconcilié, rédimé.

[By its color on the canvas, just right, and the intensity, to simply understand and begin again the beauty of the world, the painter is able to carry out his own transmutation, reconstituting his own mental being, to make of his prior distress, born out of doubt of that which is, the material where a joy blazes: and Squam Light succeeded in this, as evidenced in the organization of the relationships of colors and values, this little red chimney which seems to be more an act than an object, a thought, more than an appearance, so vivid in its joyful discussion with the tones around it. If the “little patch of yellow wall,” in Vermeer, satisfies the thirst for the absolute, allows anyone who loved it to die, this little patch of red brick renews the taste for living, Hopper is reconciled, redeemed.] (Bonnefoy, 1995: 234; translated by Adelaide M Russo)

Bergotte’s death in La prisonnière once again provides the implicit intertext to this reference (Proust, 1923/1989). Bonnefoy is dialoguing with Proust while speaking of Hopper and Vermeer. These are not the only commonplaces where his discourse intersects with Strand’s and Deguy’s, and even, for that matter, repeats Jean-Luc Nancy’s premise about the image representing an impossible distance to be approached, but never really overcome. Like Strand, Bonnefoy uses Hopper’s own comments on his paintings and his wife Jo’s annotations in their ledgers as sources of information.

Hopper is not really a portraitist. To better understand Hopper’s attitude to portraiture, Bonnefoy comments on Degas’s use of perspective, borrowed from Japanese woodcuts. Degas’s practice of hiding a part of the body beyond the frame of the painting signifies for Bonnefoy that Degas is aware that the individuals he depicts come from a different world, their world, and that as a painter, Degas must seek to enter the world from whence they came (Bonnefoy, 1995: 240). According to Bonnefoy, this is Degas’s manner of proclaiming his solidarity with the person depicted. Hopper depicts figures who are randomly perceived and he accentuates rather than reduces the distance:

Aperçoit-il dans la rue, ou par une fenêtre éclairée, quelque figure qui le requiert, il ne songe pas à s’approcher, il n’emploiera pas son modèle unique à la faire avancer vers lui, il dessine au contraire pour en préserver la distance – cadrant la scène comme l’étranger qu’il est peut la voir, non comme ces êtres la vivent. Le système de signes par quoi le peintre classique explique l’action qu’il représente, quitte à en faire sa chose propre, ce récit que Degas a voulu briser, n’est nullement délaissé dans ces tableaux de Hopper, qui en tire même sans doute l’amère preuve de son propre cloisonnement; il nous est livré, simplement, sans les codes qui en suggéraient la valeur en tentant de nous faire croire qu’ils permettraient de le déchiffrer.

[If he notices some figure which summons him in the street, or through an illuminated window, he doesn’t dream of approaching it, he will not use his singular model to make it come towards him, on the contrary he draws to maintain the distance—framing the scene like the stranger he is could see it, not like those beings live it. The system of signs by which the classical painter explains the action he represents, ready to make it his own thing, this story which Degas wanted to break, is by no means abandoned in the paintings of Hopper, who even draws from it without a doubt the bitter proof of his own enclosure; it is delivered to us, simply, without the codes which suggest the value in attempting to make us believe that they will allow it to be deciphered.] (Bonnefoy, 1995: 241; translated by Adelaide M Russo)

Bonnefoy, like both Strand and Deguy, stresses the painter’s transmission of his sense of imprisonment, of being in compartmentalized enclosures. Bonnefoy is aware of the paradoxes in Hopper’s work, how his sense of anxiety and solitude may even be the basis for eternal hope (Bonnefoy, 1995: 245). He even uses the word reclos which Deguy chose to express this sensation when describing Hopper’s 1965 painting Chair Car: “. . . où l’événement humain, aussi reclos apparaisse-t-il sur son insuffisance native, est en fait traversé de feux” [. . . where the human event, as reclosed as it appears in its native insufficiency, is in fact crossed by fires] (Bonnefoy, 1995: 245). Describing the difference between Hopper’s two distinct periods, Bonnefoy considers both of them a quest for the understanding of the existential.

One aspect of Hopper’s painting which neither Deguy nor Bonnefoy stress is Hopper’s concern with the commercial value of his painting. Strand picks up on this preoccupation. Halperin’s request that Strand write on Hopper leads to Strand’s economic gain, in a manner comparable to Hopper’s preoccupation with the market value of his paintings. Painters, such as Monet whose versions of the Rouen cathedral changed to reflect the changes in the seasons, or Cézanne’s innumerable depictions of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, are drawn to the repeated use of motif. Identifying a quasi-obsessive preoccupation is a trait which other poets recognize in the works of the painters who inspire them. For example, Francis Ponge is very aware of Alberto Giacometti’s effort to grasp the human form (Russo, 2007: 159–177). Motivated by his desire to grasp how Giacometti transforms the human body into drawings and sculptures, Ponge repeatedly returns to write about this artist. Ponge is simultaneously trying to understand Giacometti’s techniques and motivations and questioning representation.

Like Ponge, contemporary French poet Nicolas Pesquès, born in 1946, has accompanied the work of many painters, providing them with catalog prefaces and critical commentaries. A collection of his essays and prefaces was published in 2017 under the title Sans peinture. He has focused his entire poetic production on surmounting the challenges of imitation. Since 1988, much like a painter preoccupied to the point of obsession to repeat the same figure or landscape, Nicolas Pesquès has devoted 16 volumes to the description of a small mountain—more a hilltop—in the Ardèche by the name of “le Juliau.” In the biographical introduction to his personal website, Pesquès initially describes his fascination with the north face of the Juliau as an act of transposition (Pesquès, 2009). He wanted to display the same insistence and assiduity in “writing” his hilltop as Cézanne had in depicting his favorite mountain outside of Aix-en-Provence, the Mont Sainte-Victoire (Pesquès, 2009).

Pesquès’s desire to encounter the integral landscape step by step, to be in touch with what was the brightest, most alive—“le vif”—dimension of his landscape, led him to realize how this adventure made him confront expression’s greatest challenge, the “dark night” of expression. He is well aware that his work will always remain unfinished. Cole Swensen’s 2008 translation of the La face nord du Juliau emblematically evokes the act of representation which motivates Pesquès, by placing a painting on a post in the foreground of a photo of the Juliau. The cover image of Swensen’s translation is dominated by the color yellow of the English broom which covers the mountain at certain times of the year (Pesquès and Swensen, 2017).

Pesquès, like his great friend Jacques Dupin, has accompanied a significant number of painters: Gilles Aillaud, Pierre Buraglio, Anne Deguelle, Eugène Delacroix, Claude Garache, Shirley Jaffe, Bernard Moninot, Myonghi, Aurélie Nemours, Roman Opalka, Brigitte Palaggi, Gérard Schlosser, Javier Téllez, Carmela Uranga, Jan Voss, and Paul Wallach to enumerate those who are included in his 2017 collection of essays, Sans peinture. This volume was published by François-Marie Deyrolle in a series devoted to poets’ writings on painting, titled “L’atelier contemporain”—a title used by Francis Ponge for his own collection of essays on painters. There is a special niche for publications of poets’ writings on artists as we noted in the case of Strand’s volume on Hopper. The Deyrolle collection includes texts by Sam Francis, Pierre Bonnard, Pierre Tal-Coat, and even collaborations such as the volume by Jean Dubuffet and Valère Novarina, Yves Bonnefoy and Gérard Titus-Carmel, among others. In the unpublished essay at the beginning of the volume which bears the same title, Pesquès asserts: “Il n’y a pas que les peintres qui produisent des images, les écrivains aussi” [Painters are not the only ones to produce images, writers do too] (Pesquès, 2017: 11). As if to prove his assertion, the volume contains an unpublished essay on Arthur Rimbaud. In the prefatory remarks in Sans peinture which Pesquès shares with his readers—he deems them “préambules”—, he notes that like everyone else he looked at pictures before he learned to read. Colors fascinated him, but he did not understand them. When he started to write, he wanted to reproduce this fascination, relive the effect that paintings and images had on him. Like Strand, he was captivated by the force of attraction. Pesquès succinctly describes the corporeal complexity of this attraction, the sensate and rational appeal of the experience. He expresses this intimate relationship established when contemplating a painting in his second “Préambule”:

Comment font toutes ces œuvres si différentes, pour m’atteindre avec une telle force ? Que font-elles à mon corps, qu’y font-elles dedans ?

Sans doute ne me touchent-elles pas toutes de la même façon. Sélectionnant tantôt le regard, tantôt la pensée, tantôt un couple de sens attirant tous les autres dans son sillage – et par sens j’entends non seulement les cinq traditionnels mais aussi la réflexion, le désir. Ainsi produisent-ils cet arc-boutement, cette tension, toutes antennes dehors, qui vont m’accaparer longtemps.

[What do all these so different works do, in order to touch me with such a force? What do they do to my body, what do they do inside of it?

Without a doubt, they all do not touch me in the same way. Sometimes they select the gaze, sometimes thought, sometimes a pair of senses attracting all the others in their wake—and by senses I understand not only the five traditional senses, but also thought, desire. In that fashion they produce that flying buttress, that tension, all antennas outside, which will preoccupy me for a very long time.] (Pesquès, 2017: 12; translated by Adelaide M Russo)

Pesquès continues his meditation by describing what happens when he has transposed his thoughts and sensations into writing and the painting disappears in much the way Strand speaks of the work of the imagination after he looks away from the painting or closes the book. For Pesquès the painting has disappeared, but at the same time it is intact within him. It has touched him in the same way he is touched by looking into the eyes of another: “Il y a toujours quelque chose de construit qui arrive dans le cœur, et toujours à la fin l’ébranlement échafaudé, la récompense du bâti: l’émotion” [There is always something built which reaches the heart, and always at the end of that shaking scaffolding, the reward for what is constructed: the emotion] (Pesquès, 2017: 13). Pesquès unites two opposites. How can one construct the precariousness of an upheaval? Movement and the static are experienced simultaneously. Living for Pesquès is seeing, is transforming what is seen into the graphic symbols, writing that allows another to construct his or her own imaginative creation which is not an identical replication of the initial experience of seeing.

One more example of the dialogue between poets and painters will serve as my conclusion. Many poets like Pesquès are inspired by diverse painters and their works. But artists may also select multiple poets with whom to dialogue. Bertrand Dorny (1931–2015) was a celebrated engraver who produced an important corpus of artists’ books with many very important writers: Michel Deguy, Michel Butor, Marcelin Pleynet, Eugène Guillevic, Bernard Noël, Paul Chemetov, Charles Juillet, Yves Peyré, Marc Le Bot, and so on. Dorny’s practice was to produce a series of hand-made volumes consisting of multi-media collages and give them to the writers with whom he dialogued. They would prepare the texts (See Figure 1 for display of Dorny’s artists books in the window of the Librairie Blaizot in Paris). At the end of his life, Dorny collaborated with Yves Bonnefoy, and their 2015 volume La Grande Ourse underscores the way in which these two artists were able to collaborate. Even if the work can be considered minor in the context of both Bonnefoy’s and Dorny’s extensive production, the text takes on major topics, questions of life, death, and living on. Of course, the title of this poem refers to the constellation Ursa Major, the constellation of seven bright stars—there are seven poems in Bonnefoy’s volume mirroring Ursa Minoris. Bonnefoy’s writings on art and aesthetics comprise one of the most extensive and significant corpuses of poets writing on painting in French. La Grande Ourse, written to accompany Bertrand Dorny’s work, addresses how the individual sees himself in the immensity of the universe. Ursa Major has a mirroring constellation, Ursa Minor. In Bonnefoy’s text the contemplation of this celestial figure leads to an existential reflection on life. The evocation of the title is emblematic of the relationship between the minor and major.

La Grande Ourse

Est-ce qu’il fait froid?

Je ne sais pas, oui, peut-être. Est-ce que tu me tiens bien? Oui, n’aie crainte.

Ne me lâche pas, j’ai si peur!

Crois-tu que je veuille te lâcher?

Non, mais où est-tu ? Où sommes-nous? Je ne sais pas. Dans le ciel.

Tu es sûr ? mes pieds s’enfoncent dans l’eau. C’est l’eau du ciel.

J’entends des voix, des cris. Des voix? Moi aussi, j’ai peur.

Regarde à gauche ! De la couleur! Tiens-moi, tiens-moi bien !

Et ces gens sur la route ! C’est soir de fête? Non, ce sont des bêtes immenses.

Non, des enfants, Rien que des enfants.

J’ai peur.

Tiens-toi bien à mon cou. Parlons encore! Qu’est-ce que c’est? le feu?

 Je ne sais pas. La même chose que ces étoiles, peut-être.

 Je me demande pourquoi le ciel est si proche, la nuit.

 Moi, je ne me demande plus rien. Je Regarde. Non même pas.

Entrons dans cette salle. Mais c’est de

l’eau!

On va patauger.

On va pousser des cris. On comprendra

Tout.

 Toi, oui. Moi, je vais de l’avant. Je ne me retournerai pas.

 Oh, ne me laisse pas. Les étoiles brillent, le ciel bouge.

[The Great Bear (Ursa Major)]

Is it cold?

I do not know, yes, maybe.

Do you hold me tight?

Yes, don’t fear.

Do not let me go, I’m so frightened!

Do you think I want to let you go?

No, but where are you? Where are we?

I don’t know. In the sky.

Are you sure? My feet disappear into the water.

It’s the water of the sky.

I hear voices, screams.

Voices? Me too, I’m frightened.

Look to left! Colors!

Hold me, keep me close to you!

And these people on the road! A festival night?

No, there are huge animals.

No, children, nothing but children.

I’m afraid.

Hold tight to my neck. Let’s keep talking!

What is it? Fire?

I don’t know. The same things as these stars, maybe.

I wonder why the sky is so close at night.

Me, I don’t ask anything anymore. I watch. No, not even.

Let’s go into this room. But it’s water!

We will flounder.

We will scream. We will understand Everything.

You yes. I’m going forward. I will not turn back.

Oh, do not leave me. The stars are shining, the sky is moving.] (Bonnefoy, 2015: 19–21; translated by Adelaide M Russo)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Bertrand Dorny’s collaboration with Yves Bonnefoy, Librairie Blaizot Paris 2013.

Samuel Beckett could have written this dialogue. It is the exchange between two artists who have both lived well over eight decades and they both are no longer here to see the stars shine in the moving sky. The dialogue is an exchange of great intimacy—of two human beings who share their fear, their astonishment with the world, their wonder of discovery. Living with this intensity whether in direct dialogue with another artist, another creator, or in the silent contemplation of a work of art is an experience that only a minority can document. Most cannot live in this elevated state of communion and response. In the process of this exchange, the viewer is not detached from the socio-political realities of the world. Bonnefoy’s La Grande Ourse addresses the magnitude of the skies, of those inaccessible constellations which are always above us in the fear-inspiring and fearful sky. Is there anything more preoccupying than questioning the nature of existence in this minor and so major act of contemplation?