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“Cartier-Bresson: Moralities”
By Salvador Dalí
An exhibition of Europe’s best-known photographer starts its U.S. tour this month at the I.B.M. Gallery, New York; an equally well-known painter comments
The unique film of Cartier-Bresson is so “hyperestheticized” with moralities that it becomes morally necessary to extract at least four of them. Here are Dalí’s:
1. Matisse, the last consequence of the French Revolution, that is, of the passage from aristocracy to the middle-class; apotheosis of bourgeois taste (Matisse said, a good painting should be like an armchair).
2. In Spain, no armchairs; a total scorn for material things. The ecstasy of St. John of the Cross is the game children play on the street.
3. Holland: clarity, cleanliness, parallelism. The Holland of hogs, like a Mondrian or a Vermeer. In the famous opera I am writing at the moment, I want one hundred (100) hogs to be killed simultaneously against a background of 558 motorcylcists, the engines running. Now that I have seen Cartier-Bresson, I want the hogs to be prepared for slaughter in rigorously parallel lines, like a wonderful Mondrian—wonderful because pinked (the rose of pigs); each of the black lines will become tender, bleeding, deafening with sonorous volume.
4. Russia: the birth of a patriotic conscience—in the French manner—fresh as a rose, according to the Catalonian philosopher Franesc Pujols. “The Country” is the country is the tendency towards a “unity of authority based upon a unity of separation,” which is, morphologically speaking, the rose.