This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer’s art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.
Any number of holier-than-thou honorable realists walk around in the belief that they have accomplished something, simply because they tell you for the hundredth time that a field is green and a red-painted house is painted red.
The way one sees is also dependent upon one’s emotional state of mind. This is why a motif can be looked at in so many ways, and this is what makes art so interesting.
Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being… You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.
By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.
I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.
