Watch a painter preparing to paint a picture of still life. He takes a vase of flowers and places it on a table; beside it he poses, perhaps a brass bowl and some other objects, having regard throughout for light and, above all, for proportion and color. That is when he is really painting his picture, when he is really composing, receiving his impression, creating his subjective mood. The objective part of his work is done; all that remains now is to give expression to that impression, that mood. Instead of thus allowing his inspiration to gain its full value and significance, he sits down and reproduces it with a varying degree of literalness. He becomes nothing more or less than a copyist, a photographer of his own work. He kills within himself its subjective values, or, at best, seeks to give them expression filtered by objectivity. Or, again, consider the case of the portrait painter. He studies sitters from every point of view, gathering impressions. Then he begins to experiment with poses, draperies, light effects, seeking to heighten the impression already received from the sitter himself. At last he is content with pose, draperies, background, lights—his picture is there. But why, then, go to the trouble of painting it, of copying it? If the work he has done, finished in all its details, is to benefit him, he must proceed from it and beyond it. His real work then is to communicate to others the mood awakened in him.[42]
In another interview Picabia said:
You of New York should be quick to understand me and my fellow painters. Your New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought. You have passed through all the old schools, and are futurists in word and deed and thought. You have been affected by all these schools just as we have been affected by our older schools.
Because of your extreme modernity therefore, you should quickly understand the studies which I have made since my arrival in New York. They express the spirit of New York as I feel it, and the crowded streets of your city as I feel them, their surging, their unrest, their commercialism, and their atmospheric charm.
You see no form? No substance? Is it that I go out into your city and see nothing? I see much, much more, perhaps, than you who are used to it see. I see your stupendous skyscrapers, your mammoth buildings and marvellous subways, a thousand evidences of your great wealth on all sides. The tens of thousands of workers and toilers, your alert and shrewd-looking shop girls, all hurrying somewhere. I see your theater crowds at night gleaming, fluttering, smilingly happy, smartly gowned. There you have the spirit of modernity again.
But I do not paint these things which my eye sees. I paint that which my brain, my soul, sees. I walk from the Battery to Central Park. I mingle with your workers, and your Fifth Avenue mondaines. My brain gets the impression of each movement; there is the driving hurry of the former, their breathless haste to reach the place of their work in the morning and their equal haste to reach their homes at night. There is the languid grace of the latter, emanating a subtle perfume, a more subtle sensuousness.
I hear every language in the world spoken, the staccato of the New Yorker, the soft cadences of the Latin people, the heavy rumble of the Teuton, and the ensemble remains in my soul as the ensemble of some great opera.
At night from your harbor I look at your mammoth buildings. I see your city as a city of aerial lights and shadows; the streets are your shadows. Your harbor in the daylight shows the shipping
