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men may be true about women, too, but I’ve more often asked myself what it is that has delighted the man lying beside me than the other way around, to the point where it sometimes seems I know men better than I know myself.) He has received a gift, or, let’s say, he has had the nous to have taken in something which was private, buried, virgin.
    Each gesture of a woman is the sum of all her secret gestures, and a man’s pleasure is being in on the secret. And the opposite? It seems to me that the woman’s pleasure has more to do with her secret being discovered, with something in her which was buried and asleep being awakened. Maybe this is where ‘Snow White’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, and other stories begin.
    Far more than a man, she is like the page which invites, the canvas which appeals. This is maybe why her body has so often been represented in art. Not just because most of the artists were men, but because here there is something essential in the relation between the sexes: the woman inseparable from herself, and the man looking over her, finding pleasure in her immediacy!
    Pictures by Rothko and Titian, but also by Courbet, possess this quality. They are so completely themselves that they contain all the
vertical
depth of their being. They exclude any reference to rule or obedience. Snapping their fingers at others, they simply exist with us or without us. We have an interest in discovering their secret and their inner truth, but they, they don’t give a fuck, tyrannical as they are, faithful only to themselves, inevitable. They owe their existence only to themselves, tautologically! A little like God. (Hence perhaps the ‘fatality’ of
femmes fatales?
)
    Titian here is the god behind God; his painting, like nature, has its own laws, delivers – or doesn’t deliver – its own unsharable secrets, so true to itself that it needs no justification, no explanation, no story! It’s there in front of us, clear, enigmatic,as solid as a mass of irrefutable matter, a pure product of itself – in all its verticality!
    Does this make any sense to you?
    I believe the success of a painting depends far less on any closeness to its model, to what it aims at and represents, than on its closeness to a self, to the self’s memory and gaze and truth. A painter painting is like a canvas which radiates, a page which invites, a woman who glows: he’s faithful to himself: he filters nothing, he must stick to his own perception and imagination and his own five senses. If he dams up nothing, his secret will open on the surface of the canvas, and it’s this, in all its nakedness, which will entice. If an artist is true to what lies deepest in him, like the coal at the bottom of a mine, his work invites.
    I’m not preaching some magic, occult theory whereby artists should ignore technique and everyone is really a potential Picasso. Far from it. Simply, we are all capable of sensuality, aren’t we, and a kind of inner transparency might make each of us more desirable.
    Here, and certainly in art, a certain savoir-faire is indispensable. The thing is to play with the techniques one has acquired to re-become naive, to unlearn as well as learn. A cat is spell-binding by virtue of her natural grace alone. A ham actor turns you off with his tricks.
    Art attracts and sweeps away with its mastery, but it’s mastery put to the service of something naked, secret, true, virgin,never-before-seen – something which almost comes from a violation. And art does this involuntarily; it can’t do otherwise. It makes a hole in the paper – like you with your drawing of Bogena.
    There are people who know how to live like that, too. They learn, they quote, they consult, and all the while they stay in touch with their own essence. There remains something untreated and unconscious about them. When they listen, they are like wells; when they speak, they do so like