precious
to the eye, so inviting to the dreams of the man behind the glass,
are both outside and inside at the same time.
Around
us was the fairly calm disorder of the studio, for at that time
Picasso was only just beginning to use it.
The
farthest wall was uncluttered, vast and white. This wall had a part
to play.
It
all began late in the evening when Picasso came out of his studio at
the far end and walked towards us. The lights went out. Jacqueline
raised a finger, and a jet of light sprang forth. And suddenly there
appeared, enormous, ten times larger than the real canvas and
covering the whole wall, in colours, a bare-legged warrior, his foot
planted on a child, beside a kneeling woman, clinging to him, her
head thrown back, screaming; it was Poussin's "Massacre of the
Innocents."
All
around, right to the farthest corners of the wall, the massacre went
on. There was no house left, no studio, nobody. Only those huge
people radiating colour and light, alone in the night, on a level
with the house, and with an extraordinary life of their own.
But
the dark landscape clung to the glass, making it into a mirror.
Another "Massacre of the Innocents" appeared before our
eyes, right opposite the first.
"It's
almost better than the other" said Picasso, "because it's
less sharp, and the colours are truer."
"Floating
as it did outside the wall, in the air, covering, by the usual
optical illusion, the whole sky. with its stars which took their
place in the canvas, with the whole of the hill of Mougins, and a few
eyes that were headlights gliding among the soldiers as they raised
their sabres, the "Massacre of the Innocents" on the glass
wall ,had a feeling of singular immensity.
In
the studio where we sat invisible, where all was dark, thoughts of
all kinds grew in profusion, and from time to time the miracle of the
projector and the size of that wall has transformed that studio into
an enchanted art gallery where all the galleries in the world showed
us the many-times-magnified essence of their masterpieces. "La
ronde de nuit" here appears life-size. A head by Rembrandt, ten
feet high, can be contemplated for hours, whether true or false, with
all sorts of details suddenly becoming clear as
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