Tuesday, August 11, 2015

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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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