"But Dada is necessary today—to sweep away the aesthetic clichés," objected Figente.
"Sure—sure—some artists will be liberated to work in their own way—but in the meantime Paris is a hotbed of fringe lice playing at being 'lost' because they've no talent, or think they've discovered fornication. The town's crawling with 'lost ladies'—gallant, of course—on the prowl to be found. After a while it's like being an American spectator at one of those houses where the limited variety of sexual acts are performed. I mean the multiplying art-twists called movements."
"Did you attend the Dada performances?"
"I sure did. Have to be au courant. One was with the Dadaphone. Tzara stood on a small platform next to a machine resembling a coffee mill and which made a similar sound, only amplified to scare your pants off when the handle's turned. Tzara yelled 'Dada Dada Dada' as he ground away, and we yelled back 'Dada Dada Dada.'"
"It must have been amusing." Figente laughed.
"My objection that the machine didn't produce coffee got me the bum's rush. But I don't have to worry about being excommunicated. Dada's dead. The new church is something called Surrealism, its chief protagonists being the old Dada Rover Boys—some of them fine painters."
"But that's a virtue of Paris—I should think you'd miss not being in touch with all the new movements—know what's going on."
"You can have so many irons in the fire none of them get hot. There's such a thing as knowing too much. It mixes one up. At least, me. You begin to see with too many other eyes—which is blindness. There's a difference between being one who shows what he sees, and being an audience. Besides, most of these new movements arc based on formulas. Surrealism, for example."
"It's the Freudian approach in painting, isn't it?"
"Partly. Assuming—and I confess I don't know enough about psychoanalysis to say surrealism is the correct approach, Freudian or the variants—I am not trying to be a psychoanalyst but a painter. Wrong as I may be, I don't accept the psychoanalytic dividing-up of the human personality into three parts. It may be scientific but to me it's a formula approach. I read an interpretation of Leonardo by a celebrated psychoanalyst which was unbelievably uncomprehending. It may have been good psychoanalysis—but it was absolutely without perception of Leonardo as a creative worker. I'm
