bric-à-brac. Our industrial friends seem sheepish and shrivelled like tigers in a cage; it is very clear that they are happier at their factories or in their banks. We claim, in the name of the steamship, of the airplane, and of the motor-car, the right to health, logic, daring, harmony, perfection.
We shall be understood. These are evident truths. It is not foolishness to hasten forward a clearing up of things.
Finally, it will be a delight to talk of architecture after so many grain-stores, workshops, machines and sky-scrapers. Architecture is a thing of art, a phenomenon of the emotions, lying outside questions of construction and beyond them. The purpose of construction is to make things hold together; of architecture to move us. Architectural emotion exists when the work rings within us in tune with a universe whose laws we obey, recognize and respect. When certain harmonies have been attained, the work captures us. Architecture is a matter of "harmonies," it is "a pure creation of the spirit."
To-day, painting has outsped the other arts.
It is the first to have attained attunement with the epoch.[1] Modern painting has left on one side wall decoration, tapestry and the ornamental urn and has sequestered itself in a frame—flourishing, full of matter, far removed from a distracting realism; it lends itself to meditation. Art is no longer anecdotal, it is a source of meditation; after the day's work it is good to meditate.
- ↑ I mean, of course, the vital change brought about by cubism and later researches, and not the lamentable fall from grace which has for the last two years seized upon painters, distracted by lack of sales and taken to task by critics as little instructed as sensitive (1921).
