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LETTER FROM PARIS (2)
painting or a drawing, or something was drawn or painted on a photograph" (Aragon, p. 22). Aragon mentions further procedures, such as cutting photos into the shape of other than what they represent. (A locomotive can be cut out a photograph of a rose.) Aragon saw this technique, which has a clear connection to Dadaism, as proof of the revolutionary energy of the new art. He contrasted it with traditional art. "Painting has long been leading a comfortable life; it flatters the cultured connoisseur who pays for it. It is a luxury article .... In these new experiments, artists can be seen emancipating themselves from domestication by money. For this collage technique is poor in resources. And its value will go unrecognized for a long time to come" (Aragon, p. 19). That was in 1930. Aragon would not make these statements today. Surrealists' attempt to master photography by "artistic" means has failed. The error of the decorative-art photographers with their philistine creed, which provided the title for Renger-Patzsch's well-known collection of photographs Die Welt ist schon [The World is Beautiful], was their error, too. 22 They failed to recognize the social impact of photography, and therefore the importance of inscription-the fuse guiding the critical spark to the image mass (as is seen best in Heartfield). Aragon has very recently written about Heartfield;13 and he has taken other opportunities to point to the critical element in photography. Today he detects this element even in the seemingly formal work of a virtuoso photographer like Man Ray.24 In Man Ray's work, he argued in the Paris debate, photography succeeds in reproducing the style of the most modern painters. "Anyone unfamiliar with the painters to whom Man Ray alludes could not fully appreciate his achievement" (La Querelle;, p. 60). Let us take leave of the exciting story of the meeting of and photography by quoting an appealing formulation by Lhote. To him it seems beyond dispute "that the much-discussed replacement of pallntJlDg by photogra phy has its proper place in what might be called the 'ongomg business' of painting. But that still leaves room for painting as mysteriolls and inviolable domain of the purely human" (La Querelle p. 102). Unfortunately, this interpretation is no more than a trap which, shut behind the liberal thinker, delivers him up defenselessly to fascism. How more far-sighted was the ungainly painter of ideas, Antoine Wiertz, who wrote, almost a hundred years ago, on the occasion of first World Exhibition of Photography: J
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A few years ago a machine was born to us which is the glory of our age, and which daily am,azes our minds and startles our eyes. Before another