Concrete Art

     We don't want to copy nature.  We don't want to reproduce, we
want to produce.  We want to produce like a plant that produces a fruit,
and not reproduce.  We want to produce directly and not by way of any
intermediary.
     Since this art doesn't have the slightest trace of abstraction, we
name it: concrete art.
     Works of concrete art should not be signed by the artists.  These
paintings, sculptures-- these objects-- should remain anonymous in the
huge studio of nature, like clouds, mountains, seas, animals, men.  Yes!
Men should go back to nature!  Artists should work in communities as they 
did in the Middle Ages.  In 1915, O. van Rees, C. van Rees, Freundlich,
S. Taueber, and myself made an attempt of that sort.
     That year I wrote: "These works are constructed with lines, surfaces,
forms, and colors that try to go beyond the human and attain the infinite
and the eternal.  They reject our egotism... The hands of our brothers,
instead of being interchangeable with our own hands, have become enemy
hands.  Instead of anonymity, we have renown and masterpieces; wisdom is
dead... Reproduction is imitation, play acting, tightrope walking."
     The Renaissance bumptiously exalted human reason.  Modern times
with their science and technology have turned man into a megalomaniac.
The atrocious chaos of our era is the consequence of that overrating
of reason.
     The evolution of traditional painting toward concrete art, from
Cézanne by way of the cubists, has been frequently explained, and 
these historical explanations have merely confused the issue.  All at 
once, "according to the laws of chance," around 1914, the human mind 
underwent a transformation: it was confronted with an ethical problem.
     Concrete art wants to transform the world.  It wants to make life
more bearable.  It wants to save man from the most dangerous of follies:
vanity.  It wants to simplify the life of man.  It wants to identify him
with nature.  Reason uproots man and makes him lead a tragic life.  
Concrete art is a basic art, a sane and natural art that grows the stars
of peace, love, and poetry in the head and in the heart.  Wherever concrete
art appears, melancholy leaves, dragging along its gray suitcases full of
black sighs.
     Kandinsky, Sonia Delaunay, Robert Delaunay, Magnelli, and Leger were
among the first masters of concrete art.  Without having met, we were all
working toward the same goal.  Most of these works were not exhibited until
1920.  This marked a blossoming of all the colors and all the shapes in the
world.  These paintings, these sculptures-- these objects-- were stripped
of any conventional element whatsoever.  Partisans of this new art cropped
up in all countries.  Concrete art influenced architecture, furniture, film
making, and typography.
     Aside from their exhibited works, certain works by Duchamp, Man Ray,
Masson, Miró, and Ernst, and a number of "surrealist objects," are also 
concrete art.  Devoid of any descriptive, dreamlike, literary, or polemical 
content, the works of these artists are, it seems to me, highly important 
in the evolution of concrete art, for, by allusion, they manage to introduce 
into that art the psychic emotion that makes it live.

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