La balançoire aux violettes, 1963

On the occasion of a show of his abstract sculptures from 1935 to 1962, Fausto Melotti wrote about the impossibility for his generation to avail itself of the figurative representation of reality and recalled the many adventures in which the avant-garde movements had engaged, stating: “Other ways open up, other sermons. Dazed, thirsty for quiet, we distance ourselves every now and then and secretly witness the Orphic nuptials of geometry and poetry. We shall not be forgiven; we shall be accused of uncertainty, of incoherence and, in the end, of immorality. […] An art that chooses limitations and respects them is moral. But Picasso ignores barriers.” But after having compared the thousands of disguises of the Spanish painter to images in rapid succession that appear to a dying person as if they were a recapitulation of his or her entire life, he concludes: “and so this license no longer appears as such, but only the tragic warning of a coming catharsis of this long civilization of ours, and Picasso’s ‘condition,’ the incessant wandering outside the boundaries, seems the most deeply felt and, in the end, the most moral.” [...]