D.H.LawrenceonCezanne.doc

From Introduction to These Paintings
D. H. Lawrence
"What am I doing, bursting into paint?" Lawrence wrote in 1929. "I am a writer; I ought to stick to ink. I have found my medium of expression: why, at the age of forty in 1926, should I suddenly want to try another?" Years earlier; before he had turned his hand to fiction, the young Lawrence had started both to write poems and to draw and copy paintings (by, among others, Pieter de Hooch and Piero di Cosimo).Those same first artistic stirrings he gave to Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers, for whom they are at once a refuge and a passion. When Lawrence returned to painting—the return coincides with the years of his slow dying—it was, he said, "because it gave me a form of delight that words can never give. Perhaps the joy in words goes deeper and is for that reason more unconscious. The conscious delight is certainly strong in paint. "Our interest in Lawrencec paintings is limited to our interest in the artist himself; the canvases are colorful but crude. He did not like high finish in any art—what he called the "would-be''—and he would have insisted he was making pictures, not painting. In a letter to Mark Gertler, he wrote: "One's got to get back to the live, really lovely phallic self and phallic consciousness. I think I get a certain phallic beauty in my pictures too. I know they're rolling with faults, Sladeily considered. But there's something there." His poems and pictures kept an pany toward the end of his life. The police had intercepted the manuscript of Pansies (his pun on pensées) that he had sent to his publisher from Italy, and a bowdlerized edition appeared in 1929, minus the fourteen poems found to "contain indecent matter." (Lawrence later had them printed on Japanese vellum.) In that same year, during an exhibition of his pictures at the Warren Gallery in London, the police raided and seized thirteen pictures as "obscene. " They also confiscated copies of the Mandrake Press book that reproduced the