One evening, after I had been for eight hours on end in my studio, painting for five or ten minutes at a time and then throwing myself down on the divan and lying there flat, staring up at the ceiling, for an hour or two—all of a sudden, as though at last, after so many feeble attempts, I had had a genuine inspiration, I stubbed out my last cigarette in an ashtray already full of dead cigarette-ends, leapt cat-like from the armchair into which I had sunk, seized hold of a small palette-knife which I sometimes used for scraping off colours and slashed repeatedly at the canvas on which I had been painting, not content until I had reduced it to ribbons. Then from a corner of the room I took a blank canvas of the same size, threw away the torn canvas and placed the new one on the easel. Immediately afterwards, however, I realized that the whole of my—shall I say creative?—energy had been vented completely in my furious, and fundamentally rational, gesture of destruction. I had been working on that canvas for the last two months, doggedly and without pause; slashing it to ribbons with a knife was equivalent, fundamentally, to finishing it—in a negative manner, perhaps, as regards external results, which in any case had little interest for me, but positively, in relation to my own inspiration.
