
speech of acceptance by jean cocteau at the french academy in 1955.
“Man is a cripple, a prisoner of his dimensions. His nobility lies in admitting his infirmity and sometimes resembling a paralytic dreaming that he is running.Our prison has only three walls, and it is against the fourth wall that the prisoner persists, on this invisible fourth wall where he writes his loves and dreams.Everything is a prison in this matter, and the artist is one as well, incapable of escaping except through works that claim to elude the prison we are.
This is what gives them a suspicious appearance of an escaping convict, an appearance that explains why society releases its police, its whistles, and its bloodhounds after them.
Attempts to escape, even more secretive in the case of the writer, become striking when the life of a painter illustrates them.Be it in misfortune or in luck, a Van Gogh, a Picasso persist against their prison and against themselves, writing with a nail and their own blood, twisting the bars of the small window through which they imagine glimpsing a false freedom that is nothing but a dream, since the walls that confine them succeed each other infinitely.”
borderlast’s fourth wall
The walls of my studio are covered with wild canvases, bursts of color, and chaos. Brushes lie on the floor, exhausted by my fury. Every stroke is a cry from my soul. The rage to create keeps me standing. I am not an artist for galleries or critics. I am a volcano ready to erupt. They see my works and applaud, but they do not grasp the inner fire. I paint, and the canvases fill with silent screams. Night falls, and I am still here, fingers stained, eyes burning with fatigue. But I cannot stop. The fire demands release. They do not see the obsession, the urgency. I am the cursed artist. I paint with an unquenchable rage, a fury that consumes and nourishes me. I am not an artist for glory. I am a man at war with himself, and creation is the only way out.
