In her talks and in letters to disciples, the Mother said many things about art, artists and the expression of beauty which may be of interest in connection with her own artistic work. A selection of this material is presented below.
                                                       
             
   
                                 
            Modern art is an experiment, still very clumsy, to express something other than the simple physical appearance. The idea is good-but naturally the value of the expression depends entirely on the value of that which wants to express itself.

            The story began with. ..the man who used to do still-lifes and whose plates were never round. ..Cezanne! It was he who began it; he said that if you made round plates it was not living, that never, when one looks spontaneously at things, does one see plates as round: one sees them like this (gesture). I don't , know why, but he said that it is only the mind that makes us see plates as round, fu;'~ because one knows they are round, otherwise one does not see them round. It is he who began. ...He painted a still-life which was truly a very beautiful thing, ."" note that; a very beautiful thing, with a truly striking impression of colour and form (1 could show you reproductions one day, I must have them, but they are not colour reproductions unfortunately; the beauty is especially in the colour). But, of course, his plate was not round. He had friends who told him just this, "But after all, why don't you make your plate round?" He replied, "My,dear fellow, you are altogether mental, you are not an artist, it is because you think that you make your plates round: if you only see, you will do it like this" (gesture). It is in accordance with the impression that the plate ought to be painted; it gives you an impact, you translate the impact, and it is this which is truly artistic. This is how modem art began. Arid note that he was right. His plates were not round, but he was right in principle.
            What has made art what it is, do you want me to tell you, psychologically? It is photography. Photographers did not know their job and gave you hideous things, frightfully ugly, it was mechanical, it had no soul, it had no art, it was dreadful. All the first attempts of photography until. ..not very long ago, were like that. It is about fifty years ago that it became tolerable, and now with gradual improvement it has become something good; but it must be said that the process is absolutely different. In those days, when your portrait was taken, you sat in a comfortable chair, you had to sit leaning nicely and facing an enormous thing with black cloth, which opened like this towards you. And the man ordered, "Don't move!" That was the end of the old painting. When  the painter made something life-like, a life-like portrait, his friends said, "Why now, this is photography!"
       It must be said that the art of the end of the last century , the art of the Second Empire, was bad. It was an age of businessmen, above all an age of bankers, of financiers, and taste, upon my word, had sunk very low. I don't think businessmen are people who are necessarily very competent in art, but when they wanted their portrait, they wanted a likeness! One could not leave out the least detail, it was quite comic: "But you know I have a little wrinkle there, don't forget to put it in!" and the lady who said, "You know, you must make my shoulders quite round" , and so on. So the artists made portraits which indeed verged on photography. They were flat, cold, without soul and without vision. I can name a number of artists of that period, it was truly a shame for art. This lasted till towards the end of the last century ,till about 1875. Afterwards, there started the reaction. Then there was an entire very beautiful period (1 don't say this because I myself was painting) but all the artists I knew at that time were trulyartists, they were serious and did admirable things which have remained admirable. It was the period of the impressionists; it was the period of Manet, it was a beautiful period, they did beautiful things. But people tire of beautiful things as they tire of bad ones. So there were those who wanted to found the "Salon d' Automne" .They wanted to surpass the others, to go more towards the new, towards the'truly anti-photographic. And my goodness, they went a little beyond the limit (according to my taste). They began to depreciate Rembrandt-Rembrandt was a dauber, Titian was a dauber, all the great painters of the Italian Renaissance were daubers. You were not to pronounce the name of Raphael, it was a shame. And all the great age of the Italian Renaissance was "not worth very much" ; even the works of Leonardo da Vinci; "You know, you must take them or leave them." Then they went a little further; they wanted something entirely new, they became extravagant. ...
      This is the history of art as I knew it.
      Now, to tell you the truth, we are on the ascending curve again. Truly, I think we have gone down to the'depths of incoherence, absurdity , nastiness-- of the taste for the sordid and ugly, the dirty, the outrageous. We have gone, I believe, to the very bottom.
      Are we really going up again ?
      I think so. Recently I saw some pictures which truly showed something other than ugliness and indecency .It is not yet art, it is very far from being beautiful, but there are signs that we are going up again. You will see, fifty years hence we shall perhaps have beautiful things to see. I felt this some days ago, that truly we had come to the end of the descending curve-we are still very low down, but are beginning to climb up. There is a kind of anguish and there is still a complete lack of understanding of what beauty can and should be, but one finds an aspiration towards something which would not be sordidly material. For a time art had wanted to wallow in the mire, to be what they called     "realistic". They had chosen as "real" what was most repulsive in the world,  most ugly: all the deformities, all the filth, all the ugliness, all the horrors, all the incoherences of colour and form; well, I believe this is behind us now. I had this feeling very strongly these last few days (not through seeing pictures, for we do not have a chance to see much here) but by "sensing the atmosphere". And even in the reproductions we are shown, there is some aspiration towards something which would be a little higher. It will need about fifty years; then. .. Unless there is another war, another catastrophe; because certainly, to a large extent, what is responsible for this taste for the sordid are the wars and the . horrors of war. People are compelled to put aside all refined sensibility, the love of harmony, the need for beauty, to be able to undergo all that; otherwise, I believe, they would really have died of horror .

            Why are today's painters not so good as those of the days of Leonardo da Vinci?
            Because human evolution goes in spirals. I have explained this. I said that art had become something altogether mercantile, obscure and ignorant, from the beginning of the last century till its middle. It had become something very commercial and quite remote from the true sense of art. And so, naturally, the artistic spirit does not come. It followed bad forms, yet it tried to manifest to counteract the degradation of taste which prevailed. But naturally, as with every movement of Nature in man, some having gone to one extreme, others went to the other extreme; and as these made a sort of servile copy of life-not even that, in those days it was called "a photographic view" of things, but now one can no longer say that, for photography has progressed so much that it would be doing it an injustice to say this, wouldn't it? Photography has become artistic; so a picture cannot be criticised by calling it photographic; nor can one call it "realistic" any longer, for there is a realistic painting which is not at all like that-but it was conventional, artificial and without any true life, so the reaction was to the very opposite, and naturally to another absurdity: " art" was no longer to express physical .life but mental life or vital life. And so came all the schools, like the Cubists and others, who created from their head. But in art it is not the head that dominates, it is the feeling for beauty .And they produced absurd and ridiculous and frightful things. Now they have gone further still, but that, that is due to the wars--with every war there descends upon earth a world in decomposition which produces a sort of chaos. And some, of course, find all this very beautiful and admire it very much.
           I understand what they want to do, I understand it very well, but I cannot say that I find they do it well. All I can say is that they are trying.
           But it is perhaps (with all its horror, from a certain point of view), it is perhaps better than what was produced in that age of extreme and practical philistinism: the Victorian age or in France the Second Empire. So, one starts from a point where there was a harmony and describes a curve, and with this curve one goes completely out of this harmony and may enter into a total darkness; and then one climbs up, and when one finds oneself in line with the old realisation of art, one becomes aware of the truth there was in this realisation, but with the necessity of expressing something more complete and more conscious. But in describing the circle one forgets that art is the expression of forms and one tries to express ideas and feelings with a minimum of forms. That gives what we have, what you may see. ...But if one goes a little farther still, this idea and these feelings they wish to express and express very clumsily-if one returns to the same point of the spirit (only a little higher), one will discover that it is the embryo of a new art which will be an art of beauty and will express not only material life but will also try to express its SOUL

      ...At one time, when I looked at the paintings of Rembrandt, the paintings of Titian or Tintoretto, the paintings of Renoir, the paintings of Monet, I felt a great aesthetic joy. This aesthetic joy I don't feel any more. I have progressed, because I follow the whole movement of terrestrial evolution; therefore, I have had to overpass that cycle, I have arrived at another; and that one seems to me empty of aesthetic joy. From the point of view of reason one may dispute this, speak of all that is beautiful and well done; all that is another matter. But this subtle something which is the true aesthetic joy is gone, I don't feel it any more. Of course, I am a hundred miles away from having it when I took at the things they are doing now. But still it is something which is behind this that has made the other disappear. So perhaps by making just a little effort towards the future, we are going to be able to find the formula of the new beauty. That would be interesting.
      It is quite recently that this impression has come to me; it is not old. I have tried with the most perfect goodwill, by abolishing all kinds of preferences, preconceived ideas, habits, past tastes, all that; all that eliminated, I look at their pictures and I don't succeed in getting any pleasure; it doesn't give me any, sometimes it gives me a disgust, but above all the impression of something that is not true, a painful impression of insincerity .But then quite recently, I suddenly felt this, this sensation of something very new, something of the future pushing, pushing, trying to manifest, trying to express itself and not succeeding, but something that will be a tremendous progress over all that has been felt and expressed before; and then, at the same time was born this movement of consciousness which turns towards this new thing and wants to grasp it. This will perhaps be interesting.