Untitled

Untitled [Loose Leaf Pages] [BC112], Untitled [Esquisse sketchbook] [BC118], Untitled [Colarossi sketchbook] [BC114] and Untitled [sketchbook pages] [BC113] make up the contents of a file reference number MS-Papers-1893-2, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, and is all original material. A duplicate file, reference number MS-Papers-1893-1, is made up of Xerox copies of the original material file. The -1 file was produced to protect the original documents. Date of production is unknown.

Pages 1 overleaf and 9 overleaf, drawings of the La Pesquière landing stage in St Tropez, relate to St Maxime [BC018]. Page 18, a preparatory drawing showing the church L’Eglise Notre-Dame de l’Assomption in the old town of St Tropez, France, relates to Mediterranean Village [BC019], Untitled [Basilica and Lighthouse, St Tropez] [BC020], Basilica and Lighthouse, St Tropez, Southern France [BC021].

Page 11 – 11 overleaf, titled “Maxims Léopold Survage”, reads, “In painting the technical means are conditioned by the intention, which is the measure of our degree of spiritual elevation. / The state that is favourable to spiritual travail is the happy alternation of feeling and intelligence. / Feeling is a physiologic state, the result of perceptions and sensations. / Every perception that is not finally guided by our consciousness to the intelligence remains in the state of feeling. / Feeling alone leads but to animal reflexes. / Absolute intelligence – total abscence [sic] of feeling. / Quality of intelligence – spiritual elevation. / Degree of intelligence – penetration. / A conscious being, is, of necessity, cerebral. / All art is abstract, for all art is generalizing; it remains to specify the degree, which is quality. / Cerebral art – art which has gone beyond the reflex – gesture of a sensation or external perception. / Memory minus intelligence is a plague. But intelligence without intuition is orphan. The subconscious – our bodies memory; intuition, its intelligence. / The will degree of intensity of/our faculties. / October 1927”

Page 11 overleaf – 12, signed [Albert] Gleizes, reads, “The spiritual problem of the age, and the technical problem which the painter has to face thus are the same – “The problem of Space” and not merely the problem of space but the relativity of space. There is nothing / startlingly new in this. Spatial relativity is a concept and a percept which has been progressively forced in upon the mind of man, by the slaying of time and space through the perfecting of the means of transit including aerial transit. / But relativity, if it is to be accorded a solution, implies synthesis; in painting as plastic synthesis. And this brings us to the painting of Leopold Survage, which is a plastic Synthesis of Space / Gleizes”

Page 13, the date “Vendredi 17 juin" [Friday 17 June fell in 1932] Scales was in Christchurch, New Zealand, by June 1932 as reported by Art in New Zealand, June 1932 (‘Art Notes’, vol. IV, no. 16, pg 291). She also exhibited at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts Autumn Exhibition, Wellington, which opened 2 June 1932. It is possible the artist intended to write Mercredi [Wednesday] which fell on 17 June in 1931. The lecture at Mr Kinzinger’s house on that day would most likely have taken place in St Tropez, France, where Scales was at that time.