Indeed, this workshop is an antechamber or an alembic where my thoughts, my sketches, my lay models, my documents – studies and passionate research – have been elaborated, in pain and in discomfort. God willing, this should logically lead to an intense, uninterrupted production, until my death, as the river, after the last constriction of the tragic canyon, has to merge with the sea in a full-blown and superabundant delta.
Diary - August 23, 1940
It is always unpleasant to me to have to go out in the morning, to forsake the best hours of the day dedicated to reading, pictures, German, sketching, notations : the most fruitful and calmest at my desk. But once outside I seldom regret it (…) First thing, the head of a boy, seen in the metro, whose modeling at once mellow and vigorous, calls up Corregio’s so compact and powerful ones. On my way back home, it will be the face of an old and sturdy man, a touch rustic, with accurate features, eye sockets underlined by a curved groove setting the eyelids, a perfectly shaped canthus, a forehead tightened by the relief of the temples, over slightly salient cheekbones.
Studies
