ABSTRACT
Image and imaging occupy from the beginning a crucial role in all of Michel Leiris's major works. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's writings on Cubism, both in their championing of a highly defined set of artists and attitudes, and in their evolution towards a semiological phenomenology, have obviously had a major effect on Leiris's perception of the art image. Francis Bacon's art is 'plus reel au reel', feeling rather than describing the reality of the thing, experiencing it 'a partir des donnees brutes de la perception' rather than suggesting it through style. The 1964 article 'Picasso' interprets the artist's plurality of styles as a play whose eternally open nature involves Picasso for ever in a new risk. Leiris's art writings, in seeking to uncover the somatic presence that is the ideal goal of pure autobiography, unwittingly demonstrate this internal fission and in so doing reinforce its unsurpassable inherence.
