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Oh, many. In my youth mostly Russian and French painters.
And English artists such as Turner. The painters and paintings
alluded to in Ada are for the most part more recent
enthusiasms.
The process of reading and rereading your novels is a
kind of game of perception, a confrontation of novelistic
trompe l'oeil, and in several novels ("Pale Fire
and Ada among others) you allude to trompe l'oeil
painting. Would you say something about the pleasures
inherent in the trompe l'oeil school?
A good trompe l'oeil painting proves at least that
the painter is not cheating. The charlatan who sells his
squiggles to йpater Philistines does not have the talent
or the technique to draw a nail, let alone the shadow of a
nail.
What about Cubistic callage? That's a kind of
trompe l'oeil.
No, it has none of the poetic appeal that I demand from
all art, be it letters or the little music I know.
The art teacher in Pnin says that Picasso is
supreme, despite his commercial foibles. Kinbote in Pale
Fire likes him too, gracing his rented house with "a beloved
early Picasso: earth boy leading rain-cloud horse, " and your
Kinbotish questioner recalls a reproduction of Picasso's
Chandelier, pot et casserole йmaillйe on your writing desk,
1966 (the same one Kinbote had up on his wall during his
reign as King Charles). Which aspects of Picasso do you admire?
The graphic aspect, the masterly technique, and the quiet
colors. But then, starting with Guernica, his production
leaves me indifferent. The aspects of Picasso that I
emphatically dislike are the sloppy products of his old age. I