a destituent condition

To discriminate the goats from the sheep.

Incapable of realizing his megalomaniac aspirations the artist, parodying his abortive efforts, very literally blows the whistle on his own Art : the ironic sifflet which mercilessly disrupts the parfaite idealisation embodied by Fancioulle translates nothing less than the inability of the romantic artist to sustain the ilinx, to abolish the ironic interstice separating subject from object, spectator from spectacle.

He [Paul Gauguin] was a religious man, and many of the women he painted had a Madonnalike quality.