His Work in Hawai‘i: Interview 2 with Jean Charlot, March 26, 1978, John Pierre Charlot

Papa, you were saying last time that most of your influence of Hawai‘i was nonvisual.  But what were the first visual influences that hit you when you came?

Well, I think I mentioned to you that I wasn’t a landscape painter especially. The first visual things were simply the landscape, we could call it, as modified by the climate.  It was a very nice climate.  I remember I was a little hurt by the skies that didn’t go with the vegetation, and I mentioned, I think it was to Ben Norris,1 that the skies were Victorian because they had always a very pleasant sort of clouds running through the blue of the sky, and I didn’t like that.  I didn’t like it because I was thinking of representing in some way, of course, the Hawaiian landscape.  I also told you that the first fresco, the one at the bottom of the stairs in Bachman Hall, ’49 was a, of course, a landscape with figures, but a landscape as it is understood in Western art, which is on a horizontal with different planes.  In fact, the horizon is there.  The only trick, if you want, that I used that is already a little different from the expected landscape idea is to have put on the horizon the ship of Captain Cook, which is only I think six inches long and is yet the most imposing thing as storytelling goes in the whole picture.  But nevertheless, it is a landscape in the old sense, in the sense that the artists that came, let’s say, with Cook or von Kotzebue understood.  And it’s only later—and I think the Leeward College mural is important for that—that I got that idea of the vertical cut into the landscape which brings in the island, where the horizon of the sea is represented by a simple line, which is in fact in the foreground, and the lower part, the mountain submerged, has the same value.  And of course, that we have—and I found it out later—we have in the Kumulipo with that continuous zigzag of the thought of the author of Kumulipo, the questions and answers between earth and sea, between earth and sea, which are obviously based on a vertical instead of a horizontal.

In one article of the fifties, you say—it was that summer actually—that you were very influenced by color values, by seeing Hawaiian quilts.  Do you recall that?

Yeah, I recall that very, very much.  Well, what I said, what I did, was to write an article, and there is the whole history of the birth, if you want, of the Hawaiian quilt.  Of course, they had very delicate tapas and so on that they used to cover themselves at night.  But we know the group of women that was coached by the missionary women to do quilts.  And the curious thing is that the quilts that those missionary women did, when they are seen now, are important as a sort of a quaint memory of the past.  And the metamorphosis by the Hawaiian Christians, we could say, who were trying to imitate those women, makes their quilts today works, we could say, of modern art, which are absolutely contemporary, while the ones of the missionary women have become historical curiosities perhaps rather than art.  There is also one thing in there is that the bits of cloth and so on that the missionary women put together were put together in a sort of a, you know, House Beautiful magazine message with the colors and so on, but without really a soul.  It’s a curious thing that those women who were, I mean the missionaries, who were dedicated in their life to the spiritual, left the spiritual totally out of their quilts, while the, shall we call it, the pagan students who were just coming to the idea at least of the Christian spirituality have their quilts chock-full of the spiritual.  There is all the questions of taboos and non-taboos and chiefs and gods and whatnot that is represented by the designs with the same intensity that the designs of the petroglyph makers before the Christians came were also chock-full of those same things.  You can call them ghostly or spiritual or whatever you want.  But the quilt of the Hawaiian, understood, if you want, or read or translated by Hawaiian mind, has an imposing content of spirituality—the quilt of the missionary women are pleasant additions to the home.

Where did you see quilts that first summer?  Was there a show of them someplace?

No.  I went, one of the first things I did, very early, it’s in the first sketches I made, were in Hāna.  And I went there with Juanita Vitousek.2  She was in my class of fresco, and we went to Hāna at a plantation, some friends who had a plantation there.  And I really didn’t know anything about Hawai‘i, but the people who live in Hāna, the, not the planters but the lowbrow people, were all washing and drying their quilts and putting them on the side of their house, hanging.  And I was really bowled over by the quality of those things.  Most of them were family, what we could call heirlooms nowadays that we are thinking in terms of the value of Hawaiian quilts—but simply faded in color, but still magnificent, and the design showed at a distance.  And each one of those little houses that we call nearly huts by Western town—city—standards, had that sort of a fringe of, well, perhaps even nineteenth-century quilts that were faded and washed, hanging on those clotheslines.  So I asked, of course, and began to investigate and soon enough found that they were not, you know, just beautiful decorations, but that each had this meaning and, in fact, its proper name.

Let’s talk a minute about petroglyphs.  When was the first time you came across petroglyphs?  I know that a couple years later you did lots and lots of work on them.  But do you recall seeing them that first summer we came in ’49?

I’m not very sure.  No, I think that came a little later.  In fact, the only petroglyphs I saw at the beginning were some very poor things that were used decoratively and in shops and so on and always with the tendency of being funny.  I remember there were some little petroglyph drawings in magazines and so on that were made to enliven the page.  But of course, I was on the lookout, so to speak, for the visual arts in Hawai‘i and very soon, for example, I went to the slopes down the Royal Mausoleum in Nu‘uanu and there, of course, found a whole series of those things.  That was rather early in my stay, but I think after I had done the university, the first university fresco.  And again if you compare with Leeward, in Leeward I gave a real important position to the petroglyphs, not only as visual arts—there is there a guy who is making a petroglyph, who is a visual artist, shall we say—but also as the symbolical quality, or in-depth, if you want, that the petroglyph that represents a chiefly birth has to do with a woman who is singing perhaps the name chant of the chief.  So that came a little later, if you want, in my understanding of Hawai‘i.

Well, you did the tiles here, and you did the mural for Alfred Preis,3 and you were planning to do a big petroglyph mural in your own house.  What were you trying yourself to do with all those petroglyph subjects you did?

Well, it’s like you go to the Louvre or to the Metropolitan Museum and you copy the Old Masters.  You don’t pretend that you are an Old Master.  But by repeating the lines, the proportions, and so on, you gather something that the guys who did the things—it may be Titian, it may be Poussin, it may be the old Hawaiian—had I wouldn’t say in mind, but the very rhythm, the very rhythm of their hand, of their wrist, and so on, is repeated as you copy the petroglyphs.  Now that you mentioned it, I think that the Preis mural—which incidentally I think has been destroyed because the, that whole part of his house was in disrepair—was my first important—important for me perhaps more than for other people—statement about petroglyphs.  The ones I did for the house are rather late; they are all of ’55 or ’56.

When you say “an important statement about petroglyphs,” what do you mean?

Well, as I said, in France I was, let’s say, looking at the Poussins and made drawings after Poussin’s compositions and whatnot, and that was a way of knowing what a visual Master in the seventeenth century was…was; I don’t say ‘was doing,” but was.  There is a sort of a following the track, the path of those people.  You understand simply by following, you can say, their footpath.  And it’s the same thing with petroglyphs.  If you copy the petroglyph in the same sense of respect, if you want, that you copy a Poussin, you gather something—maybe through the very physical motions in the tracing, for example, that I made of many petroglyphs—of what the old Hawaiians were about, of the old artists, if you want to call it that, of Hawai‘i were about, were doing.

I guess what I’m asking is what did you find out when you did that?

Well, I found quite a lot of things.  I found out, for example, they didn’t give a damn if the thing was seen or unseen.  And one of the petroglyphs that I liked the most, which is one of those fellows crouching seen in pure profile—it’s one of the largest ones I traced—was most of the time under water.  Even when the sea was relatively low at least you couldn’t see it at all, and I wetted myself through the whole day trying to finish my tracing.  On cloth, of course, not on paper.  So the… I speak of that, I think, in the petroglyph film:4 the petroglyphs are not done as public speaking.  They are done as, we could say, a private statement that in itself, by itself, has value.  I don’t like to use the term “mystical,” but nevertheless, ties up, if you want, the spirits or the spiritual beings or whatever it is, or is simply a plea just like the rites of the heiau, a plea for the god to come and stop there.  So I’ve been terribly busy with liturgical arts all my life since the Gilde Notre-Dame, and immediately that thing took its place, if you want, in my knowledge of what we could call liturgical arts—something I hadn’t understood first.  Looking at the little people and the little dogs and so on, I hadn’t had that feeling.  But after copying and seeing the incredibly secret places where some of the best petroglyphs were put, I realized that important thing: that it’s a dialog or an attempt at a dialog with the, well, the akuas, shall we say, not to use the term gods, rather than something to be put in a show.  In fact the Bishop Museum has had a hard time.  They cut out very nicely some petroglyphs and put them in their garden.  But by then they are just unfit for rites.  The spirit is gone out of them.

In the rubbings and tracings you did, you seem to be trying to show an artistic way that that could be done.  A lot of people had done scientific rubbings, but the way you did them on paper and spaced them and then had them mounted the way Chinese scrolls are mounted, seemed to me that you were trying to show a real artistic genre that could be applied to them.

Well, I think that that’s a very unjust thing that has been told to me many times.  A fellow like Emory,5 for example, when I showed him some of those things, said “No, I’m not interested in those things.  I’m interested in the real thing.”  The way I did those copies of petroglyphs is to take the canvas, whatever it was, anyhow the loose cloth or paper if I didn’t have the cloth, take a pencil and without looking, so to speak, make the perfect tactile following up of the edges of the petroglyph with the pencil pushing in the rock and without looking at the effect at all.  And it’s only after the thing was finished, or the relation of one to the other….  That big thing of dogs that Lily has, for example, is not an invention of mine.  It’s a rock as is with the different dogs, of spirit dogs, in the order in which they are.  But it’s so little a translation with my own ideas that it is not a visual, but a tactile report of the petroglyphs on the rocks.  Afterwards I put ink, I admit that, and when there is a clear edge, I can fill in with the ink so that it becomes visual; and when the edge is not clear, it just remains unclear.  So for me, they are straightforward presentations of the petroglyph.  It’s possible, of course, that having, well, more art in me than, let’s say, Kenneth Emory, the thing is better looking, but it is not my own, it is theirs, that of the old Hawaiians.

So you see those as more the study aspect of your work than the actual creative artistic aspect of your work.

Well, I mean it’s like my archeology in Maya culture.  I didn’t have the least idea of doing a work of art.  I was copying the thing as it was.  And it’s not a compliment for me when people look, for example, at that copy of the big altar to say that it’s a good painting.  It isn’t a good painting; it’s a square inch by square inch reproduction of what was there.  It’s the same thing with the petroglyphs.

I find the style of the petroglyphs starts influencing you first in your dogs, and it’s only in the Leeward frescoes that the human figures begin to take on sort of a petroglyph style themselves.

Well, I think my dogs predate the coming to Hawai‘i because everything goes back to my little—they are called esquintli, esquintli is in Náhuatl—that is, of hairless dogs of Mexican villages.  I don’t know how we had one, but I know that we had one that was our own in France, and we brought him to Mexico.  And it was the original hairless dog, and lots of people had never seen them before, didn’t know what it was.  And he’s a funny guy, and he looks just like a petroglyph, I think, actually.  And you’ll find in some of my pre-Hawaiian things some of those petroglyph dogs that are simply the presentation of that little doggy that I loved very dearly.

I remember when you were doing the first Bachman Hall fresco, you were doing the dogs.  And you told me they were for eating, and I sort of blanched.  And you said, well you see, they had special ones that they had for eating that didn’t have much personality, and I painted those without much personality.

Well, yeah, that has nothing to do with what I call my petroglyph dogs, those are different.  And there was one dog at the Bishop Museum that had been stuffed, and it was not even a Hawaiian dog.  I copied it very carefully.  And then I looked at a label that was stuck under the pedestal of the stuffed dog, and it said it was from New Zealand.  Then I read in some of those travelers’ things that the New Zealand dog looked more like a wolf and the Hawaiian dog looked more like a fox.  So I modified the drawing that I had done from the New Zealand dog towards the fox.  And there was a gentleman somewhere here who was working on those dogs, on the real dogs this time, trying to go back to the original one, and eventually he said “Eureka” and had a photograph taken of his return through genetics to the original Hawaiian dog, and it was just the portrait of the one that I had put I think five or six years before in the fresco of Bachman Hall.

How about the influence of petroglyph style on your figures at the Leeward fresco?  Did you consciously make them a little bit closer to petroglyph style?

I don’t think so.  I think, of course, the petroglyphs there are made as petroglyphs.  But for example, the one of the…we can’t say the painter, but anyhow the visual artist, who is doing a large dog on the rock—on purpose at the side I put a real dog.  Or at least a real dog, a painted dog to show the difference between the spirit dog that the artist is presenting and the real dog.  Now my real dog would not seem a real dog to many people, but anyhow he’s supposed to be, with flesh and bones and whatnot.  The point there is to show that the artist really presents a spiritual image of the material world, so that there is a degree of petroglyphness in the things.  For me, the real dog, what I call the real dog in Leeward, is a dog of flesh and bones, and the other one is spiritualized or, if you want, carried into the esthetic plane in that sense of what I called before liturgical arts, which to me has a great reality in all the things that Hawaiians do.

Well, I was thinking for instance of the figures.  You’ve given their heads very sharp profiles that look like petroglyphs, and the man who’s doing the petroglyph of the chief on the right, his hands have the same shape and gesture as the hands of the petroglyph.  And then the little girl who’s standing by the woman pounding tapa consists of a head and then a very square torso and then legs that look like petroglyph legs.  I see all through that—except in a couple of figures—the influence of petroglyphs.

Well, I’m afraid it’s a totally, totally different thing, and that [it] is a totally different thing is something that has plagued the Western artist or more exactly the Western muralist too.  What you put on the wall is not, is not what the people see.  And the Leeward fresco has been a little bit spoiled because you can look at things from both levels.  Now if you look at the upper level when you are standing on the upper floor there is a very strong stylization, and then you can speak of petroglyphs if you want.  But if you look at it from the lower floor, you can see that what I’ve used is certain perspective simplifications, rather complicated ones too, by which the people look natural when you look at them on diagonal vision and from the lower level and so on, and that has to do with my great love, of course, of people like Francesca and Uccello.  It’s a totally different thing.  I’m not a true Hawaiian in those things, but just a guy who is interested in all those perspective diagrams and whatnot of the Italians of the fifteen hundreds and even fourteen hundreds.

Were there any other places where you think petroglyphs touched your own art?

Well, I think we’ve about, you know, said everything there is to be said on that in the little movie that is done with my own things about petroglyphs.  There is one thing where we meet, not that I learned from them, but where I found they had the same attitude that I had, and that is the humility of the artist.  To be truly an artist, you have to be humble, which is usually contrary to the image that people have of what they call the Masters.  And there was a humility in those people who did their petroglyphs to remain unseen, so to speak, in many cases.  And my own, for example, love of popular art, or if you want to call it lowbrow art—it’s a very close thing.  You could, of course, play on the contrast and say, well, they made their petroglyphs not to be seen and I myself make my art for the lowbrows.  It looks like a very different thing, but actually the making of the thing in both senses, either when you do it for the gods or when you do it for the lowbrows, is a sort of act of humility rather than an act of pride.

You really sort of see them in the way that you saw the Medieval cathedral artists as anonymous craftsmen doing liturgical art.

Yeah, I know that people can think that that is dated, that it dates me, but there are many many—there is much truth in those things.  From time to time you find a rather proud signature by one of those cathedral workers, but nevertheless the fresco-making and the cooperation with the masons and all those things, is for me something that is close to the way the cathedral people worked.  They’ve just found, for example, a diagram by Villard de Honnecourt, the fellow who was doing those cathedrals, running all through Europe from France to Hungary and further.  In one of his cathedrals, they found a diagram he had engraved on a column for the stone masons—we hadn’t that; we had only his drawings on paper—which of course, suggests the architect, but the architect talking, if you want.  The link with the masons is so evident in that diagram that is simply scratched on the stone.  That pleased me very much.  I mean, that was a good illustration of that business and literally the same thing that happens between the fresco painter and the mason.  Of course, you’ll say that, well, that isn’t the same thing as doing a petroglyph for the gods.  But I don’t know.  I just like that neither the medieval artists nor the petroglyph makers do it for the art lover.6