First Interview, Jean Charlot, September 14, 1970, John Pierre Charlot

JPC:

Could you tell me about your relationship with Maurice Denis?

JC:

Well, it wasn’t a very close thing, but I was at the time a member of a group of Catholic art that had just started called the Gilde de Notre-Dame,1 and we were mostly people in their teens.  That was just before my military service in the First World War.  And so we asked Maurice Denis to come and speak to us at the Gilde because he was probably the major Catholic artist in our circle at the time.  I must say that, of course, Rouault was around and doing Catholic art, but he wasn’t known yet.  I would say the publicity around his work hadn’t been done, and I knew him only as the Director of the Gustave Moreau Museum.  I had seen him and so on, but I thought of him as a museum director rather than an artist, while Maurice Denis was quite in the news as the Catholic artist.  In 1911 he had done the mural decorations for the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, among other things.  And of course, I’ve always felt that I was a mural painter even before starting doing murals, so I was interested on two counts in Denis: as a muralist on one side, as a Catholic artist on the other.  And he was a very nice fellow, and he gave us a very nice talk on truthfulness in art in the sense that you shouldn’t paint marble if you couldn’t afford the real marble and you shouldn’t put gold on wood which in itself is beautiful, and so on.  It was very nice, a very nice talk.

And before that, now that I remember, I had gone to his own house.  I think it was St. Germain-en-Laye or something like that, anyhow, where he had lived mostly all his life.  I went there in awe.  I was at the time just, well, I was in the army already, but I hadn’t gone to the front.  I was an aspirant, which is preparation for officer.  I was in my best uniform, of course, and Maurice Denis received me very nicely.  I was by far the youngest fellow in the group.  He seems to have had around him admirers that were all of them of an academic caste.  By that I mean people who had been mixed up with the old Académie and who accepted Denis as a modern artist.  It was in a way luck that as soon as he formed himself and matured himself, Cubism came.  That is, the first Picassos around 1907 or so, and Braque.  And the people who would have accepted him as modern really rushed to Picasso and Braque who they rightfully saw as being the last word in art.  And Denis, even though he was not ancient at the time in any way, I think he was at the end of his thirties, found himself already old-fashioned in relation to the new trends.  So he was a little bitter about Cubism.  He spoke of it and wrote of it as something German, and he wrote with k’s; I remember at the time there was the Kultur with a k so he would say “Kubism,” with a k always.  So I was, I wouldn’t say disappointed, but I was astonished that this man which I considered a modern painter was full around him of rather dowdy admirers, men who had been teaching at the Beaux-Arts, who had been painters at the Académie, all of them, with the Legion of Honor and so on.  When I arrived, Denis had just received the Legion of Honor and he had it—he was, I would say, fully dressed for an artist—he had his coat with the Legion of Honor on it, but outside the coat he had the large cape without sleeves that he wore as a badge of the artist, and also on the cape another Legion of Honor, so even though I was very young and very awed, I noticed the two Legions of Honor.

He was showing us his last pictures or his new pictures and one of them was an Annunciation; it was a very lovely Annunciation, but he had done it, of course, in the l910s, and I remembered another Annunciation, rather similar, that he had done in the 1890s, so I felt a little awkward.  It was, of course, my first conversation, very close contact, with a famous artist; he certainly was a famous artist.  There was an element of nearly the theater and acting that bothered me a little bit.  He showed me very nicely around his studio, and he was doing the Way of the Cross; there were the fourteen panels, all of them the same size, and he had started on one of them in charcoal.  What was it?  An Entombment.  There was just a single line of charcoal, a very lovely one, an arch which suggested the cave, I suppose, in which Christ was put into the tomb.  And he said, “People would tell me to leave it like that, that it is a Maurice Denis, but I must go further, I must finish this because it is my conscience that pushes me to finish this thing.”

You could see that he was uneasy about the newfangled affairs—Cubism, the first abstract things had already been painted, and so on. Where he was at his very best, I would say, is in relation to his family, as a family man.  I was presented to his wife, his first wife, who was quite sick at the time, she died soon after.  And there were a dozen—or it seemed to me at least a dozen—of children around, running around and bringing him some drawings they had made, and he gave them very good advice.  They were all his children, of course, and I admired him as the father of his children more readily, more easily, than I had as the man, the artist.  And later on, of course, or very soon after, or at the same time, I had already contacted Cubism, it was really Cubism at the time, and I started myself working in what was for me the new idiom around 1918 or so.  And I admired Denis, but I really admired him as a good man, as the father of his family perhaps more by then than I admired him as, let’s say, a modern artist.  I still admired him as an artist because he was a man who really knew how to paint.  He had a great craft.  When he calls himself a decorator I think perhaps it is a true appreciation of his art.  As a decorator he was supreme.  Maybe because my own experiences at the time were very strong and mixed up with the war and death and so on, I had to change my attitude towards art, and even though I was a muralist, even before painting murals, I never could think of myself as a decorator.

JPC:

Were there any aspects of his paintings or his style that influenced yours, do you think?

JC:

Well, I am quite sure so, yes.  I have my first would-be mural that wasn’t painted actually on the walls but had been done to scale and from the blueprints of the building which was a church.  And I can see in there very distinctly the influence of Denis, in the certain, oh, proportions, a certain nearly Post-Impressionist sense of color.  There was, however, another influence which was stronger on me than Denis, and that was that of Marcel-Lenoir.  Marcel-Lenoir isn’t very well known now, though he has some of his things in museums and so on, but he was a man more severe than Denis, without the charm of Denis, and perhaps closer to what I myself was becoming at the time.  So the mixture between Lenoir and Denis somehow would account for my earliest style when I started thinking in terms of murals.

JPC:

But Denis uses a lot of architecture in some of his decorations, large square balconies, arches, etc., and he got this a lot from Florentine painting; some of it must have been fresco painting.  Do you think that that filtered…that, if you want, muralesque architectural aspect in your work, what there is of it, came through Denis, or do you think you got it directly from the same sources he got it from?

JC:

Well, I can’t think of him very much as an architectural artist, perhaps because his architecture, even though it was drawn on the canvas originally, after the colors were set in, became so atmospheric that it wasn’t architecture any more.  Marcel-Lenoir, to come back to the man who was a man who used architecture without putting sort of a haze of atmosphere over it, and he would have been my model if I hadn’t had, of course, the models in the Louvre which were even clearer.  People always mention the influence of Paolo Uccello on my work, and that is very true.  I was in admiration and in awe of the panel of battles in the Louvre and that was one of the great influences on my painting, partly because there, even though there was no architecture in the sense of houses, the series of lances and so on were all ruled in with a very exact line, and that exactness and even the lack of atmosphere pleased me very much.  It was a strict expression of geometry.  I may have started admiring the Cubists for a certain sense of geometry, but they were rather fantasists in relation to the early Italians, and I felt closer perhaps to the early Italian masters than to the Cubists themselves as soon as I saw with what freedom the Cubists used their geometry.  I liked things that were a little more rational in their approach.  Of course, we should add Poussin to Uccello to have a rounded figure of my relation to geometry.

JPC:

But the earliest paintings I have seen by you were rather atmospheric. There are outdoor scenes, the use of lines—that you don’t use lines in them, you build up your volumes by color.  Do you think, was it seeing the Uccello painting that started you in another direction or had you already, in fact, started a more architectural style before you saw Uccello?

JC:

Well, I think a young man, a very young man I should say, goes through a number of schools nearly in chronological order.  We could say that I had an academic period in the narrow sense of the nineteenth century.  I had a perhaps not Impressionist, but certainly Post-Impressionist period.  And then, those things don’t last long, but you do a dozen or so pictures in one style and then you can go to the next.

JPC:

But how old were you when you saw the Uccello painting?

JC:

Oh, maybe twelve years old or so.  I used to go every weekend to the Louvre and soak in the Old Masters.  They were really my masters more than any person living, without being unfair to my actual masters.

JPC:

It’s quite extraordinary, I think, to have somebody twelve years old who is so interested, so struck by certain aspects of art, but you’d been prepared for it, you’d been painting really since you were old enough to hold the brush, hadn’t you?

JC:

Well, I wouldn’t say so, but my mother,2 of course, painted and I would see her doing a painting and I knew that paintings were not ready-made, that they had to be done by hand, and very early I tried my hand at doing paintings.  And twelve years old is perhaps a little early for my going to the Louvre because I would have to go with a governess or something, maybe—I don’t know maybe it’s a little later on that I would go alone to the Louvre—but I used to go every weekend and I would get in trouble with the guards because they didn’t want me to sit down to copy things because I didn’t have a permit as a copyist, so whatever drawings I made from the Old Masters I had to do standing and sometimes I got very tired indeed.

JPC:

The earliest things we have of you are those childhood books.  Were you conscious—what were you conscious of in your first drawings that you remember?  Were you conscious of trying to depict something, of trying to make a pretty line; do you have a recollection of what you were trying to do in those earliest things we have of yours?

JC:

Well, I think you are speaking now of things I did when I was eight or nine years old which, of course, is a long time ago, but I do remember a few things.  One of them was my discovery that you could do purer painting and it represented something; that is, up to then I had done things in pencil and then I had colored them, and the two operations were distinct.  You start drawing and then you put color on.  But one day I took a brush and I started drawing with the brush and that was a tremendous impact.  I still remember it now, that question of working with pure color instead of the gray of the pencil, and it allowed me to do things which today look just the same as any children’s drawings, but at the time looked to me painterly, even though I didn’t have the word at hand to describe it.  So that was certainly a discovery, and maybe it is a time when I found that I was a painter.  And that must have been when I was maybe nine years old, something like that.

JPC:

Are there any more memories you have like that, things that struck you as you first began to draw and paint?

JC:

Well, I don’t think they are artistic things, but that realization that you could put things and people on paper astonished me.  And we had a cook who, I think, was rather rounded and had heavy breasts, and I remember my feeling of success when I rounded her on the paper and gave that heaviness to—of course, she was fully clothed, but I would say to her corset, because people at the time, women, wore corsets, but it looked to me a very sensuous thing, again though I didn’t have the word to describe it.  However that sensuousness is not terribly apparent, I think, in what I did later on, but it was perhaps a way of pinning a sort of idea of a passion to painting which, of course, painters have when they paint, though it was a childish affair.

JPC:

Did you ever discuss that kind of experience with your mother? Did you ever think about it or, either discuss it with somebody or else think about it yourself—mull over it?

JC:

Well, I certainly mulled over it, but I didn’t discuss it either with my mother or with the cook.  I was very careful not to.  It seemed to me a very wicked thing indeed.   

JPC:

We have now here those childish first sketchbooks and then the next—what were the next things you did after that?  Were they the little illustrations for Odette’s3 book with the little mice running up and down the sides of the book?

JC:

Oh, I think I had two or three teachers, some of them were my school teachers; then I had one who was more of a professional professor outside the school; and they gave me things to copy.  They were nice things, and I usually worked in oil on a sort of, well, not canvas board but what we had at the time, sort of a paper that took the oil.  And nowadays I must say I have a hard time, unless I remember the circumstances, in knowing which of those early panels are copies of other painters and which were done directly from nature, because I was soaked in the teachings of those people which were, we could say, just between Academism and Impressionism and very able at it.  But it certainly opened my eyes to many problems which I was not really to go further into later on: of course, the problems of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in relation to outdoors and the sense of sunlight and so on, which are not things that I followed up very closely later on.

JPC:

Actually, that interests me very much because the early ones, the early paintings we have of yours are very Impressionist, much more that than, say, classicist or academic in the good sense of the word—would, say, come from a classical tradition.  But by the time you were doing those illustrations for Tante Odette, you have, I think, a black pencil arc, ink line, really, which is then filled in with color, colors which set some of the volume.  And this seems to be a tendency in your art towards a more linear, a line painting—or wouldn’t you say so?  There seemed to be a strong pull in that direction for you, towards further linear…

JC:

Well, that has the same thing…it’s exactly the same thing that you mentioned as architecture.  I mean we mustn’t see architecture as houses and buildings but as forms that are defined against space.  The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were very careful to fuzz over the limits between volume and space and very early, maybe because of that mural tendency, I knew that I couldn’t afford that and that I had to make a clear definition between volume and space, though I had to use both of them.

JPC:

But you speak of your wanting to be a mural painter even before you had done them.  When were the first moments when you realized that that was the kind of painting you wanted to do?

JC:

Well, again, it’s not the question of terms, but I remember that I had a small closet—again, I must have been very, very small—all to myself in my room was my own closet, and I started doing friezes for it (I think I still have some of them) and decorating the inside of that closet as if it was a little room, or little hall, or maybe a little church just with those friezes that were made for a specific place.  I think one of the things I do not like about easel painting or the theory of easel painting is that you go from the painted space inside the painting to the true space outside and that edge, usually on the rectangular panel, is very disagreeable to me.  That’s why I’ve never been able to use an easel because then the panel is isolated and you go from the edge of the picture into deep space, which is frightening to me.  I have to prop up always my painting on the real position, on the real wall, on the real building, or if I do an easel painting, I prop it against the wall so that I have an illusion at least that this is part of an architecture.

JPC:

At the time of your childhood one could buy, couldn’t one, in stores certain little friezes that one could pin up in one’s room?  Wasn’t that the sort of thing one bought children?

JC:

Well, there was certainly more wallpaper seen then than there is now, especially in the United States; nearly all the rooms of the old-fashioned places had the wallpapers and the bands at the bottom and the top of decorative value, and maybe that was one of the things that suggested to me that relation of painting and walls.  It’s quite possible, but of course, I had greater examples because you can’t live in Paris or live even in Poissy, which was our summer place, without going into Gothic churches, cathedrals, and whatnot or palaces as well, Versailles and whatnot, and not see the use, of course, of painting in relation to architecture.

JPC:

You don’t remember any time that this particularly struck you, say even before you began making the little patterns yourself to be put in your closet—there is no conscious memory of that?

JC:

Well, there’s no vocabulary.  I just—from the beginning I really was set for a certain sort of task, and really all through my life, I’ve been going at that task when I had the chance to.


↑ 1

The official name was Gilde Notre-Dame.  See John Charlot, Jean Charlot: Life and Work, chapter 5.

↑ 2

Anna Goupil Charlot (1870–1929) was an accomplished artist who studied at the Académie Julian and the Grande Chaumière and with Jean-Léon Gérome.

↑ 3

Odette Charlot (1895–1977) was Jean’s sister and only sibling.