Could you tell me about going into the army, about your life in the army a little bit?
Well, I think that’s not exactly relevant in the sense that it stopped what I was doing connected with the visual arts. I told you already that I took refuge in poetry because I could do it without accessories. I was called early; earlier than my class; I think my class was ’18, but we were called before because of the war, of course. So I was quite young. I must have been eighteen or nineteen when I got into the army, and there was a…well, minimum training, actually, before going into war. People, I think, were pushed to the front rather quicker than in other days, so I haven’t really known the army of before the First World War, the one that is represented, for example, by those generals and so on in beautiful uniforms that appear in the Dreyfus process. It was quite a different type of people, and we were all of us more or less in the same dirty colors. Already there was the idea of blending with the backgrounds. And there was discipline, but the discipline that happens in wartime is very different from the discipline of peace time. I was put in a horse artillery, and I had a very hard time with the horses. I had really not much training with horses before. I think those that I knew were mostly those of the Caplain family in Chaumontel. My godfather actually, Frédéric Caplain, was rather proud of his carriage horses, and when they had guests besides the family, they would have a great display of the carriage horses with the coachmen holding them. It was a rather magnificent sight. But as far as getting near horses, I had no training, and there suddenly I had not only to ride horses, to jump on horses, but also to take care of horses. And I made friends rather easily, I must say, with people who had a great knowledge of horses. Not that they were military people. One of my friends was a peasant who had been a coachman at the same time, and in fact he took some of my dirtiest chores of currying the horse and so on after the horse had been running and was in a sweat until I understood how to do things. I remember, well, for example, being on night watch in the stables and lying into the box where the extra straw was with a good book. I took with me three or four books, actually, even in the worst moments of my early training. One of them was Rimbaud, The Illuminations, and I’m pretty sure I had Maritain, Art et Scolastique, and so on. But it was rather difficult to read because the horses at night are not all quiet, they are not all asleep. Some of them got very temperamental and kicking and making lots of noise, and then I was supposed to cool them off. But it was really nearly the only moment that I had to myself, when I was on sort of a lonely vigil in the stables. For a while I was helper to a horse doctor, which was even a more complicated affair and rather disgusting as far as I was concerned, but again there I learned a lot about, shall we say, the physiology of horses. However I was never a very good rider, but for some obscure reason, maybe because of my training as a boxer—I was going to say as an athlete, really strictly as a boxer—I could jump on the horse from behind. He was without a saddle, and I jumped from behind on the horse just putting my two hands on his croupe, on his behind, and jumping on his back. And that was something that those who couldn’t do it were so astonished. It was the only thing that gave me good points in fact. I had left school before I had even my baccalaureate, so on paper I was not one of the intellectual guys, one of the cultured guys. I had once a view of my description in military terms, and there was nothing about education because though I had gone to Condorcet and so on, I hadn’t finished my studies. So I was not a bachelor, even, but the only thing that was positive was that I could swim. And that was something, after all; so many people couldn’t swim. So there was really dirty work for me. At the same time, I knew things that the other fellows didn’t know, and I got the idea, it was a strange idea, to study my textbooks and to apply for officers’ school, which I did. Most of it was things that I wasn’t too strong about: mathematics and so on. Because at the time we had no computers; all the artillery stuff was done by brain and hand, human brain and hand. Anyhow, I filled in the different papers, I passed a few written exams, and I had completely forgotten about it. I was in one of those muddy barracks somewhere. Actually, we were digging a privy, I think, when one of the young, rather dapper lieutenants rushed there and asked for me by name. Well, we were below level, we couldn’t be seen, so I just raised up my head, said, “I’m Charlot,” and so on, and he said, “Well, here’s something saying that you should go to Officers School in Fontainebleau. I didn’t know that you were an educated, learned guy. If I had known, we would have gotten together. I would have given you private1 lessons,” and so on. I said, “Well, I had forgotten myself.” So I dropped my spade and got out as best I could from that potential privy, and then I was sent to Fontainebleau. There was a very, very stiff training there. All the old-fashioned military ways were there with a vengeance, I would say. There was a wonderful tradition. It was the same school in which Napoleon had gone when he was a young man, doing the same thing that I was doing and preparing to be an artillery officer. And they were proud, of course, of their past, and it was about the stiffest military training one could get, with many of us, of course, falling, I would say, on the way, either for intellectual or for physical reasons. I managed. I went through, and so much of the things from then on were easier for me because I was aspirant. We don’t have that in the American army, but aspirant is just a sort of in-between, between non-commissioned officer and officer, and it’s a rather delicate thing. I forgot to tell that before I went to Fontainebleau, I had gone to the front as a just plain GI and had seen some combat there, of course. And after that I was for two years or so in troops of Occupation in Germany, which in a way, I had a little more leisure. And besides my contact with the country and the language, I could contact anew, I would say, because already I knew well German art. And we went all the way from the south, Ludwigshafen, to Köln in the north, and in Köln especially, there were some wonderful museums in which I really got very close to a good knowledge of the School of Köln of the 1400s, which I think is one of the influences on my work: the very clean color, a flower-like color, if you want, of the School of Cologne, the sort of rounded volumes, even the sort of childishness of those chubby angels in the religious pictures; all those things, without being conscious of it, certainly became part of my vocabulary.
Could you tell me something about the friends you had during the war? I know in the war papers I’m looking at, you were always mentioning them, and there are some photos of you with them.
Well, we were, of course, thrown together, and for me the discovery was, of course, of people I would not have contacted otherwise. I mentioned already that peasant coachman. I had the greatest respect for people who knew things I didn’t know, and it was mostly those people, because the few people who had similar education to mine had no mystery for me. And well, perhaps later on, for example, when I was in Mexico and felt more, I wouldn’t say at ease, but felt more the mystery and the interest of the Mexican Indian than my cultured and cultivated Mexican cousins; probably the same thing was at hand. I was interested in things that I had not experienced. I enriched my life with the experience of people who had started life in very different ways, and I think that the thing is the common man or the masses or whatever you want to call it, is really the type of man that interests me, that I feel closer to. There was a very curious misapprehension, I would say, when I went later on after ten years in Mexico to New York, to the United States, because there the Left was trying to put up a sort of art that would be a channel to what they called “the Masses,” and I met some people, one of them was the head of the Communist Party at the time, and so on. But they spoke of “the Masses” that it was a sort of agglomeration or conglomerate of things that were not quite human. They never had that sense of the respect of the individual which had been so very strong with me, and though many of those leftist guys received me terribly well because they thought I was one of them, I was very ill at ease with their idea that from outside they were going to reform those lowbrow people. I think their idea was to take those lowbrow people and eventually with the revolution make of them highbrows. And of course, that wasn’t at all my idea. I liked them, I loved them, and I painted them as they were without any desire to modify them.
There’s a picture of you with some of your friends. I think one of them was a Second Prix of the Academy, a violin, and it says, “In memory of the nice days we made music together.” Do you remember any of those people very well at all?
Well, I remember making a portrait of that guy, or a caricature, or whatever you want to call it, and he was a nice fellow, and if we made music, I am sure he was the fellow who made the music. I remember trying to play the mouth organ. but I couldn’t even play that. I have other memories. There was a very tough guy, who was, people would say, an apache, and we took to each other very much. I rather envied him because he was tattooed. There was something rather elegant in the tattooings on his arms, and we did a little bit of boxing together, and I wasn’t terribly good, but he wasn’t terribly good either, and the other people were in awe of us. And I remember at the time, we thought of getting together a little group and call it the Club des Costauds. The costaud is a strong man. And my reward, if I had been a member of the club, would have been to be tattooed also in the same way. There was a real friendship there. I must say I don’t remember the friendship with the musician. I had something that was handy, which was I could make portraits of people, and I probably have made a number of portraits as I rose in rank from sergeants to captains, that came usefully in my military career. They were very polite portraits. I still, I think, have a few of them around.
Did you do any art work for the army while you were in the army?
No. The obvious thing, of course, would have been the sort of primitive camouflage that was being done already at the time, but I wasn’t asked to do that. Perhaps, beside, of course, my military duties and dangers and adventures, there was an unusual thing in that one day I received a paper saying that I was to teach higher mathematics to the soldiers who were getting ready for Fontainebleau, who hoped that they would get ready for Fontainebleau. And of course, I probably had gone through that, and it’s on the strength of the papers that I’d left in my dossier that they asked me to do that. But I wasn’t quite fit, but I managed all right for the few weeks that it lasted. But this is the army. They don’t look exactly what you can do best. They just give you an order, and you do it as best you can.
Did you do some paintings for those backs of the cards of those hospital charts?
Well, I may have done something when we had concerts. I remember when we were in a place where there was a building that was fit at all for a theater representation, and I may very well have done some sets of a sort. It’s quite possible.
You told me once that they had you do the backs of the fever and health charts in a hospital, and you did little French flags and things. You don’t remember that? No. When did you do the Ste. Barbe—it’s a woodcut, isn’t it?2
No, the Ste. Barbe is actually an ink lithograph. I was certainly thinking in terms of woodcut. That was done in Orléans. I was in training, early training, in Orléans, and before that, even, I had made a collection of Images d’Epinal, of the penny-sheets that are done in woodcut with strong stenciled colors. And then in Orléans there was a little museum. I was in that little museum quite often, and there was a very interesting series of penny-sheets that correspond to the Images d’Epinal, but that were printed and done in Orléans. It has been a pretty important influence on my own art, together with the Images d’Epinal. It was a very different sense of color that the folk engravers of Orléans had from the people of Epinal. The Epinal pictures are usually, so to speak, red or white and blue. They always have a flag-like quality. Those of Orléans were much more refined. There were some where the genius among the folk artists who offered some very curious relationships of greens and yellows and blue-grays and so on. That was a big influence on me, and at the time I prepared—I still have some drawings—I prepared a series of Images that would have been close enough to those things—though they were not copies, they were my own—about a few patron saints. The Sainte Barbe is, of course—or was, before she was demoted two or three years ago, I think—was the patron of the artillerymen. And so the first thing I did—I had planned a series of them—was the Ste. Barbe. It’s actually a transfer in lithographic ink that was printed in Orléans. And I had made stencils and a series of color arrangements put on, on purpose, in a folksy way—that is, not corresponding to the outlines very much—that make it really very close to the penny-sheets that were printed in Orléans in the early 1800s or so. There was also there, as long as we are talking of religion, there was a sort of use of my art for a pious purpose, and I wanted, I remember, to distribute those images or to sell them, perhaps, for a penny to the artillerymen so they could say their prayers to their patron saint, Sainte Barbe. There is a little poem, John, that you have there which is on the same topic, that was published in the Petit Messager, if I remember, in which I mention definitely the folk sheets, the penny-sheets.3
You have poems for other people too. Did you plan the series of prints for them too, the other people besides Sainte Barbe?
Well, I should look, but I remember I had a Joan of Arc, and at the same time, more or less, I was beginning the Way of the Cross, at least the sketches for the Way of the Cross, which was then actually, of course, directly in wood. It was begun, I think, before going to Germany. It was finished more or less in Germany, where I found some fine planks of pear wood, and many of the sketches refer to the Twelve Apostles because the Twelve Apostles are on the cover of the Way of the Cross. I made a small edition, I think seventeen copies of it, and the cover has the Twelve Apostles, and I have quite a number of sketches. I was looking for liturgical art in the sense of what symbols went to what saint or what apostles, and there is some research in there. Of course, I knew pretty well the art of the Middle Ages. I knew pretty well the symbolical quality of the accessories that you find with the saints in the cathedrals, and I thought that it was nice to follow up directly that line, to follow up the medieval artisan. We come always to the same things. The artisan, instead of reinventing things that already had been used for what we could call the parishioners’ prayers, was better. I mentioned Denis. Denis, in a way, seemed to me too modern in the sense that he was inventing, and I tried, myself, really to follow what I called the tradition, which seemed to me very important, and I was not conscious of creating, or more exactly my ideal was to follow, not to create. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. But that was what I was trying to do.