Could you tell me when you first got interested in the Epinal and Orléans folk art and what it meant to you?
Well, it goes back, certainly, far away, I would say to the original Images d’Epinal, not the earlier ones, of course, but when I was a small child in the early 1900s, there were still those loose sheets that were printed at Epinal of Images d’Epinal. They were not what we think of now with a definite primitive stamp and so on, but they were usually short stories very much like the funnies that we find today in American newspapers, not in style, but in the machinery—that is, a series of tableaus of different moments of a certain action—and that I received from my grandfather mostly, I would say. He would just buy them at the shop, give them to me, and I enjoyed looking at the stories. And together with the stories, I absorbed the pictures. And even though they were not any more woodcuts, there was still a certain degree of simplification in the drawing, and the printing was still at times the stencils that were colored by hand, which gave them a certain flag-like decision about strong colors—glue tempera, red and blue, and so on. And another thing that I think interested me at the time: that the superposition of line and color was never quite exact. There was always a wobbly quality between color areas and line. Now, of course, I didn’t look at them mostly from that technical point of view, but I know that that attracted my eye.
Later on, when I was a soldier in… well, before I was a soldier actually, there was another thing that was, of course, an important thing for me: I became a collector of Images d’Epinal. I used to go to the Foire aux Puces, which was near the Place de la Bastille. You could see the column of the Bastille from the Foire aux Puces, and there there were a lot of people in the open air, just selling their secondhand wares. There were a lot of secondhand books besides, of course, mechanical parts and all kinds of things. And I found there an album of perhaps fifty sheets of Images d’Epinal and those of the older style, probably mid-nineteenth century—well, they were mid-nineteenth century, I would say; some may have been a little before—that had been put together, not bound, but tied up together by a collector who was certainly aware of the interest of those things; but it must have been done long before. I bought them for a small sum, and they were on very thin paper, and they were already in not very good state. And to preserve them—I don’t know if it was a good or bad idea, but it was one way of preserving them—I put white paste on stronger sheets of paper and tried to glue those very thin sheets, the very aged sheets, on the stronger paper with the white paste. And I managed. They wrinkled a little bit, but nevertheless those are still with me now.1 I am sure they would have been destroyed if I hadn’t done that. And they may be valuable. I haven’t been able to put a, let’s say, money value on the collection, but it has been a big inspiration for me. I look at them even now from time to time to sort of restore my confidence in a certain folk way of line and color. Many of them are by Georgin, who is considered the great master of the Images d’Epinal. Some are dated of the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s, I think, the later ones, and I have learned a lot from the familiarity that I’ve had with those pictures. And later on when I became a soldier and I was in Orléans, in Orléans the little museum, then I saw another type of popular sheets of the same type that were printed in Orléans, with a different set of colors—perhaps less flag-like, less crude than the primary colors of the Images d’Epinal—using more greens and yellows and, I think, salmon, a sort of off-pink. And there also I looked at those with great intensity, and in the very little time I had to myself, I decided to do a series of those single sheets, putting them up-to-date; they would represent the patron saints. I still have, you have seen some of my drawings for that series of Images d’Epinal more or less as far as style is concerned. I did one of Sainte Barbe, which was the Saint Barbara, which was the patroness of the artilleryman. I had one of St. Mauritius, who is the patron of soldiers. I prepared one, I think, on Francis of Assisi, and so on and so forth. The one, the only one that I finished, that is, of which I made an edition as I had planned, was the Ste. Barbe, patron of artillerymen. I was at the time in the artillery as just one of the men on horseback that dragged the guns in the field, and I represented, I think, some scenes of the carrying of the gun, of the people on horseback, of the people manning the 75, which was the gun we were using in field artillery; and then the large figure of Sainte Barbe. The way I made the edition, it is a lithographic transfer; that is a printer that I found said he could do the multiplication of the image and gave me paper, a sort of a couché paper with the lithographic ink and told me that what I did would be transferred, I think transferred on stone at the time, which he did. So I had an edition, I think seventy-five or so sheets in black and white, and then on those I proceeded to put in flat coloring in the style of a stencil. I don’t think I actually did stencils, but in the style of a stencil, trying different color combinations. I gave a few of those to my fellow artillerymen, but most of the edition remained with me. So there has been there a long series of contacts since I was a small boy with popular engravings. And of course, being aware of that business of popular sheets, images—pilgrim images we could say—when I was in Mexico, very quickly I looked for the similar thing, and that is the way, of course, I got very much interested in the publishing house of Vanegas Arroyo, who are the people who had printed the work of José Guadalupe Posada. And it is really not through an accident but through that pre-form so to speak by which I was acutely aware of folk engraving that I was, we could say discovering, rediscovering, anyhow publicizing, the work and the name of José Guadalupe Posada.
Could you tell me a little bit about your book buying? I know you spent a lot of time on the quays looking for books.
Well, on weekends I had my time; I would go by the Seine. I told you that the Beaux-Arts School was Rue Bonaparte, the Louvre was on the other side of the Seine, and so I would just go along the quays and look in the secondhand cases that were full of books. I even made a little money on it. I knew some of the old gentlemen there, the old booksellers, and some of them had a little business, which wasn’t a swindle but helped them sell their engravings. They had a bunch of black and white engravings of things, fashions and whatnot, and they would sell them better if they were in color, so I made a little money by putting color on those old engravings. They looked much prettier, and they sold much better. And from time to time, I found something I myself wanted and bought or exchanged for something of that type or some task that I made for them. I wasn’t interested so much, however, in images as I was in the books themselves. I was looking very intensely in my teens for the books of Léon Bloy, and I made a fairly good collection. In fact probably now it would be a very valuable collection of first editions of Bloy. I still have two or three of those books with me. The bulk of it was loaned to somebody, and I think I left for the army, and I think the poor fellow died in between or something, but I never got the books back. But they were things that I got acquainted with like… well, the works of Balzac and in early editions were rather easily available at the time, around 19–, let’s say, ’12 to ’15, something like that. And I got some very fine editions of his series of Physiologies, Physiologie du Mariage, etc., with very lovely lithographs. They were small-format things with lithographs by people like Gavarni, for example, that I treasured very much. I think that my own taste in lithography and what could be done with lithography comes in fine part from looking at those early editions. I kept with me all this time—I still have them now—some things that I found on the quay. There was a first edition of Victor Hugo, the Orientales—I think 1824,2 something like that—with a lovely engraving, a very romantic engraving, of a harem girl looking at the moon. And the works of Théophile de Viau, which I think now are rather difficult to get, and the letters of Cyrano de Bergerac, the original edition. I found those things on the quays, and I certainly never paid very much for those things, five or, well, I’d say less than ten francs for any item. It was a great education, not only for what I got out of it in buying books, but looking at those many things and many books and getting an idea of nineteenth-century literature in sort of a very vivid fashion.
Weren’t you looking for bindings also?
No, sir. I wasn’t looking for bindings, but the one of the Orientales of Hugo is a very fine romantic binding, even though the back was cracked and I had to put in a new back.
But you did collect those children’s books with the covers that had sort of drawings on the cover.
Yes, I remember getting some of those. It’s a papier-mâché that was molded. It was the style of the time, and if they had been in what people call mint condition, they would have been collector’s items. But of course, those I got, I got them because they were not in mint condition and I could afford them. I think there was at the time a sort of a vague idea that I would collect such things, but it didn’t quite jell.
In the original inscriptions for The Picture Book, you do them in red and blue. Was this influenced by the flag colors of Epinal?
Well, that was the trial copies that I made to proof the drawings with the first idea of the text, but that never, of course, was realized, but it wasn’t a choice. It’s just that even though the color lithographs of The Picture Book are very complex in the finished thing, they are done, of course, in seven or eight ink colors, and the single ink colors as a rule are rather crude. It’s only by superposition of the inks that we get the refinements of colors. And the text that I wrote with a brush and lithographic ink was painted in one color and one of the colors chosen for the picture, so that by definition they had to be crude. It wasn’t a choice of color; it was just simply a technical happening.
Could you tell me about your years at the Condorcet?
Well, you have photographs, I think, of myself and some of my fellow students. I was pretty good at certain things, I think, literature, for example; but there’s nothing really to tell. I just got a spattering of English and German at the time, my two languages. I, of course, learned a little bit like all children who go to school, about history. I remember it came to me as a great surprise, though, that there were other histories than the Histoire de France. I had been very innocently working on my Histoire de France, and I looked at the whole world through those sort of rosy glasses of the Histoire de France. And I think I was once—one of my summers in England—also I was maybe thirteen, fourteen years old, maybe less—I suddenly found an Histoire which wasn’t of France, but of England, and I was surprised how biased it was for the English, even against the French. I was very incensed, and I realized that there were many histoires: histoire of Germany, of France, of England and so on and so forth, and I stopped being the innocent I had been. Maybe the only place where I remain up to now a chauviniste about France is really in the arts. I think that…I still will fight for French painting as being the hub of the world, but of course, I can’t prove it. But I remember that before that I always thought of France as being the hub of the world. I had to change a little bit in certain things, but I do not about art: I still think that France is the hub of the world as art is concerned.
What were your favorite subjects at Condorcet?
Well, really, there were some I couldn’t stand. That was mathematics; my poor mathematics teacher suffered a lot from me. I remember that I told my father such horror stories about him that my father went and saw him and told him how heartless he was with me, which, of course, didn’t endear me to the dear professor of Mathematics. I was neutral on most subjects. I liked literature, I liked literary composition of a sort, but I think perhaps my only éclat, my only glory, came when I got into boxing and became one of the champions of boxing in scholarly circles. From then on there was a certain respect on the part of my fellow students and perhaps some of the teachers.
How did you get into boxing? Was that when you gave up fencing?
I just can’t remember how. I remember, more exactly, that I went to a gymnasium and that the fellow in charge of the gymnasium inveigled me in boxing. The first type of boxing was the savate, that is, the old French boxing with feet and knuckles, and he explained to my parents, I still remember that, that he had a picture on the walls of the gymnasium that showed a man being attacked by villains, obviously apaches, and getting rid of them with the greatest ease because he knew the savate, he knew the French boxing. So my mother, I think, thought it was a nice thing for me to do that, and then from that I wouldn’t say graduated, but I enlarged my knowledge by trying English boxing. It isn’t quite American boxing; the stance is different, the stance of the nineteenth century, really, and I got into some championships. I had my nose bloodied and whatnot, but one year somehow I got the championship, by means fair or foul. I think one of the championships I got that I wasn’t opposed by anybody, but of course, I could always believe that I was so formidable that nobody wanted to oppose me. But anyhow, I have a record somewhere of being champion of boxing in the scholarly championships, and that helped me a lot, maybe not with my studies, but with my stance with my fellow students.
Did you have some good friends at Condorcet?
Yes, I suppose so. That is, there were some families who visited each other, and the children visited each other. There were some… well, it did enlarge my ideas of things. I remember that visiting other families who lived in other, I wouldn’t say conditions, but other homes, apartments, houses, whatever it was, gave me an idea that people could be very different. I remember a place, for example, where I went where the father was playing the piano. Now up to then I had always believed that it was the mother who played the piano in the home, and I was very astonished at that man playing the piano. And so on. There were other people who had other tastes in art, that were not the same as our family. And I think to an extent it helped me understand that people were different. Otherwise, there were enough members in my own family to do the job, to give me a diversity of people and knowledge. Every weekend we would go and have dinner and a day with my grandfather Goupil, for example, and he is the man who was my closest tie to Mexico. Very often the archeologist Charnay would be there, telling further stories about Mexico.
But as for strictly friendships in college, they were casual, or we got together for certain ideas that we had that were, well, juvenile. We had for a while a newspaper, I would say a periodical, that we published on the news of the heavier-than-air; that is, the aeroplane was coming up at the time, and we had a little newspaper that was mimeographed about aviation. I think you’ll find some of those in our files somewhere here. I think I was eleven years old at the time. I wrote part of the reports on the new discoveries in the newspaper, and then we gave models of paper airplanes, how to fold the paper and make new forms, newfangled forms of airplanes. It’s strictly contemporary with the first flights, at least outside the United States, of the Wright Brothers and so on. So it shows a certain excitement at some brand-new stuff happening in the world, connected not with art, of course, but with mechanics, with machinery. There were two or three things like that we did in a group, but otherwise there was no really very close or very deep friendship.
Wasn’t the Dubonnet boy there with you?
Yah, they were there with me, now, when I was very little. That wasn’t Condorcet. That was before Condorcet when we were at a school for children, really; it was the school of Les Demoiselles Hattemer. They were two sisters who had never married and had that school for children with eleven grades, something like that. And the Dubonnet boys were there. I don’t know where they went from there. They certainly were not in my classes at Condorcet. Later on they were in the news, of course, and one of them became a very…a rather famous racer in automobiles, and I was astonished because he had been rather slow on the ground—his feats of speed with automobiles.
Was that a good school for children that you were in there?
Mademoiselles Hattemer were the best school in Paris. At least that was their own opinion of their school, and I think it probably wasn’t far from the truth.
Tell me about your two trips to England as a young boy.
Well, my father, of course, was a sort of international, being born in Russia, raised in Germany, and so on, and so that I should, too, have some sort of international flavor in my life. And it was the proper thing, anyhow, to send a child to other countries in summer. So when we didn’t go to…when I was big enough to be more or less on my own, I was sent to England twice. I never went to London at the time; I just stayed on the south coast. And I was rooming—the one that I remember the best when I was rooming at a parson’s. A parson was a very religious man. There were a little group of Frenchmen there, and on Sundays he didn’t want us to do anything, not even to play billiards. That was considered sinful. So it suggested to us all kind of tricks, of course, and things to take our revenge on the poor parson. And then another thing, those episodes are not very interesting, but we were in the countryside and we were pursued by a bunch of children our age, more or less, who told us we were frog eaters. So we were very mad at the little guys and we turned on them, and eventually they, I think they climbed on a tree, and their father came, ready to beat us up, and we explained to him that they had insulted us, saying we were frog eaters. He said, well, they could come down, and we could forget the incident.
Didn’t you go with one of the Briançon boys to England?
No, sir, I did not. I was on my own, more or less. My mother crossed the Channel with me, left me there, and came and brought me back.
Did you have any contact with art or literature in England?
Well, I know that I sneaked in [unintelligible] was a lowbrow-music hall. I doubt that the parson knew about it. I don’t remember the details. But there was a scene in, I think, a Turkish harem, and the ladies I think nowadays would have looked fully clothed, but there was a belly dancer, and I remember I was quite astonished at such goings on. It’s a very vivid thing in my memory, gave me a certain desire to go and visit such lands as Turkey and Egypt. At the time it may have added to my sense of other worlds that had unusualnesses that I didn’t know about.
Were there any other vivid impressions you got from England? I know you don’t particularly like the English.
Well, I certainly like the English very much, but the impressions are just what you could get in one of those south towns. There were little people carting some seafood on the, by the beach, and we used to get those very small clam-like things that were pickled in vinegar. I don’t know whether they were pickled in vinegar because there was no icebox, and those things don’t keep, and you couldn’t know if they were rotten or not because of so much vinegar. But we liked them very much, and obviously, we didn’t get poisoned, to death anyhow. That was one of the things I remember. And then another sort of introduction to the theater: there was a clown, he was alone, and he could play the clown, but before playing the clown, he passed his hat around and got a little money so that he was sure people wouldn’t leave before the end of the act. And I remember one day he was unemployed, just sitting there on a bench, and five or six of us went to him, and we begged him to do his act. We thought it was a very funny man and were horrified when he refused. We didn’t have any money. We couldn’t give him enough money to do his act, and so I had a very strong feeling that the man was being a clown for money. I had never put the two together somehow, and it hurt me to know the world was wicked about money, so desirous of money that he couldn’t follow his artistic vocation unless he had money in his pocket. It was quite a disillusion that came on me.
Well, you seem to have been in quite a pack of children there.
Well, there was the five or six little Frenchmen, and then, of course, in addition English children around. It wasn’t really a pack; it was a little group.
Did you ever visit Germany as a young boy? Did you go there often? I know you went there with your father before the war.
Well, of course, I was only sixteen when I went with my father—it was before the war—and I went to Freiburg-im-Breisgau, which was a student town. Father, of course, could merge with the people, speaking perfect German. My German wasn’t that perfect, but we arrived there in July, I think, or the end of June, and the declaration of war between—what was it?—Serbia and Austria happened soon after. And of course, I couldn’t realize that that meant war between Germany and France also. It was too complicated. But everybody around us knew it. And there was a bigger boy in the family where I was, and he started cleaning his gun and so on. The poor guy probably was called to the wars as soon as they were declared. There were big movements of German troops toward the French border, and father and I actually took the last train that ran between Germany and France. If it hadn’t been for taking that train, we probably would have been put in a sort of a prisoner camp for civilians for the duration of the war. Of course, I liked very much what I saw of Germany, and later on when I went back after the war as the victorious troops of Occupation, I had a little more leisurely way of observing Germany, the German people, and German art, which is certainly one of the things that influenced me, because I find not only that it is beautiful, but that it has a note, it gives a note that no other art gives. Even though it’s not Spanish, or French, or Italian certainly, it is something that is a must, I would say, to give a rounded idea of the art of man.
Charlot’s collection of Images d’Epinal is now in the Jean Charlot Collection.
Victor Hugo, Les Orientales (1829).