Seventeenth Interview, Jean Charlot, November 12, 1970, John Pierre Charlot

Could you tell me something of what you saw of Stefan Lochner, Grünewald and the other Germans during the Occupation and how they influenced your work?

Well, I don’t know about the last part, that is, the influence on the work.  I suppose some art critic should find that out.  But, actually, the Louvre had, I suppose, some important things of German art, but they were not presented in such a way that I could pick out the qualities that we think of when we think of German art, and I was so interested in other things, mostly really the French school, that I hadn’t looked specifically to German things.  I had read, however, I think it was in Huysmans about Grünewald, and I wanted very much to see the Grünewalds of Colmar, which are the main, of course, work of Grünewald.  I was at the time with the troops of Occupation on the Rhine.  We crossed, in fact, from Alsace, which had become French, but was, of course, part of Germany before, into Germany proper.  We crossed at Christmas, what was it?  December 1918.  And I stayed for two years with my troops, my units, along the Rhine.  We started in Ludwigshafen on the south, and we worked our way, on horseback mostly, up to Cologne, or Köln, in the north.  And I could take a few days, and I went to Colmar.  I stayed a whole day there, I remember, taking notes about the Isenheim altar,1 and it was a big experience, a big impact on me through the idea of color.  Of course, I knew color through the other masters, and I knew color through the moderns—the Fauves and Matisse and whatnot had been famous for their color—but there was such a complexity and such an intensity in Grünewald.  I think he was the first Old Master in which one was forced to say that the most important means with which he expressed himself was color.  The big Christ on the black ground and flesh green with the purple-red wounds were something that struck me.  I wouldn’t say that I was expecting that because the people who spoke of him, Huysmans and others, spoke of the intensity of the religious experience that Grünewald should have gone through in putting down his paints, and for me the experience was really painterly rather than religious.  And I felt that Grünewald himself had had a tremendous visual experience of the world that he had put down in those terms; exactly like Van Gogh, for example, was going to put down his color experience of the world, which blended with his own inner passion.  In Van Gogh it’s easy to distinguish the experience of the world through visual means because the subject matter, as a rule, is rather neutral.  He has to rely on men like Delacroix when he does religious subject matter, Pietás.  But with Van Gogh, let’s say a pair of old shoes or a vase of flowers is enough to express his visual passion.  With Grünewald I think it’s a little more delicate because people will rush to the fact that he has, well, the Temptation of St. Anthony, those horrible devils, and of course, the dead Christ on the Cross, sort of nearly beginning to rot, we could say.  And they go directly to the subject matter and decide he is a mystic.  It wasn’t, as I say, with me a religious or mystical experience, but a tremendous painterly experience within my craft to see the complex harmonies of colors with which he harmonized his things.  And I felt, and I still feel today that great as a man like Matisse, for example, is, as color goes, Matisse clarifies his problem with what people like to think a French rational approach a little too much; that is, he refuses a certain amount of complexity in nature which he should not have refused if he wanted to have the full experience of color in nature.  I think that Grünewald is probably, perhaps with Piero della Francesca, the greatest colorist, that is for me, of course.  All those things are subjective.  So I stayed there the whole day long.  I remember I was in my uniform of artillery officer, and at the time things were still very close to the war, and I caused a little flurry among the people around, just taking notes in front of those pictures for twelve hours of the day while the museum was open.  And I would say I never recovered.  That is, I never could think of things in terms of rational design in the terms that Poussin had heard design.  You can take a drawing of Poussin for one of his big compositions: you have the essentials of the composition.  But we don’t have, of course, some compositions of Grünewald in that sense though he must have made some.  But they are always modified by the sense of color.  So I learned something there that remained with me all my life, I think, and whatever color I choose to use, the color will always modify the line and the composition.

Then the other thing which, again, I knew more or less—that is that there was a School of Cologne and the head of the school or the main master was Stefan Lochner—I did not experience until I was in Cologne.  I went to the, I think it was the Wallraf-Richartz Museum that has some very beautiful Lochners.  The experience with Lochner was a little different.  It tied more easily with the things I knew before because he is a man who is more of the Middle Ages, who uses a local color with a little more, I was going to say conscience, than Grünewald.  He doesn’t spill in one robe, for example, from green to pink to violet; he keeps the robe all red or all blue.  So that I had already seen those possibilities in the folk pictures, in the Images d’Epinal.  But what impressed me very much with Lochner was the nearly infantile proportions of his people.  Of course, the angels are supposed to be babies, and they have their big heads and those little rounded bodies, and that’s to be expected.  But he has also those big heads and those little rounded bodies on the kings, for example, who are old men with long, white beards, who come to bring the presents to Our Lady and to the Child, and Our Lady herself is as childish in her proportions as the Child.  And there is a sense of innocence that comes through those infantile proportions.  It should be in a way belied by the tremendous craft with which he crafts his paintings, but it isn’t.  The sense that you get from a Lochner is a sense of innocence.  I think we saw together a small picture of his, the Madonna with the blue angels in a rose arbor in Munich, which had that same sense.  And I’ve always been very sensitive, I would say, to the idea of innocence.  And I found it in the Images d’Epinal again, and I think it comes in my own work very often.  I have a whole part of my work as subject matter goes which really I wouldn’t say is patterned after Stefan Lochner, but allowed me to present the same feeling through the same proportions, that is, the series of the dancers, of the malinches.  Of course, that is from Mexico, but it is the dance which still is based on certain of the purification rites of the old Aztecs, and the girls have to be virgins, virginal, so that the dance will be propitious, and the Mexicans, of course, don’t take chances so that the girls are very young girls, and they had what I would call the Lochner proportions.  And that came in my representation, even in the sketches, of course, that I made from them, but later on I sort of enlarged the theme, and it became really a mixture of innocence and heroic that I like very much, that means something for me, even though quite a number of people are sort of repelled.  They don’t quite understand what it’s about.  So this is what I owe to Lochner.  And not at all a mystical feeling, I would say, in my work—that doesn’t come from Grünewald—but the very complex problems of coloring which I learned from him.

In the Frankfurt Museum there is a large work by Lochner made up of little paintings.  There is, for instance, one of somebody being boiled in a pot—I think it is John the Evangelist—and another one with compositions made up of lines, long sticks with which they are beating somebody.  Do you recall seeing that?

No, I can’t say that I recall that.  That is, I didn’t memorize subjects, but for me the Lochner is summarized by those Madonnas in usually rose arbors and with little angels running around and doing certain, sometimes domestic chores, lighting the fire to cook, and such things.  And I think that, well maybe even in the subject matter, some of my Flights, Rests on the Flight into Egypt, and so on, owe something to Lochner, shall we say subconsciously as long as that is the word nowadays.

I mention that work of Lochner’s because I found in it lots of very geometric composition.  Did that ever impress you?

Well, I said he was of the Middle Ages, and that is that he’s a man who doesn’t dig in deep space.  He doesn’t have the problems of deep space, and very naturally whatever he does, he comes back to illuminations, and illuminations of manuscripts very wisely didn’t try to dig into the page, which would have been a very bad thing to do in a book, but remain relatively on the surface.  And that is his own solution, so that he has surface diagrams and arrangements is to be expected.  I think my own surface arrangements and diagrams come rather from the Italians.  Well, Poussin always, but the Italians, Piero della Francesca, Uccello, are probably my greatest models for surface geometric construction.

You spoke in one of our other interviews about a special note of German art that you don’t find in any other art.  Would you elaborate on that, please?

Well, again, it’s purely the point of view of a Frenchman, of a man who was brought up considering French painting as being world painting, a certain sense of classicism, a certain sense of beauty which descends, really, from the Greek tradition perhaps more than the Roman.  And in my classes on the history of art, I used to work myself to a certain excitement explaining that the German artists, as they created a language that was definitely German, allowed the survival of barbaric forms, forms that you find in the Vikings, for example, and the early Celtic works of art and an apotheosis of forms that seemed horrible to the classics.  I mentioned, for example, bugs, lizards, and frogs, and bats, and so on.  I used to say that, of course, with all my heart and really as an enormous compliment that what we like to call perhaps prehistoric Europe remained alive only through German art, until I got a very irate letter from a lady who signed herself as being a German countess, telling me that if I went on insulting German art in the classroom, she would denounce me to the president of the university.  So I toned down a little bit what I said, but the substance is that: that they have a tremendous role to play in keeping alive European primitive arts that would have completely disappeared really under the invasion of the Romans carrying Greek culture with them.

Do you think brutality, the kind of subject matter they used and also sometimes their brutal uses of color would be an important characteristic of German art?

Not brutality.  That is, it wouldn’t be typical of German art alone, the brutality of the subject matter.  The brutal color, yes, I think would relate to what I like to call the primitive arts of Europe.  But brutality goes to much greater length, for example, in Spanish art, in the representation of the martyrdoms, and that isn’t at all accompanied by primitiveness in the arts.  The Spanish people have accepted all the, shall we say, civilized decisions in the art of Europe, but are terrifically…well, they may be masochistic if you put yourself in the place of the martyr himself or sadistic if you put yourself in the place of the man who is torturing the martyr.  I don’t think there is any such thing in German art because with those big swords and war clubs, you just killed the guy and that’s all.

Did Spanish art have a big influence on you ever, as opposed to Mexican art, early Mexican art?

Well, you absorb, of course, much of Spanish art in its provincial form in Mexican art, but my first contact with the non-French forms of European art was with El Greco.  That was the fashionable rediscovery around 1910, and I followed suit, and of course, in the Louvre at the time—and I don’t know why they don’t do that anymore—they featured the great Crucifixion that they have of El Greco against the stormy sky with the two supplicants at the bottom of the picture.  That was in the Great Gallery, and it was at a right angle as you came in, so you could see it from all kinds of points of view, and it was a very beautiful picture.  I like it very much.  It seems to me a little tormented.  I wasn’t taken by the things that pleased so much Maurice Barrès.  I enjoyed, though, the abstract forms of the night sky.  And then there was another El Greco that I liked very much because it seemed to me so delicate, and that was a portrait supposedly of St. Louis, King of France.  And I probably learned more from that St. Louis, King of France, than I did from the Crucifixion because it was one of those delicate El Grecos where he refines on his brush stroke, and the color of the skin as it goes into the darks becomes blue.  It is gray in the light and gray-blue in the darks with an exquisite precision of the stroke.  I am not too fond of El Greco when he gets excited.  Maybe it reminded me too much of what we called Modern Art around 1920.  But I love him when he polishes his work and can give the same sense of passion and excitement through means that are nearly timid.  That is, when he creates his form rather than making a replica of something he has done before.

You never were very influenced by Northern art, were you?  Either Flemish primitives or later Dutch masters?

Well, there are, of course, many different forms.  I think Vermeer is something that you can hardly escape.  There is The Lacemaker in the Louvre, which has certainly influenced me as it has influenced nearly all painters that could go to the Louvre and look at it there.  Then there was the great show of, well, of Flemish and Dutch art, perhaps Dutch art it was, I think, in the Pavillon de Marsan, the same one where Proust went and was photographed.  The last photographs of Proust was coming out of that show.  And that was, of course, a great experience.  There were all the great Vermeers, the View of Delft and The Girl with the Pearl, and so on.  Those things are experiences.  But Vermeer is in a way not typical.  That is, Vermeer went very far into the decomposition of the solidity of the outer world while all his contemporaries and friends and even who came afterwards underlined that solidity of the world, which was something that pleased the people who paid for their pictures because they really could believe in this world as something solid and permanent.  Vermeer, on the contrary, escapes and escapes violently into something else by suggesting that the world is most impermanent, that he cannot catch it even visually.  And that did not please the patrons, obviously, because at Vermeer’s death, for example, they found that his pictures were dispersed among the butcher and the baker and so on and so forth.  He had had to pay with pictures because he didn’t have money to buy his bread.

Is there any particular influence?  I know how much you appreciate Vermeer, but I just don’t see any way that that comes out in your particular art.  You’ve never really worked, or very seldom worked the atmospheric end of painting.

Yah, that’s true.  I would say that it’s a very different point of view.  I mean, I don’t want to pretend that I have a universe-wide philosophy of things, but Vermeer annuls the physical world and makes it impermanent, but doesn’t give any extra solution.  There’s no solution for him.  That is, there is no place where he suggests permanency, and maybe in my work, I start from what I think permanent, which is not especially the visible, and when I come to the world as is, there is always a sense of coming down to something which is rather brittle and rather funny and rather impermanent, of course, but it doesn’t matter because somewhere, somehow, there is permanency.  So, they are two very different approaches.  Vermeer is open-ended.  Vermeer is open-ended in his thinking, and I swoop down from something which is far from being open-ended, which is solid, concrete, and that is a spiritual world.

You once told me that you thought Vermeer had seen one of those magic lanterns or whatever and that that might be an explanation for the way he paints the bread, for instance, in that famous painting of the woman at the table.

Well, we know that the people of his generation used the camera negra, which was really a photographic apparatus that could not fix the image, and we know that those camera obscura were imperfect, and they could not focus.  They had no way of focusing.  So it’s like you would take a photograph with a camera where you cannot fix the focus, and much of it will come out unfocused and so on.  That is the physical part.  I am quite sure that Vermeer not only looked but copied in some way the image he saw in the camera obscura and accepted its imperfections, while his friends corrected the imperfections.  But he accepted the imperfections because they coincided with something in him, that is, in his own makeup, that accepted that fact that the world was an illusive affair, was an impermanent affair.  So all those things tie together.  There is no reason to defend one or the other.  Both get together very well.

You once made up a list of the ten greatest artists in the world, and I remember you leaving the whole Northern School completely out.  You don’t feel a particular affinity with what was going on there, though I know you liked Adriaen Brouwer.

Well, I must have been very young.  You are looking into my very young papers.  I must have been ten years old or twelve years old when I made a list of the ten best artists in the world, because, you know, it’s not like the best dressed women and so on.  It’s a little more complicated.  I think, first, you can’t compare.  There’s a saying by Max Ernst2 which I like very much, and he says, “Well, to paint is not like a boxing match.  You can’t say so and so has won over so and so.  Each one is isolated in his work, and you cannot compare.”  That is certainly what I feel now.

Still, the question remains what you think about affinity?  You’ve never felt a particular affinity for what was going on up north.

Maybe not.  Maybe you are right there.  Well, people are not encyclopedias, and I think with the French and the Italian and the Hispanic—I say Hispanic, of course, because I think of Spanish in terms of Mexico—and nowadays I would say all the primitive arts—Oceanic and African and so on—I have quite enough ancestors without looking for more.

We’ve discussed pretty much, I think, all of the influences you ever mentioned to me.  Have there been any others, even minor ones, that we might not have talked about yet?

Well, I think the world.  I mean seeing is the biggest influence.  The big influence is nature as it comes to the artist through his eye.  I think all those things that we speak of are sort of bookish.  It’s the same difference between reading a book and living.  I don’t think any artist is influenced in any major way by any school of art or any other artist.  I think he’s influenced by what happens between his eye, I would say nearly his eyeball, and nature.  So we speak of that simply because it can be spoken of, because it can be written down and put in a book, all those scholarly influences, but they are at most, at least in the great artists, I think, they are at most ten percent of influence.  Influence comes from the world itself.  Well, there are a few exceptions.  I think a man like Picasso, for example, remains in that strange twilight of having an art, making an art influenced by art.  But that is a great exception.  That is, he uses already the chewed-up solutions of other artists.  I was very impressed looking at the three hundred or so etchings that he did in six months in 1968.  I was looking at those things that he did when he was nearly ninety, well, not exactly, but pretty close, and all those bookish, we could say, influences are there, and he doesn’t seem to have done what painters do who work and are taught by nature.  There is always a sort of a synthesis toward the end of their life that can be translated as a sort of increased wisdom.  I found in those Picassos a tiredness using the same formulas, and it’s like he had lived a very long life without having learned very much while living his long life.  It’s a little frightening.  But as I say, artists influenced by art more than by nature are a great exception.