Twenty-Fourth Interview, Jean Charlot, May 18, 1971, John Pierre Charlot

We were talking the last time about your early woodcuts and your early paintings, and I wanted to ask more about that.  All of them seem to be filled with a great deal of analysis rather than synthesis, in your terms.  Could you tell me about that?

Well, that, of course, is very much what happened to my generation.  We were sort of born within Cubism and not the Cubism later on that was more decorative and colorful, but the Analytical Cubism of the beginnings.  And I mentioned that series of drawings which are nearly the only thing I did on my first trip to Mexico.  They were all analytical, done after those Métamorphoses of Ovide with the Boucher engravings.  Now, on the second trip, the paintings that were done at the same time than the woodcuts were of different styles.  One of them was a hangover, so to speak, of my days in Paris, and it has a rather long title.  It was a Crucifixion with Thomas Aquinas and perhaps is related to the Amitié, the first thing I showed, that had been painted in Paris.  It was to a great extent analytical but rather connected with my days of the Gilde Notre-Dame with the idea of doing, I would say, obviously religious pictures, pictures with obvious religious subject matter.  And at the same time, there was that series of big heads that you know—Bob Browne has one—which are faceted and were my own version, in a way, of Analytical Cubism, without obvious distortions, because I had perhaps more interest in the subject matter, which is all Indian heads in that series, and I wanted the model, so to speak, to be part of the picture, more than the model is in the portraits of Picasso and Braque from around 1910, 1911, and a little later of Analytical Cubism.

Well, they seem very different from your later views on Indians.  When you look at them today—I believe there are three in that series of painted heads: the man with the cigarette and then the man and the woman—what is your feeling?  What do you think you were seeing then that you stopped seeing later or that you didn’t see yet?

Well, my own knowledge of Mexican Indians and specifically Aztecs, because my models there were Aztecs, was academic, not in the sense that the Frenchman would speak of it, but academic in the sense that I was already very well aware of the Prehispanic forms of art, both in the manuscripts and in the sculptures, terra cottas and so on: that is, the Indian’s own way of looking at himself.  And there is a definite sculpturesque quality, faceting in hard material, we could say, in those early portraits.  And I think there is in there a lot of obvious dignity that I had learned from the Prehispanic collections.  I always come back to my Uncle Eugène Goupil, because I knew those things very well.  So it’s a mixture of my knowledge of antiquities and, so to speak, the first contacts with live Indians in their habitat.  Now, that is a first impression that, so to speak, I couldn’t recapture, because when I made friends and was invited in Indian homes and so on, something else emerged which was, perhaps as I suggested, less academic and more simply human.  That is, the things that we had in common rather than the things that seemed foreign to myself in the first contact.

Now this brings up a very interesting point.  Some people say, Schmeckebier1 for one, that there were two big turning points in your style, especially of doing Indians.  One was when you went and saw the masks at the museum, at the Ethnological Museum, and then you use them in your Dance of the Ribbons,2 and Siqueiros used them in his The Burial of the Worker.3  And the other one was doing your work in Yucatán.  And they see two very different changes in your style at this point, and I’m sure if they’d known these earlier ones, they would have said, “This is the way he looked at it before he reached those influences.”  But you feel you had those influences there before.  Would you say there wasn’t those two big cuts in style when you met those particular types of Aztec or Mayan work?

Well, I knew less about the Mayans than I did about the Aztecs, and certainly going to Yucatán and going into the diggings of the archeologists—maybe for the archeology, of course, but very much because all the workers were Mayan Indians in there—was a terrific experience.  And as suggested, the Aztec and the Mayan are nearly antithetical.  It gave me another facet, so to speak, of Indian culture.  The Aztec is a little more complicated because I always come back to Gauguin and his Peruvian blood.  I mean, I had the Aztec in me besides having it around me.  The Maya was more of a discovery, and of course, I had to dig into it very strongly by copying hundreds of bas-reliefs, getting at least the sound of the language, befriending, again, some of those people who came from the village of Pisté, which was rather a purely indigenous village.  So there has been something added by Yucatán that wasn’t in my work before.  I think that’s true, but the things eventually blended.  It would be very difficult for me now to be sure of what is Mayan, what is Aztec.  There is a synthesis, of course, after working with things for decades and makes difficult—in fact, you shouldn’t try to separate any more the components because they have fused together.  They have blended.

Schmeckebier says that you got your first, you did your first, if you want, those round-profiled Indians after Yucatán, that is, where the mouth and the nose meet in sort of a rounded profile.

Well, I don’t know.  I mean, I can’t tell you.  There are so many things.  Schmeckebier was blessed by a bookish knowledge of things.  That is, he had a more simplified idea; he was going by books on the history of art of Mexico and so on, but when you are with the things themselves, it’s pretty hard to say, for example, the underlying art, the prehistoric art of the Mexican plateau, which is all mixed up with Aztec.  What we call now Olmec has completely that skull and nose that he saw mostly as Mayan.  I am a little too close to things, so to speak, to have a very clear image of things, but I think that the most important thing was really that when I went to Mexico, I already was soaked, so to speak, into all the things I was going to meet there.  There was—I always come back to Ozenfant4 and his pre-forms—there was a pre-meeting with Mexico long before, long before I met Mexico, so that makes things pretty difficult.  They were already assimilated, so to speak, even at the very moment that I discovered them.

Where do you see the stylistic, or do you see a stylistic influence of Precolumbian art in those early things you did, that would be as opposed to some sort of spiritual or moral influence?

Well, I mentioned a thing that I destroyed, incidentally: that big Crucifixion with Thomas Aquinas was nearly entirely done on a French basis, so to speak.

You didn’t destroy it.

Yes, I did.

You gave it to me.

No, no.  I gave you the model, the small model.  It was a very large picture.  It was already a mural, so to speak.

Why did you destroy it?

Because I didn’t like it.  Those big heads—I mean, I come back to those things as being the most obvious style or early style in Mexico—were really quite French in the cubing of the faces.  I don’t know that I had in mind at the time some of the early sculptures of Picasso, the head that is all faceted, but it’s very similar to that anyhow.  As I said, the only difference which makes it not wholly French but already Mexican is a respect for my subject matter.  There was, perhaps, a certain uncertainty about the new accessories, paraphernalia.  For example, the serape that the man with the cigarette has on is not something that I would choose later on because it’s something which is a little bit touristic by the standards acquired when I knew more about serapes.  Actually, the large hat of the man, the sombrero, also is something that later on I used less and less as I looked at Indians in their daily life, in their home and so on.  So there is a certain uncertainty or surprise about the subject matter that disappears later on, and there is a strong scaffolding of French know-how that we can call early Cubism, which also later on is much less obvious.  On the other hand, this very same feature which I call French can also be construed as being from my knowledge of Mexican things because it’s obvious that looking at those people, I didn’t think of them as flesh but as hard matter, hard obsidian and so on.  That is, a faceting that the French had used without any sense of weight or texture, I would say, in early Cubism, with me became a way of changing the flesh into hard stone.  And I think that already is Mexican.

Why did you pick the theme of those people, say, rather than landscapes?

I didn’t pick the theme.  They were the regular models who were at the Coyoacán open-air school, ready to pose for the students, and they were for free.

Did they wear, say, that man, did he wear in posing the serape and the hat?

Yes, indeed, very much so.  In fact, both the women and the men dressed up in a way that you could say was Mexican Indian ways of dressing.  That is, it wasn’t too wrong, but it was also something that had been chosen by the artists themselves to get a colorful result, and that wasn’t then the Indian taste proper, certainly not the Indian taste of everyday.

Why did you have him with a cigarette?

Well, I suppose he was smoking at the time, poor guy.  He had to stay still with all those boys doing Impressionist oil paintings from him, and I suppose they had given him permission to smoke.

Now, the background, you have sort of, if you want, a native background.  That, of course, was invented.  Was that based on studies?  You also have a little vignette of village life.

No, that is an addition from the stay in Puerto Mexico.  That is, the little landscape is really closer to Tehuantepec than it is, of course, to Coyoacán.  Probably something I had in my eye from my stay in Puerto Mexico.  It’s definitely tropical.

The other man and woman you did, they are quite simply dressed.  Were they also from the Coyoacán school?

Well, I am not quite sure who you are speaking of.

The one in the closet here.  There is, you know, Bob Browne has the Man with the Cigarette, and then there are the man and woman, two separate paintings, one of each, in the closet here.  The woman is in a simple greenish dress.

That’s a woman with an orange and she was dressed that way, I suppose.  All those things are done from the model.  The man, I think, is a woman.  The one you called a man is crowned with poppies, and that is a little different because that was sketches from Santa Anita.  I had gone to Santa Anita, I sketched, I have a number of small pictures of the time of the men in their dugout canoes, and for a certain feast the women put those poppies on their heads.  There is also a woodcut, not of the same woman, but the same idea.  I think it’s called La Gata de Santa Anita.5  The other one is just an old woman in front of a glass of pulque.6  I remember the glass is blue and the pulque is curado, that is, mixed up probably with something that makes it pink.  As I say, I think all those things hang together with a French know-how of faceting Cubism, but a transformation of what was with the French an aesthetic statement to relate the live models with the Prehispanic sculptures I knew.

Well, I’m very interested that there seems to be a progressive moving away from the studio into the everyday life of the people, that is, a moving away from the model as just a body in a room towards a portrayal of people in their natural or social setting,

Well, it happened to me too, that’s all.  I just went into the street, and I have many of those little sketches, even a series of lithographs of people I had met in the street.  Then, of course, when Luz presented me to her family in the village of Milpa Alta, that was direct, everyday Indian life, and there was no need—in fact I don’t think I ever had people pose again—with the exception of Luz, that would pose from time to time for something like The Fold of the Rebozo and so on.  So there is, as you say, something that is from a school, so to speak, in the first things I did in Leal’s studio in the school of Coyoacán.

What was the reaction of your fellow students, so to speak, there when they saw it, because these were quite different from the work that they were doing?

Well, I think they didn’t quite know what it was all about.  As I said, there was a very nice effort on their part, even a heroic effort, to do something that was Impressionist, I would say, not even post-Impressionist, but Impressionist.  And the jump into what I was doing, which was post-Cubist, was too difficult.  It’s only, really, when Diego Rivera came back and gave some lectures—and he had photographs of Cubist things, his own among others, of course—that they could, if they want, relate my own things to what Rivera had done and was showing them.  But by then I think they had forgotten those early paintings of mine.

What was the reaction of the teachers—the same?  You must have been quite a different thing for the teachers there, or did they feel at all threatened?

Well, there was only one teacher.  Those Mexican schools—I hope they are still in the same way rather disorganized.  And Ramos Martínez, who was Director of the San Carlos Academy, was really the only teacher, and he loved French things.  He loved to speak French.  In a way, both Ramos Martínez and Rivera were happy with me because I spoke French.  And when he criticized—there is something very nice in Fernando Leal—I don’t know if you found it out in his, the thing he made for me specifically, then he enlarged it a little bit—in which he relates the way Ramos Martínez used to criticize them with French words and give each one of them a name.  There was one that he called Renoir, another one Cézanne, and so on.  And I was the only man, of course, who knew what he was talking about when he used all his French words, and he used them very well indeed.  But he was happy to have somebody who knew what he was talking about.  On the other hand, the thing that made a very bad impression on everybody was my use of black, because they had worked so hard to eliminate black completely from their palette.  And of course, as it was Cubist, I thought black was a pretty good color.  So that was, I wouldn’t say anything that a teacher would point to, but a certain scandal among those people who wanted to bring sunlight into their pictures.

Didn’t Leal also, wasn’t he also using black at this time in his painting?

Well, you can’t, I mean, make things that simple.  What he was doing was beginning to compose, we could say, in an artificial way with bodies, and that also was something different from the impressions that the other people were painting.  I come back to his picture, which I think is called The Zapatistas, in which…and I realize now that he was right.  At the time, he told me how bold he was in making those artificial constructions of bodies.  Of course, for me that was, seemed natural, but compared with the things around him that were more like direct impressions, he certainly was standing, anyhow, to something that would have a certain, what I would call classical, monumental quality.

Your Woman with an Orange was shown in France and got a photo and a very good press notice in one of the papers.7  How did you get it to France?

I got it to France in the form of a photograph.  It was never shown there.  There was a fellow, he was the son of a Blanchard, Claude Blanchard; he was the son of a fellow who had been one of my teachers of painting.  He went to Mexico.  He was at the time in the early movie crews and found that he couldn’t stay there because there was sort of jealousy for his being a foreigner and so on.  So he stayed very few days, but he was connected with Crapouillot,8 with that magazine, and so he asked me to send him photographs and a little text that he would arrange for the magazine, which I did.  We were very happy to have that early publicity, and that helped a lot, actually, Ramos Martínez, who was defending himself against still another group of people who were just connected with the real academic painting that had been so flourishing in the nineteenth century in Mexico.

I don’t have that little text, by the way.  I’d like to get it from you.  Were these early paintings and woodcuts you did in Mexico, did they reach the public at all and was there any reaction to them?

Well, they were reproduced, as you know, in some magazines, the Universal Ilustrado,9 which was a weekly, and certainly lots of people read the Universal Ilustrado.  They were shown, I think, also.  A little later on, the Estridentistas, the modern poets, showed them in something they called The Café de Nadie, that is “Nobody’s Café,” where they met and discussed, I suppose, literary problems.  I’m quite sure it didn’t make much of a stir.  That is, it wasn’t a turning point for anybody.

Now, there’s just one more question on this I want to ask.  Is it true that you and Siqueiros would go to the museum and study the Aztec masks, and that this is the source of both of your using them, you in Dance of the Ribbons and he in The Burial of the Worker?

Well, I hope so.  I mean, Mexico City was still a small place at the time, and there was very little to do when you were not at work, and the museum for us had a tremendous attraction, probably more than the museum of painting that was in San Carlos, because the museum of painting wasn’t very well arranged, and some things that are now displayed were not.  And when you think of the Museum of Ethnology, you must not imagine the present day one, which is a superb thing as presentation goes.  There were so many good, good things, but they were all piled up, really, like the stones that they were.  But I am sure that Siqueiros went to look at the thing.  I am sure I went to look at it very often too, because those things were beautiful and related to the art that we were, I wouldn’t say dreaming of, but already doing.  I don’t think, though, that going together, Siqueiros and myself, to the museum for the purpose of finding motifs is the right description of what we were doing.

Well, let’s get back, then to these early days.  Could you tell me something about who was in the crowd and how it was before the arrival of Siqueiros and Rivera, because all of this, these early paintings of yours and your stay at Coyoacán, that’s before Rivera came back, isn’t it?

Yes, it’s a little before, just a little before.  And I think you can find all that in, well, in my book on the Renaissance and another text you probably have there.  Rivera would go and visit.  He was very faithful in that sense, visiting all the places where there was any art being done, and he wrote—and I think I quoted a thing in my book—he wrote that Coyoacán was such a lovely place and so isolated from the world that he felt he was in an asylum.  He didn’t quite say “insane asylum,” but an asylum, and really for him it must have been a fantastic sight, coming back from the aesthetic, epic battles of Cubism, to find people who were working so hard on the revolution of art that would result in Impressionism.  He was very nice about it and little by little somehow introduced in either formal lectures—and people would go to his lectures—or just in conversation and showing photographs and so on, what at least the art in Paris was at the time, which came as a complete revelation to people.

Could you tell me about how—let’s see, we talked a little bit about how you met Leal.  But how did you meet Dr. Atl?10  I believe you met him before Rivera came.  In other words, what I am trying to do is get as much as I can out of you about the days before Rivera and Siqueiros returned.

Well, I mean, there isn’t much.  Everything is on a small scale there.  There was a group of people.  Ramos Martínez received me at the San Carlos Academy.  He was charming, and he really was charming.  And he offered me to go there and paint and, like the other students, I could get my paints for nothing, which was a wonderful thing.  They were, incidentally, hand-ground right in the school.  And so, I was delighted.  And then the people around me were simply the students or perhaps I could say the advanced students, who were functioning as instructors also, informal professors at the school.  That altogether makes five or six people there; some of them faded out when we came to murals.  Well, a man like Emilio Cahero,11 I speak of him in the book, did one mural and then really was not interested in murals.  And there were other people that thought that we were wrong because they were Impressionist painters, by then nearly full-fledged Impressionist painters, and it had been so hard for them to decide that color was the whole story that they couldn’t drop color and go into what seemed to them the drab constructions of Cubism.  I will not say, I don’t remember, but the people who came then were Revueltas, and Leal, of course, and Ramon Alva de la Canal.12  Those are about the only people who reached the wall, so to speak, in good standing.

Can you tell me about your relations with Revueltas and Canal?

Well, we were still very young, I mean twenty-two, twenty-three perhaps, and none of us had any money to speak of, so the relation was just young artists.  There was nothing very much going on.  We would just paint, and if we had enough money, we had a glass of beer, something like that.  That’s about all.  Revueltas had a brother who was a very good musician.13  He was the most successful of the lot.  And as far as I know, I didn’t go into any theoretical discussions of art.  I’ve never done it in my life unless it was as a professor speaking to students.  So I don’t know that there was very much going on.  I would be invited to, let’s say, Revueltas’ house, and he would show me his paintings and so on.  Cahero did the same thing.  Cahero, incidentally, is the man who introduced me to etching.  And I dedicated my first etching to him in the first proof.  So it was just young artists getting together; nothing I think like what was going on in Paris where Picasso and Braque and all those people seemed to have been passing all their lives talking to each other.  I can’t believe it, because at the same time they were working very hard.  Well, we were working hard, but there wasn’t much talk going on.  And Atl was an entirely different generation.  Atl was an older generation than Rivera and Orozco.  Rivera and Orozco had been introduced to art by Atl.  Atl by then was not painting very much.  He was mostly in the mountains, in the volcanoes, and I went to see him at the Mercado de la Merced, where he lived.  He had a sort of azotea, a little cubic place on top of the roof of that old building, and like anybody else was nice to me, and he gave me, I still have it, a charcoal drawing of the volcanoes.  It’s really, we could say, uninteresting because when you look at the works of art, you think there may have been some clash of aesthetics, but there were never—if there were, they were never translated into words.

Did you meet Goitia14 at this point or later?

Goitia came a little later.  He was very reserved.  He never mixed up.  He never even visited either the scaffolds of the muralists or the places where the group was.  So it’s only later on with Anita Brenner15 and Edward Weston, I think, that I made it a point to go and know Goitia.  I thought he was, I still think he is, a wonderful painter.  The first things I saw of his were actually done as an artist to help archeologists: the book, or the two-volume book, I think, of Caso,16 who was head of the Archeological Department on Teotihuacan, and he asked Goitia to do landscapes and the present-day types of people in Teotihuacan as a comparison with the ancient things.

Again, still before the arrival of Rivera and Siqueiros, had you met Orozco at all at this time?

I really can’t remember the exact things.  As I say from 1922 on, I begin to have a good chronology because of my diary, and that’s early enough in a way.  But Orozco roamed, you could say, around us.  He comes to walls later on, and before he had walls of his own, he had a certain curiosity in seeing what was going on, and he wasn’t very enthusiastic.  I remember that I showed him my fresco—I think in the making at the time—on the staircase of the Preparatoria, and he said that was silly because nobody would stop on the staircase to look at the picture.  Of course, you never knew with him.  I think he was impressed at the same time.  That is, he was being funny maybe just because he was impressed.  That has always been the two layers in Orozco.  When he has something that he likes very much or that impresses him very much, then he starts demolishing it in words, and people get sometimes a little confused about those things.  But he was not at the time inclined to murals, we shall it say that way.  He was not jealous of the murals because he didn’t want especially to paint murals.  He made his living at the same time like he had done before by doing cartoons for magazines.  Then we would walk with him from the Preparatoria to the place where he had done those cartoons, and there was a little, I remember, there was a little glass case outside the printer’s in which the magazine just off the press was shown.  So we would just go and see how the layout of his cartoon had been, and if it was well reproduced, and so on, so forth.  At the time, of course, he was something that for me tied up—he was the only one of us who tied up with the folk art of the, well, of Posada—to come back to Posada—and the nineteenth-century Mexicans.  In fact, he was the only one actually who was in direct line with the nineteenth-century illustrators and cartoonists.  He wasn’t interested in the fact, but everybody else had forgotten those people.  So I knew Orozco as a comrade, we should say, and as a cartoonist for perhaps two years before he went to the walls and started painting walls himself.

Again in this very early period, had you already started going around looking at the folk dances and the folk art?  For instance this little Tortillera that you have.  In other words, what sort of ethnic researches, if you want, were you carrying out in present-day Mexico, in the then-contemporary Mexico?

Well, it was very hard to avoid those things because they were all around one.  Of course, the open-air puestos were something taken for granted.  In the Alameda, for example, it was full of those open-air puestos, with the Indian women selling the pots and so on that had been made in the family.  You saw that all over the place.  If you went to the Guadalupe, there were always some dancers in their dancing costumes, feathers and whatnot.  It was really nineteenth-century Mexico that I contacted rather than Mexico today.  So, even if I hadn’t looked for it, of course, I was based in all the folk art and folk dances and folk music of the Mexican Indian.

Through your friends, were you acquainted and did you follow the work of those people who were rather systematically studying folk art, for instance what Atl was doing with pottery, and was Frances Toor17 then there and Anita Brenner—that’s before the arrival of Rivera and Siqueiros—or did your contact with those people come after?

Well, again, read my book.  I have a chapter there now, and I think it was called “Nacionalistas,” and they were people who were trying to adapt the designs on the bateas, on the gourds, and the most colorful folk costumes, to their art; and men like Montenegro,18 Adolfo Best Maugard,19 and so on.  The thing that bothered me, or would have bothered me about them if I had looked at their thing very much, was that there was a sort of elegance, what for me seemed like a false elegance: elongations and sophistication.  I don’t know exactly where they got that from, but I think it was in the case of Montenegro the tail end of Aubrey Beardsley.  That didn’t leave me indifferent.  It repulsed me horribly, so that I couldn’t look at their things very much.   So their intentions were good, that is, making use of Mexican folk motifs in fact, but the results were so refined, decorative, and sophisticated that they couldn’t appeal to me, that I couldn’t hang on them.  The only one of us that later on became a muralist, who was part of muralism, who was part of that group actually, was Tamayo.20  Tamayo was a very young helper to Montenegro in the early murals that Montenegro did in San Pedro y [San] Pablo, and some of the early things of Tamayo were, I don’t know if I should say influenced, but along the lines of Montenegro.  And then, of course, he repented very quickly.  He was very young at the time, maybe sixteen or so, and went to something of his own.