Fifth Interview, Jean Charlot, September 21, 1970, John Pierre Charlot

Papa, we’ve spoken about your painting up through the time when you were at the Beaux-Arts.  Now, was it the war that broke up your studying there?

Yes, I think everything was stopped, of course, by the war, even though I was too young to get in there the first year, I got the two last years.  And there was no way of drawing, at least very little way of drawing.  I have, I think, two albums of very small sketches that I did when I could, but they are just like a journal of things.  When there was something I wanted to remember, I put it down in a drawing or I put it down in writing, but I couldn’t do any true painting because, of course, the conditions were not conducive.  On the other hand, the only thing I could do was poetry.  I have a great mass of poetry, which I don’t think is terribly good, but I kept more through a sense of humility than a sense of pride, because it nevertheless is an image of the things that were going on in my head in those days.  But I recognize in it, myself, some reflections of a number of people that I knew or admired, and Claudel1 is certainly one of the influences in that sort of poetry, and strange to say, it is mixed up with the formal presentation as far as verse and rime is concerned instead of free verse.  It’s the form of sonnets, and those sonnets came to me through people like Leconte de Lisle, for example, that I had read when I was quite young.  I was a little ashamed of those verses, and reading them now, I remember what Claudel said about sonnets.  He said it was like a “boîte à musique,” that you turn it around, it does its little musical stint, and then it ends, and you know that it lasts only through three minutes or maybe fourteen verses.  But just because it was what went on through my head, especially in those long nights when I had to keep awake under difficult or dangerous conditions, I’ve kept those verses.  And I don’t think they will add anything in themselves, but they are something that I did because I couldn’t paint.  I think my natural way of expression is really visual—painting, drawing, and so on—and this was just a thing that nevertheless made me express myself a little bit, even if it wasn’t in the mode of expression that would come to me naturally.

It’s a great problem for some people who write about the arts now, whether one can say similar things in different arts.  But you’re very outspoken, if I can use the word, in your poems.  You are very definite about your meanings, about what you want to say.  Would you say that you can express the same things in painting that you can express in poems or that you did express in poems?

I really don’t think so.  I know that two different parts of my brain get to work when I write, when I write in words, so to speak, or when I paint.  In fact, throughout my life, I managed to rest from one thing by doing the other one.  It’s pretty hard to pinpoint the difference because both, of course, are modes of expression, but I think there is more of a conscious and logical approach to words, at least for myself, even when I did poetry, than there is in painting.  Every time that you start a painting, you have to start, really, as an adventure, not knowing where you are going, and the grammar, so to speak, which, of course, is part of the manipulation of words, should not be there; that is, should not be there so much into the consciousness of the painter as it is, perforce, in the consciousness of the writer.  Now it is quite possible that some writers manage perfect freedom.  I believe that Rimbaud, for example, when he was working out those great lyrical cries of anguish and so on was doing it in a way that would be close enough to a painter painting without knowing exactly where he would land, what would happen as he went on doing his work.  But in my own case—maybe because a certain articulation of language, let’s call it the grammar of language, is something that I love in the same way that I love the architecture of a mural painting—I feel that there is more of an adventure into the unknown in painting than there is an adventure into the unknown in writing.  But of course, that is purely my own personal reaction, and it’s hard to pigeonhole things because, reading some of my old things, for example, I am astonished sometime that I hit at something that I had never known I was hitting or hinting at when I was writing, as far as I can remember.  But it’s curious in painting, even in the painting that I spoke of before, that is the mural, monumental architectural painting, it will be a bad thing if it is entirely conscious.  There is quite a percentage of things that happen that, well, they are pretty much what the people today call “happenings,” that is, things that surprise even the person who is doing it.  And if it wasn’t so, if there wasn’t those happenings in the middle of all those calculations, I don’t think the painting would be a good painting.  So maybe in the two things, there are some interchange of, well, of cogs, but in my case I would say that writing is conscious more than painting, and that painting reserves more surprises than writing.

Can you remember now which poem struck you as hinting at something that you didn’t know at the time, and what were they hinting at? 

I really don’t know.  Some of those things were done, for example, at night watch, and well, it was night, and it was dark, and there was danger.  It was the war, of course, and it would have been very hard, of course, not to have a very strong, a very intense sense of death.  Death was all around us and perhaps all around us, and we were all of us young men, some of us very young men, in fact in our teens, so maybe death had a very different character from what example I would think of now that I have in my seventies, and it seems to be the end of the day, so to speak.  It was a different thing then.  So when I looked at the things around me, it was always with that superposition of looking at them maybe for the last time.  Maybe it doesn’t answer your question that I was looking back at some of my sketches made in the war—I had a little pocket sketchbook and I made sketches in there—and I was astonished how much of it is taken with studies of natural forms, especially some herbs or grass, leaves of grass, or small flowers that were around me, and even though the drawings are, well, well done, and one would say realistic, I remember that I packed in there a certain drama, that is, the drama that perhaps those were the last little flowers or last little blades of grass I was looking at.  Now the poetry goes into the metaphysical, and that is things that are not visual, and there, of course, you can get into timelessness.  But I think the intense drama of the painter is that he has to do with things that are passing.  I was giving the example of the war because there it was such an obvious, intense thing, but even nowadays, let us say, that I do a flower piece, I know, of course, that the flowers will hardly last the time that I do my flower piece.  And if I do a portrait, it’s not a very different affair.  That is, the passing of things is uppermost perhaps in that intensity of the artist who has a visual image and knows that the visual image, or more exactly, that the model that procures his visual image, is changing, so to speak, right under his eyes and disappearing.  So maybe the role, the role of the artist, is to make those things somewhat permanent.  I say somewhat permanent because painting and drawing, even sculpture, are not really permanent.  There is a terrible disappearance of things, even in my lifetime, of the things that I have done, and the paper rots and the canvas rots and so on, so that the permanency of art is really a figure of speech, but that is the intention of the artist.  It’s to make permanent the impermanent.  I find that very strongly in those war sketches.  They are not perhaps great art, but they are intensely felt.

Now in the poetry, so long as we are speaking of the poetry, there is a sense of eternity which is perhaps more viable, that is, more right, has more right to be there than in the visual images, because you can find in your head, let’s say, for example, simple actions like prayer get you into a timelessness and a permanency that you don’t have any right to see when you look at things that are passing, that are not permanent.  So maybe, for me at least, there was more of a soothing quality in writing poems—because I could choose, so to speak, time or timelessness—than there is and there is still now in painting where the things that you try to hold sort of nearly vanish or disappear or change right under your eyes. 

In that article I wrote about your idea of the body2 I suggested, or it was my theory, that the one painting you did during the war was that surrealistic one of the bullet coming at the viewer and sort of fragments of things revolving around it,3 and I suggested that this was because, you know, this anomaly in your style, was because you weren’t satisfied with the style you had developed up until then to express the new things you had in your art.  Do you think that’s true?  Does that ring a bell with you?

Well, there was something in Cubism which doesn’t quite follow the things I was speaking of about Cubism when I said it was monumental and ready for mural painting and so on, but the early Cubism, the faceted Cubism, Analytical Cubism, really was an exercise in cutting things that were one and making them into multiple facets, but also in multiple pieces, that is, it was a sort of explosion.  There are some images of bottles, there are some sculptures, in fact, by Picasso and so on of bottles that are really the bottle exploded, so that—it sounds like a pun, but it wasn’t a pun—it seemed proper that in the war where those explosions were around us, Cubism would have been one of the ways of representing this disappearance—maybe not disappearance of the body but disappearance of the units of the body into multiples, into fragments.  And that is probably why I did that thing, which incidentally we shouldn’t call surrealist; it’s rather an adaptation of Cubism, in which the soldier, because that is the subject of the picture, the soldier is literally exploded.  So in a sense it is realistic; in a sense it is not realistic, but it is, as I said, nearly a pun: that is, taking the faceting of Cubism and using it to represent death on the battlefield.   

One of the shocking things about that painting is that the bullet is coming at the viewer and, of course, had come, if you want, at the artist when he was painting the picture.  In a way, all through your work there is this sense of, if you want, death hanging over the things.  For instance in your Holy Families, the very stillness, the very quietness, and even happiness—of course, happiness is too giddy a word—one knows the end of the story.  Do you feel this is true?  Do you feel that death is a conscious element in your work, in your life, and has been? 

Well, I wouldn’t make it anything tragic or sad or surprising, but maybe it’s a little different.  Maybe it is the freezing of the moment.  I think I mentioned before in a previous monologue, because those are sort of monologues, that instead of presenting the instant, I always try to represent the succession of instants that telescope into each other, that is, and give a sort of permanency, and that doesn’t allow one to show, let’s say, passions in the way you represent passions on the stage.  There is very little laughing or crying or hitting people, for example, or caressing people in my pictures because of the many moments that are telescoped into one.  So the result is a certain freezing of the human beings when there are human beings in the picture, and you can get a sense of unease.  You may have seen some of those tableaux vivants in which the people freeze into postures that represent some masterpiece of sculpture or painting, and just the fact that those people freeze in those positions is something that makes us uneasy.  And that is exactly that telescoping of moments which I think happens in all my pictures, and of course, the people who are frozen for good, let us say, are, for example, mummies, so that an idea of that is there in the sense of the slowing or stopping of the action, but not in a sense of drama.  In fact, I think there is something rather, well, religious and a certain sense of hope in the fact that we deny the instant, that we deny the moment.  That is, the snapshot is one form of art.  But for me, for my own art, it would lack some of the essentials that always have a sense of timelessness and freezing the action, and of course, that may suggest a certain sense of stillness which, in turn, for us is somewhat connected with death.  But I don’t think there is any sense of death in the same sense that you have it in the medieval Dances of Death, for example, or even in the ease with which a man like Georges Rouault gets into sort of gruesome suggestions and heads of people that are so close to skulls that he rejoins, so to speak, the Dances of Death of the Middle Ages.  I don’t know.  I would hope that there is no such thing in my pictures.4

It interested me, what you said about the separation in your own mind of literature and painting because, of course, as we said before, there are really marked influences on your writing, on your poetry, and, you know, on your early talks.  But would you say that we would have to be very careful in ascribing these literary influences and influence on your art, for instance, the idea of the poor which is so strong in your writing which one could trace from any number of choices: New Testament, certainly, very strongly linked with Bloy,5 Catholic revival.  Would you say that we have to be careful or it would be completely wrong to say that this is, for instance, one reason you are so interested in the modest life of the Holy Family as portrayed in your paintings? 

Well, it’s probably a little bit of all kinds of things, but there is a certain sense of the classical, strange to say, that maybe is as good an explanation as the religious one of the role of the poor as being another Christ, and so on and so forth, and that is a man with a minimum of accessories is at his most human.  There is a rather nice thing that was said by Picasso.  He said he couldn’t understand why Matisse, when he painted chairs, always chose a Louis XV chair while he, Picasso, could paint only a kitchen chair.  If you pass that to human beings, I think it is just about the same thing.  I would not be as happy painting somebody in all the accessories and frills and lace and so on of a man or woman at the court of Louis XV because the humanity somewhat drowned in the accessories, and that is probably why I have painted quite a number of Nativities in which the shepherds have come and adore the Child, and I don’t think I have painted—I painted perhaps one, and somewhat reluctantly—it was for an enamel, actually—that represented the Kings.  That’s because the Kings have so many accessories, of course, including their crowns, and the shepherds to me were the more easily human people to represent and as such had a certain classical quality that the Kings wouldn’t have.  And if I paint a Nativity, I think it’s very much for that idea of poverty, not seen as a virtue or not seen as a historical event, but where the minimum of complicated or the lack of complicated accessories and the simplicity of the things surrounding the Child and the Mother and Joseph makes them more truly human and as such, for me at least, truly classical.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that I do people like the Greeks have, that is, just naked as being the most human.  That isn’t quite it, because man isn’t made for that.  Man nude is in a way as artificial as a man in all the falbalas or frills of the court of Louis XV.  But a simplicity in the attire and a humanity.

I was quoting to you the other day a very nice thing of Degas also, who was speaking of a woman who was in high society, but she had sort of climbed up by a rich marriage, and he was obviously taken by her, and he was planning her portrait.  So people said, “But why do you want to paint that woman?  You know very well that compared with the other ladies around her, there is something vulgar about her.”  And he said, “Well, that’s just it.  She is not so refined that she has lost her charm.”  And by charm, of course, he meant that sort of nearly animal charm that comes of the simplicity of gestures, which is something that we find so often in animals—take a cat, take a deer, a fawn, and so on—has charm to the gestures through the simplicity.  And my models, for example, my Mexican Indian models, are all very good examples of that particular sort of charm that Degas mentioned, which was the contrary of sophistication.

But can you recall any literary, that is word influence, that has influenced your pictorial presentation?

Well, I mean, we could say, as you said, that the idea of poverty comes in through literary media.  Leon Bloy, of course, is the most obvious link in the question of the poor, like The Woman Who Was Poor,6 for example, his novel, but I don’t think so.  I think that words and images are two different things and that my loving simplicity—I have also not only the poor people and the Indians and the shepherds, but I have also in my pictures the kitchen chair.  I think all the chairs I’ve been painting have been kitchen chairs, have come really from the fact that those are more so, more man and more chair, than if they were more sophisticated.  That is purely a visual affair, a visual taste.

You once said that Anne-Catherine Emmerich7 had interested and influenced you because she was so pictorial.  Could you give me some examples of how she has influenced your way of presenting Biblical scenes?

Well, it’s been so long that I read her that I don’t have any really ready thing at hand.  But I remember, for example, that she used to see not only the scenes of the New Testament, which she saw in great detail, but the scenes of the Old Testament, and, I must say, even scenes in the Old Testament that are now considered rather parables than historical things.  She has, for example, a long chapter on Job.  You would know that better than I, but I think Job nowadays is considered as a parable; that is, it doesn’t have to have had a historical existence.  But for Anne-Catherine Emmerich it did have a logical existence, and when she moved from one of her little houses to another one in the village where she was, she got a new postman who made the rounds and brought letters to the new neighborhood, and she told the man who was taking down her visions, she said, “Well, I couldn’t explain to you what Job was like, but he’s very much like the new postman.”  So that reality, if you want, and that closeness of the sacred personages—that they are our neighbors—is, of course, something that I tried to suggest very much in my pictures.  More exactly, I didn’t try it, it just happened to be so.  I remember the Rest on the Flight into Egypt; I’ve done many of those, and in some of them, Mary has been washing the diapers of the Child, and Joseph is hanging the diapers to dry, and so on.  Those things are very similar to the simplicity of Anne-Catherine Emmerich when she spoke of the sacred personages.

Through your war experiences, before, you said that you had turned a little bit away from Maurice Denis and his style under your war experiences and you had gone to, come a little bit more under the influence of Lenoir.  And then you just said that Cubism was a means, seemed to be for you a means through which you could express some of your war feelings.  Were there any other artists that you found particularly helpful at this time?

Well, I mean, I always have to go back to the Old Masters because, as I said before, they were closer to me than any of the contemporaries.  There was a sort of court of intelligent people around Picasso, even when he was young—Picasso and Braque, and so on—that were so excited.  Men like Jean Cocteau, for example, that considered Cubism something so sophisticated, so excellent, and they wrote very beautifully about it.  Of course, nowadays we are glad that those things were written, because it was under the element of surprise of something new.  But I never had that feeling.  I never had that feeling about Cubism.  I thought it was a fine thing, it was a nice thing, but there was not at all the sense of the fashionable or fashion speaking of Cubism.  And when I speak of Old Masters, I should say they were not only the Old Masters of the Louvre, but for example, and very strongly so, the Prehispanic manuscripts and codexes and codices of my uncle, Eugène Goupil.  When I was very young, I must have been, I think, perhaps sixteen at the time—I know I was under age to get into the Bibliothèque Nationale and see the books—I wrote a letter to the director of the manuscript section, which was much more exclusive than the Bibliothèque Nationale, and told him I was ready to do a new catalogue of the collection of my uncle, catalogue raisonné, and to let me go and look at the manuscripts.  And the man, well, accepted, agreed, because those things had been the gift of my uncle, and I had written him a letter in which I said if he hadn’t given them to you, they would be now in my hands.  He was so astonished when I came; I wasn’t a big guy, I was a young guy, I looked probably younger than I was at the time, because he had said yes.  So I studied those manuscripts directly, and you know enough about the Aztec drawings and the Aztec conventions of drawing, and so on, both in people and landscapes, to know that those are much more Cubist than anything that the Cubists ever did.  So in a way, Cubism was something that I could compare with things that I was very familiar with and that very few people were familiar with.  Then they have looked at Aztec drawings, but they hadn’t soaked, so to speak, into the style of the Aztecs as I had before.  So my Old Masters are the Louvre, my Old Masters are the Mexican codices, and so on.  And there was no place for surprise and excitement about modern art, as so many people felt surprise and excitement looking at the new forms of art.