Seventh Interview, Jean Charlot, October 1, 1970, John Pierre Charlot

Last time you told me the story about how you had got your illumination for the malinche picture.  That’s something I don’t think I ever could have guessed.  Are there any other odd times like that which gave you odd clues, odd things that gave you clues to the way you should paint certain pictures or themes?

Well, I am not conscious, of course, of those things, and it’s only as a sort of a postmortem that I can speak of it.  But in the thing that I am doing now, that series of Hawaiian drummers, I found that the gestures and so on, which I thought were inspired by some of the engravings in the eighteenth-century report of Cook where he has some people, not in Hawai‘i, incidentally, but in the Cook Islands, I think, with drums that I liked to represent and with the gestures I liked to represent, were identical with some of the Aztec drummers that are in some of the codices; some of them in the codices, of course, of my uncle, Eugène Goupil.  And others had been reproduced in the color lithograph facsimile reproductions of the Sahagún,1 which I have also.  So that it’s quite possible that there is a superposition there of the two main themes that I have used, that is, the Mexican Indian and the Hawaiian drummer.  Those things happen, I think, all the time to an artist, and you will find them if you look at the Old Masters: that two or three themes get all mixed up together.  It’s not a question of geography.  I was, myself, interested in recognizing suddenly in the Hawaiian drummer the gesture of the Aztec drummer and in the Hawaiian drum, which I like very much as an object—it can be very beautiful—something very similar to the teponaztli of the Aztec.

It’s odd that you never did Aztec drummers.

No, it isn’t odd because things get bottled up into one and come out at a certain time, sometimes in another way.  I think, of course, of the way that the psychologists and so on tell you that you have received most of the major impressions that we learn as we go through life when you are, I don’t know, two years or four years old.  It certainly is true of the painter that there are many things that get bottled up in him to come out later on.  However, in the codices, of course, which I looked at when I was young, there are many of the actual postures, mostly of the women, that I saw in Mexico.  Again there, that was a double image.  That is, when I was looking at the Mexico of my day and of the actual people doing the house chores, I had at the back of my head the vision of the manuscripts, of the drawings of the ancient Aztec painters, representing similar movements, similar motifs, some five hundred, six hundred years before.  I was very impressed when I was in Yucatán doing the copies of the columns of the Temple of the Warriors—there were perhaps three hundred drawings of bas-reliefs there—to find that one of the signs—which, of course, wasn’t Aztec, it was Mayan—but to illustrate the verb action or the verb accomplishment, there was a hand of a woman, just the wrist and the hand of the woman holding the roller, the stone roller, and rolling the dough on the metate.  It’s, of course, not exactly representational, it is just a hieroglyph, like an Egyptian hieroglyph, but it was such a summing up of so many things that I had stored in my mind and exteriorized in my pictures that it was interesting there to see that in the temple that may have dated of the thirteenth century.  The Aztecs in Mexico in some temples and the Mayans in that particular Temple of the Warriors had come more or less to the same conclusions that I had come to when they think of summing up in one gesture the verb action in terms essential to Indian life.

We’ve often said, you know we’ve sort of talked a little bit about what different themes mean to you.  What does this theme of the Hawaiian drummer mean to you, which is such an important theme in your work here in Hawai‘i?

Well, it’s not exactly the Hawaiian drummer, but it’s the way the fellow is squared in the same shape as his drum.  The one thing that the Hawaiian and the Aztec had in common was, of course, that there were no chairs, there were certainly no high chairs of any kind.  Stools were perhaps the idea of the throne, of the emperor, but people very easily sat on the floor, on the beaten ground, and so that gives them proportions that are nearly unknown for the human body in cultures that use furniture as we understand the term furniture.  And when the Aztec squats, you have the hieroglyphs of the man seated, of the man in the mortuary bundle dead.  The head is really very close to the feet.  He just works himself either in a circle or in a square, and that thing seems to me typical of those cultures that do not know or do not use the chair, or only exceptionally.  And when I saw my first Hawaiian drums at the Bishop Museum—they were incidentally not exhibited, but they were in the storage rooms—I sat myself at one of the drums, and I started drumming on it.  And there’s a very good photograph, incidentally, that you should see of myself as a Hawaiian drummer.  And the feeling, first of being close to the ground while drumming and having myself take the shape, we could say, more or less of the musical instrument, of the drum itself; the oneness with the instrument was something very pleasant to experience.  And later on, of course, I’ve had a number of occasions to see people doing the same thing.  For example, Ka‘upena Wong,2 who gave a demonstration of Hawaiian instruments and who is an excellent drummer, and I had the same feeling of oneness and closeness to the earth, which is something that perhaps is one of the major themes in my presentation of people.  However, the strongest impression of all wasn’t the visual impression of seeing people drumming, but of being myself a drummer.  You can look in the photographs we have; I am sure you will find a particular photograph which was published as the cover of some little leaflet or booklet, I don’t know where or how, but anyhow we have it.3  So as long as you ask what unusual stories there are about themes that come into my pictures, the theme here is not a visual theme as much as a felt theme, a theme that ran through my body while I was squatting and drumming, and maybe that is what gave me the desire to do a series of those drummers.  And again here, the major position remains unchanged, and there is just that change of the smaller elements, for example, the fingers and the hand and the arms that barely move, the position of the head, perhaps.  And of course, again, to come back to another thing that is nonvisual, the Hawaiian language contains most of the epics and most of the chants that were usually accompanied by the drum, and those chants go all the way, of course, from joy to sorrow, from, we could say, national anthem type of things to very subdued love stories.  And all those things, of course, can be represented in the variations of the small movements, while the squaring of the body against the cylinder of the drum remains a constant visual theme.

Again, that’s something that I don’t think I could have guessed.  I know that photo and like it very well.  It is a Hawaiian drummer, the photo, oddly enough.  But let’s talk, I’d like to talk a moment about some of your other themes like the Hawaiian swimmer.  In that article I did on your idea of the body, I was going to say in the last part that the Hawaiian swimmer, if you want, shows the closeness of the atmosphere in Hawai‘i on the skin.  That is, a real, if you want, ultimate contact between man and his natural environment.  Does that ring any bells, or did you have very different ideas about your theme of the Hawaiian Swimmer?

I think that’s good.  But of course, the visual theme of the swimmer is not under water originally but is the rather majestic and fat women who look very much like just plain fat women when they are not in action.  But when they dance the hula, and especially, of course, those who dance the older, more authentic hula, there is an amazing, I wouldn’t say voluptuous, but correlated motion of hands and arms and torso that has the same flow of a sea animal.  I think everybody has that image of the octopus when you see the arms and fingers and so on in motion in the hula, and so I think that that seawise effect of presenting those dance movements in the water really comes from the mental image of the octopus, among others, where the movement is not angular but always established on a circular motion.  There is also one way, a correct way if you want, to represent the nude.  I never can quite understand the nude model unless there is a reason for the nude, and of course a swimmer, especially the Hawaiian swimmer, is in the nude naturally; it is the correct thing to do.  The terrestrial, so to speak, source is represented by the leis which remain on the neck of the swimmers.  Most probably they would get rid of the leis before getting under water.  And there is another thing, which is quite a surprise, and it’s a friend who noticed it for me, and that is that weightlessness of the swimmer—which of course is true, we weigh less under water than out of the water—but which is based really on photographs of especially the first tests of weightlessness in space.  In fact, my major visual image of weightlessness was an early one in which we had put a bunch of mice, I think, in a little box and photographed them when they were weightless in space.  And there was an extraordinary lack of north and south and right and left in that thing which remains to me as a sort of symbol of freedom, if you want—from gravity, of course, but also freedom in general, which is part of my image of the Hawaiian Swimmer.

That’s, again, very interesting.  How about the theme of the man going out to meet the boat, the chief in the double canoe going out to meet the boat?  That’s a very imposing theme that you use at the Kaiser Village4 and also at the bank, the new bank mural.

Well, that isn’t part of my subjective images, I would say; it’s part of the objective, historical research which I like to do for a mural.  I’m really one of the few people who really likes what was called in the seventeenth century the painting of histories.  And in those days, for example, the Academy, when it was founded, the Academy of Fine Arts, considered the painting of histories as being the most important genre in art, and if you wanted to become a member of the Academy, you had to establish a drawing and a painting on a subject that would be what they called a historical subject.  Of course, that could go all the way from Greece and Rome to some unusual things in France, for example, about the history of Gauls and such things, but always a historical theme.  And Poussin, of course, is the greatest of those painters of history and remained very conscious of establishing his subject matter with what historical data he had at hand.  And in the same way in my murals, that was a good occasion for me because I do believe in that idea that painting of histories is a very articulated, a very elaborated genre in painting.  I even believe that it is higher than, let’s say, the painting of portraits, and the painting of portraits is higher than the painting of still lifes.  All those things, of course, nowadays seem rather ridiculous, but I think there is a truth in them.  So in my murals, I’ve had the occasion of doing painting of history in the old-fashioned sense of the term, the seventeenth-century sense of the term, and I’ve been reading then books, historical books, and getting my subjects out of those books.  And one of them which I rather like is the meeting of Kamehameha5 with one of the Russian ambassadors who came here; it was 1817 or so.  And the ambassador and the different people who were on board who wrote their memoirs write of the magnificent double canoe that came and Kamehameha at the, on the bridge between the two canoes and the way the paddlers, because they were not oars but paddles, maneuvered the boat in the grandest style.  And then Kamehameha came on board, and the Russian had prepared some trinkets, literally some trinkets for savages, fit for savages of the Pacific Ocean, and one of those trinkets was a cloak which was, I think it was made of felt, all blue inside and all red outside with ribbons red and blue, satin ribbons red and blue.  So Kamehameha took off his great feather cloak, one of the most beautiful things in the world, and received and put on his shoulders that cloak, and, as the Russian says, he danced with joy seeing such a beautiful thing.  And one of his helpers, of course, folded his feather cloak and took it back to the canoe, and Kamehameha again made a grand exit as he had made a grand entrance and probably threw the cloak in the garbage heap as soon as he wasn’t seen.  I think this is the scene that inspired me, that sort of a nobility of what the explorer considered the savage, who was so polite that he could not show his disdain for whatever trinkets the explorer gave him.  So that the ship in that particular fresco is an English ship—it’s the ship of Cook which is in the Bay of Kealakekua—but it is the same theme, because it has been acted over and over again every time that an explorer, who could be English, who could be Russian, would come and the Hawaiian chieftain would always be so polite, however ridiculous the things that he may receive in exchange for his own gifts—that were, incidentally, feather things of great value and sculptures of great value.  So there is, perhaps there that double take of the civilized savage and the savage explorer, which is an amusing theme, but it allows me to give a dignity, a true dignity, to the theme of the man on his canoe.

I want very much to get back to these objective themes, but what are some more of the subjective themes, as you call them, and how did they arise?

Well, I don’t know, Johnny.  The fact that they are subjective makes it very difficult to analyze the birth of those things.  But I am sure that when I was a child, I had a wet nurse, as a little French boy chanced to have at the time, and it may very well be that my contact as an infant with my nurse’s breast gave me a certain idea of sensuousness, a certain entrance into a knowledge of Greek art, for example, and so on.  I mean, those things are truly subjective and it’s perhaps better not to put them into words.

That is one of your themes, especially in Mexico, is the duenna with the child.  You include this in The Picture Book,6 which is a collection of your themes.  But it’s a theme that dies out in the States and then Hawai‘i.  Is it just because those cultures, those two last cultures, didn’t have duennas and wet nurses, etc.?

Well, I think I grew up a little bit, and I didn’t need the protection that I needed until rather late in life, I would say.  For that picture that you refer to in Picture Book, which I think is a sort of a fat lady leaning over and a little child with his pants off, just standing there, I made a poem.  I made in fact…my first idea for The Picture Book was to make my own text, which were little poems to go with the pictures.  Some day we can speak of that.  But that particular theme had the following little caption or little poem; it said, “Happy child a mother wide protects on every side.”  So that is in words probably the core of that theme of the fat woman that you were speaking about.

In the States, one of your big themes was construction workers.  Why did that interest you so much when you came to New York?

Well, I was really trying to hang on the things I had known before, and the construction workers for me were the parallel in New York of the men in Yucatán that we had who had helped first take away the forest and so on on the ruins of the temples and then helped us put the temples together.  My first construction workers are the Mayan workers, who are carrying those stones and carvings and so on, and putting them on top of the Mayan temple.  And there was no scaffold or very small scaffolds, but their relation there was to the korbel stone7 stairs and the different platforms of the temple, but nevertheless they rose up into the air on a vertical and a diagonal and so on, working.  And of course, in New York with the scaffolds—at the time they were thinking of the Els, I think, in the Second and Sixth Avenue, something like that—I found something similar, of course, with different race and different clothing to the pictures I had already made, and the images I had stored in my mind of the Mayan workers at work on the Mayan temples.  So it’s not the novelty of the subject that interested me, but really the memory of things that I had seen before.

Would you say there was a tie-up between your paintings of black people in the States and your interest in Indians?

No, I wouldn’t say so that way.  I wouldn’t say so that way, but perhaps we could say that I had learned to represent the human skin in a lower value or a darker value, if you want to put it, than the skin of the white race, and I had a very hard time, actually, to accustom me to what we call white people.  I remember that one of my first few…I think it was a boxing match in New York.  It was one of those huge amphitheaters; of course the lights and so on were all artificial, but suddenly I found that enormous sea of people—and you see nearly only the faces in those big crowds—that were piggy-pink.  Everybody somehow was clean, I would say physically cleaner perhaps than a similar Mexican crowd at the time, but that very cleanliness gave to all those so-called white skins a pink that was rather repulsive, one just like the belly of a pig.  And for my own painting purposes, I really had to hurdle over that distaste before I was able to paint white people.  So I must say I do feel better, I have a better time, if you want, painting darker pigmented skins than that of white people.  I left that to Renoir.  Renoir was par excellence the painter of the pink race, we could say, and there is no doubt that I am not.  So when I was in the South, I didn’t choose, of course, especially Negroes, but they were part of the murals I painted at the time.  They were part of that particular mural in that little town of McDonough, where I painted the cotton gin.8  And I felt at ease, I felt very interested by the dark skin of the Negro.  I don’t think I had any, oh, romantic idea or desire to uphold the dark races against the light races, but it was just for my craft.  I had more experience and my eye was attuned to a darker skin than the pink skin of the so-called white man.

But you were fascinated by that New England girl you met as you were going to Mexico and whom you did as Grace in the large painting and then in The Picture Book.9

Yah, that is just because of the contrast.  She was an extraordinarily light-skinned girl, and her blond hair was so blond, it was nearly white.  And I didn’t know anything about the States the first time, or very little.  Anyhow, she said she was from Long Island and that she had a duck farm, and all those things suggested to me nearly a shepherdess of the old times with her sheep and so on.  And there was something rather tender about it all, and I used it as a foil, if you want, for my main theme, which was very different.

It interested me very much what you said about accepting this classical hierarchy of subject matter in painting, which, as you say, isn’t an idea that is used very much anymore.  Do you have any reasons that would back that up?  Back up, if you want, the hierarchy that you adhere to?

Well, I think subject matter is the integral part of painting.  I was interested when I talked, talking with Father Couturier.  We had long conversations about things, and he was a good friend of Léger and Braque and Picasso and so on, and when he was speaking of Braque one day, he said that Braque—who usually did still lifes as we understand them, with glasses and bottles and fruit dishes, a regular Cubist still life—was in a series of still lifes with skulls, with the human skull.  He had a human skull in the studio and organized the still lifes very much in the same way that he had organized the still lifes of bottles and dishes, but with a skull, let’s say, instead of Cézanne’s apple.  And when he was painting those things, he had a certain mood, a certain gravity that was different from his mood when he was painting bottles and dishes.  And he told to Father Couturier, he said, “You know, there is really a greater responsibility on the part of the artist when he paints a skull than when he paints an apple.”  And I think, of course, in sort of an unborn way, that is the whole feeling that was developed in earlier centuries by the Academy.  We have, for example, Chardin, who was considered by all the Academicians as a very great artist, but they wouldn’t accept him on the strength of his still lifes, and he had to turn to portraits for his reception at the Academy, not because he was not considered a great painter, but because he had to accept, or if you want, to harness to his work more important concepts than those of the bottle and a loaf of bread and the raisins, whatever it is that he would put in his still life.  It’s very easy to laugh at those things, but there is a very deep truth about it.  We cannot empty a subject matter of its, well, everyday connotations in relation to life and death, shall we say.  In a way, that Cézanne did very great work in his still lifes, but he also did very great work in representing the peasants in The Card Players; he did classical seventeenth-century historical painting or symbolical painting in his Boy with the Skull.  And the early Cubists pinpointed too much the fact that he had painted still lifes of bottles and glasses and fruit dishes and did not follow his lead in the greater themes, though Cézanne himself did some of the great themes.  For example, his Apotheosis of Delacroix, in his representation of woman and man in symbolical poses and so on, he went much further than his Cubist followers in accepting the importance of the theme.  In a way I am glad that I am a mural painter because it allowed me without pretending to originality, if you want, to fall into the beaten path of the Academicians of the seventeenth century, which seem to me to be the right path.10

Would you place religious art, then, above historical painting?

Well, I did when I was very young, when I was in my teens and we had that Gilde Notre-Dame.  I remember writing an article where I put religious art at the top over historical painting.  I am not sure now, because it isn’t the theme itself but the clarification of the theme that is the point that the craftsman, that the artist must put over; and he is a “mouthpiece,” if you want, for the theme.  It’s not the theme itself, but the way that the theme is put together that counts, and so it’s possible that religious themes proper are not visual themes in the same way that historical themes are visual themes.  That is, to bring the unseen into the realm of the seen is sort of a weakening, if you want, of the theme itself.  It’s possible that the religious experience is not specially visual, that it is something else, that it is something that is not part of the law of the visual arts.  But of course, the painter still has a beautiful role to play in religious art by channeling people through the seen—that is, through his paintings or sculptures or whatever he does for the churches—towards something else.  But that something else is not within the realm of the arts, and the fellow who understands religious art by looking at it and is tempted to go further will have to go further alone.