Sixteenth Interview, Jean Charlot, November 6, 1970, John Pierre Charlot

Could you tell me about the Way of the Cross you did in woodcuts when you were in France?

The Way of the Cross, well, that was started, I think, before I went into the military, and it was finished when I was in Occupation in Germany.  There were rather large planks of wood for woodcuts the way I was doing them, that is, with the bois de fil.  You know, there are the two kinds of wood.  One that you cut with the grain, which is the way the Japanese do their cuts and some of the old Images d’Epinal, and then there is the one that cuts against the grain, which can give a very hard surface that can be worked out with the same engraver’s tools that you work on metal.  But what I wanted to do was bois de fil.  I mentioned before that I was interested in the popular Images d’Epinal, and I mentioned, I think, something about Japanese prints that I had seen in the Camondo Collection in the Louvre, and all those things were on bois de fil, and I wanted to do something similar.  One of the reasons is just that you use a knife, and there is no need of complicated tools.  So the first planks, actually, were cut, I think, in Chaumontel, where one of my uncles had his summer house, and the last ones I brought all the way back from Germany.  They were pear wood, very beautiful wood, actually, and so not only some of the things were—the last stations—were thought of in Germany—where I was in the Occupation of the Rhine, troops with the colonial division—but the wood itself was cut in Germany, on German wood.  I just mention that because I think that I have some of that in the title of the series.  It’s probably the most, I wouldn’t say obvious, but the most, well, monumental, whatever you want to put on it, thing that I got from my admiration of Marcel-Lenoir.  Much of my work, as we could say, has stocky proportions that are a little similar to those that you find in Mexican Prehispanic manuscripts, for example, on stone idols, and so on, quite short in relation to the Greek classical standard proportions for the human body.  But Marcel-Lenoir had very elongated proportions.  These things are the classical flair, that is, they were obviously descended from the Greek and Roman tradition, the classical tradition, but very elongated; something that you could find also, I think, in some of the works of the group of the Nabis.  There was, for them, there was a spirituality in elongation, and in that Way of the Cross, I am working within that world of thought that, we could say, thin people are more spiritual than fat people.  Since then, and I think before that and after that also, I have had other ideas about spirituality, and I went back very quickly to the stocky bodies I had learned of in looking at Mexican antiquities.  But that whole Way of the Cross was done in that elongated esthetic—the fingers, for example, very long and thin, long necks.  There is something in there of the elongations that one finds in some of the, well, so-called baroque Italian painters.  Parmigiano, for example, has wonderful elongations of that type.  As I say, this is nearly a unique thing in my work.  I’m very consistent, I must say, through the whole series.  So I made the drawings so they could be cut with a simple tool, which in that case was just two or three different knives that I had, sharp knives, single blades, and I made, of course—I had no press so that all the proofs I made were done by hand, simply by putting the paper on top of the block, not the block on top of the paper, and rubbing, rubbing with the finger or with the nail.  I have quite a number of those proofs before the blocks were completely cut.  Then, when it was finished—I think it was just around 1920 or so, I think; the thing must have been begun around 1918, the cutting of the blocks and finished around ’20, if I remember—I decided to make a little edition of it.  At the time I was in Chaumontel, which I mentioned before, the house of my uncle, and there was a little printer in the village—it was really a village—and I brought my blocks of wood.  And I think that a more elaborate printing shop would not have accepted to print from those amateur blocks, but that fellow had antiquated presses; they were sort of plate presses, and it was easy enough to print the blocks.  I made an edition, I remember, I think, of fifteen copies of the Way of the Cross, and that was, I think, my first published album, published portfolio of art.  And I still have one or two, I think, of those Ways of the Cross.  They were also among the very first things that I exhibited.  I had them in the annual exhibition of the Arts Décoratifs at the Pavillon de Marsan at the Louvre, and they were exhibited.  I had put some nice sort of velvet type of mats on them.  They looked very good to me, and I was quite crushed when I went there to hear remarks.  I was crushed by the fact that most people passed by without stopping, which you usually do in a very large group exhibition, where there are so many items.  But there was a cleric showing around some of his people, and he passed by there, and they wanted to stop and look at that Way of the Cross, and he said, “No, no.  That’s all right.  Those are just outlines.”  And then he herded them to another room.  And there may be in me—some people, Wolfe, for example, in his life of Rivera,1 says that I have a strain of being anti-clerical.  Maybe there is in me something of that type because of things that happened to me with people, shall we say, in clerical costume.  I remember that that is one of the things, that I remember very distinctly, that didn’t endear the cloth, shall we say, to myself or to myself as an artist.  However, the thing was well received.  I think it was shown the same year that I showed my wood sculptures that also received some medals, awards, and even sales.  So it was a good beginning as far as being a Paris artist showing in Paris exhibitions.  Nowadays when I look at that Way of the Cross, I am a little worried by the, as I said, the elongations.  Not the elongations themselves, but what they signify.  There is a sort of tying up of aristocratic forms, I would say, with spirituality.  And as long as you’ve been working through my old books of poetry and so on, I remember that at the time I was writing those poems, I thought it was wonderful, that I was really a refined fellow, very spiritual, refined fellow on the way to holiness.  Nowadays I am horribly worried by certain ways of thinking that come out in the words in those poems.  I always tie spirituality with, for example, whiteness.  I speak of the white fingers of our Lord and the white this and the white that, and it reminds me of something that I found in Bloy, I think, when he was very annoyed at somebody who said that “he was entranced by the whiteness of the Host.”  And there must have been in me something that disappeared somewhere on the way in living, because nowadays I really think that black, probably, and certainly brown have more of a tie with spirituality than white.  However, I have to be humble.  Those poems and that Way of the Cross were all done in good faith, and I have to accept what I was at the time, even though I have modified my color sense since.

Could you tell me something more of some of the esthetic problems you faced doing that Way of the Cross, say continuity?

Well, it’s a good example of my desire to do things that are nearly encyclopedic, that is, monumental.  It was one of my first, perhaps the first, Way of the Cross I’ve done.  Since then I’ve done quite a number of them.  I’ve just finished something, for example, in bas-relief, and I have done some in fresco, I’ve done some in ceramics, and so on.  But what appeals to me is to have fourteen objects that will make a continuity—in the esthetic approach, of course, but in the spiritual approach also.  And I think a fresco painter has that desire to bring together things into one nef.2  It is, after all, the problem of the architect to take the four walls of the room and make them one.  And in a way, that Way of the Cross, even though it is done of what we could call portable woodcuts—they are not wood engraving, they are woodcuts—is a good example that I would call the monumental approach and that sense of designing a multiplicity to a unity.  As I said, now I feel a little ill at ease with the type of devotional approach of all those kind of long and lean, underfed people.  There is one thing in there, though, that touches me nowadays, and that is my self-portrait.  I think there is the Cross, it’s in the Crucifixion, the Cross, and there is John and Mary and Mary Magdelene, I think, and there is myself, and I’ve represented myself in my full uniform of lieutenant in the Moroccan Division, which I was with at the time, of the Foreign Legion, and I think I hold my heart in my hand and offer it to Christ.  Of course, that ties up with the type of poetry I was doing at the time.  But it is one of the rare self-portraits that I did.  It’s a good one.  I think the year would be 1920, and I think I made little prints, separating them from their context, of the thing as a self-portrait.

Aside from L’Amitié and this Way of the Cross, what were your other major artistic works before you went to Mexico?

Well, the wood carvings.  Those were woodcuts, but I made also sculptures, wood carvings, that were done directly in blocks of wood, and I used again, simply, chisel and hammer.  And of course, I had gone to Brittany, and in Brittany I was impressed by the what we would call now the santos in relation to New Mexico, the devotional stone carvings and wood carvings that you find in the little Brittany churches, which correspond again to the Images d’Epinal, but this time in three dimensions.  Incidentally, it’s the same type of thing that started Gauguin in his search for the primitive or more exactly in making coincide his remembrance of Peruvian primitiveness of his ancestors—he had Peruvian blood, Inca blood—and things he could find closer to Paris.  Some of the Gauguin Brittany pictures incorporate totally, without really much change, much modification, with a great humility, some of the elements of the Breton folk sculptors.  There is one, for example, of a stone Calvary with some Breton women kneeling or sitting by the stone Calvary, which is a copy of a stone Calvary.  And it goes much further in the early Gauguins towards the primitive masks and so on that he was to paint later in Tahiti than anything he had done up to then.  There is, of course, the famous Yellow Christ,3 which is a transposition with minimum changes of one of those Crucifixes in one of the country churches of Brittany.  I had, myself, a similar contact, and I would say similar reaction, and it is a parallel with Gauguin.  I had known before the Prehispanic primitive forms, and I recognize in the stone sculpture, wood sculptures of the wood and stone carvers of Brittany, something similar and a marvelous, humble religiosity, I would say, without pride.  So maybe even though I was doing at the same time the Way of the Cross and the wood sculptures, the wood sculptures are nearly something to atone for that elongation that still bothers me today in the Way of the Cross, in the woodcuts, and they were much closer to the Breton folk sculpture.  I didn’t know, really, like all artists, I didn’t know what I was doing at the time.  This is sort of a hindsight with which I am speaking of those things.  But I made a panel which represented the Visitation—Mary and her cousin Elizabeth and the dog barking and so on, so forth.  And when I finished that panel and I painted it and so on, I decided to bring it to Dom Besse.4  Dom Besse was at the time a very famous fellow in the revival of liturgical art.  He was a Benedictine, and he was in one of the Paris Benedictine, well, shall we say monasteries, and I wanted to show him that thing, so I went there.  I had no letter of introduction.  There was no phone at the time that people would use as a rule.  So I went there.  I saw the janitor and said, “I want to see Dom Besse.”  And I had my package, which was a little heavy: that panel.  Well, the janitor was a nice guy.  He had a family.  He had his wife and children.  He said, “Well, Dom Besse…Do you have a date?” and so on.  “It looks very important, very difficult to see him.  He’s not here now.”  So I said, “Well, I’ll wait.”  And I waited a long time.  I think a few hours.  To while away the time, of course, I had a sketchbook, and I made portraits of the janitor’s family.  So they liked me fine.  So when Dom Besse came in, I recognized him.  At the time his portrait was in many Catholic magazines and so on.  He said, “Are there any news for me here?”  So he answered, “Well, there’s this little fellow here who has been waiting for you for hours.”  Well, he wasn’t too happy.  He suggested to the janitor that he should not let people in who didn’t have prearranged dates.  But the janitor said, “Well, he’s a nice fellow,” and so on.  He said, “Well, I’ll see him.”  So he went into his office.  I brought my little sculpture, and I unwrapped it.  I remember the paper made a lot of noise, and it seemed so long unwrapping, taking the strings off, and I showed it to him.  And he said, “Oh well, I see that you are a Breton.  You just arrived in Paris.  Well, it’s all right, it’s all right.  I think you have a nice innocence and so on, just go on doing what you are doing.”  That was the words of wisdom of Dom Besse.  I was, of course, too awed by him to tell him I wasn’t really a Breton.  But I was rather pleased, and I understood that he was in a way rather pleased, so of course, he thought I was, so to speak, one of the folks out of the masses.  But it shows, really, that there was a genuine quality that I had learned from the Breton folk artists, and for me it placed my sculpture in a certain perspective which I hadn’t had up to then.

The panels that Tante Odette has, didn’t she send you another bas-relief that she found, that she cut into four pieces to send?

No, I don’t remember that, but she found an old photograph.  What she has are the wings of the angels that were to be on both sides of an altar piece.  And as I said, I sold all the sculptures I made to a collector in Paris, but he didn’t need the wings, so I kept the wings.  Then later on that fellow very nicely invited me, and I went to see him.  There was a rather grand Paris apartment, and my things looked, I must say, very well.  He had a collection of other modern people, and it made me feel a little bit like a professional, going to visit with somebody who had paid good money for my work.  Unhappily I don’t have the name of the man, otherwise I would have liked very much to ask a loan of those sculptures for my retrospectives, both the one I had here at the Academy and the one I had in Mexico.5

Tell me about meeting Cocteau.6

No, well, I didn’t meet Cocteau, actually.  Cocteau was having a magazine.  It was in the war, and I must have been sixteen at the time, early in the war.  And he had a magazine in which he was writing, making drawings for it, and asking a few of his friends to work in it.  He had a Nijinski drawing, by the dancer Nijinski, which I liked very much.   And at the time I was really looking for a job, so I decided to bring some of my drawings to Cocteau.  I knew a young man who was a friend of Cocteau, and there was no introduction, but he made it possible for me to go and ring the bell.  And Cocteau had a superb butler, who looked like a movie-type butler.  Cocteau was very wealthy.  And so the man received me, and I said I wanted to show my work to Mr. Cocteau, and he said, “Well, I doubt very much Mr. Cocteau will see you, but leave your drawings and so on and come back.”  (I think the next day.)  So the next day I decided to wait and go there not too early.  I think it was ten thirty, eleven, in the morning when I went there.  That same butler was rather horrified and said, “Well, Mr. Cocteau is asleep.”  So, I had there the portfolio of drawings.  They obviously had not been opened.  And there was a rather whining voice from Cocteau in his bedroom, saying, “What is it?”  He had heard the noise, the disturbance, so the butler went and talked with him, and he came back and said, “Well, Mr. Cocteau cannot receive you.”  Then he gave me the portfolio, and obviously sort of liked me even though he didn’t depart from his butlerish ways, and he said, “May I give you advice?”  I said, “Oh, yes, please give me advice.”  He said, “Have you read Balzac?”  And I was ashamed I hadn’t read Balzac or things of Balzac he would know about, The Physiologie of this and that, so I said, “No, I haven’t read Balzac.”  “Well, remember: To make money, you have to have money.  To be successful, you have to have money.”  Then he opened the door and let me out.  That was the end of my relationship with Cocteau.

Tell me about your trip to Brittany.  When did that happen and what was it like?  Were you with people?  Where were you staying?

Well, I’m very vague about it.  I didn’t have my mother with me.  I think we took a vacation, or I took a vacation from our difficulties.  My father was sick at the time, and I’d had a hard time with different things, and so I think I was given a few weeks to be in a way by myself.  There was a little group of us in an hotel in, I think it was Plougastel.  And even though it was a place where tourists went, it couldn’t have been very different from the times where Gauguin was there in a little pension.  It was more a pension than an hotel.  And I went around just making little oil paintings of things, and I should have somewhere a sketchbook of my drawings.  As I said, I was roaming around the folk churches, making studies and sometimes sketching some of the folk sculpture, and so on.  The Bretons of the time were still all in their Breton costumes.  A lot of black or blue-black velvet, the women with their white coifs.  It was a very lovely experience, and it sandwiched in my life between the declaration of the war and a little later on my going to the wars, of course.  And I really can’t remember why I was there.  I just know that I was there.

Did you ever get any prizes in school?

Any prizes in school?  Well, I…sometimes I was better in some things than in others.  I think I was good in something like French composition for a while.

But you never got any prizes like firsts?

No, I don’t think there was any special honors.  I was good in some things and bad in others.  That’s all.  I wasn’t very good in drawing.  I still have some drawings here that have been corrected by my teacher to correspond to some Cs and at times to some Bs.  They were not really very good, now that I look at them.

Where were you at the front during the war?  I know that you did participate in a number of battles.

Well, they were not battles like sort of a clash, body to body, with swords or shooting people when you see the white of their eyes.  I was in the field artillery, and we were facing field artillery of the Germans, mostly in the Oise in a sort of inglorious moment of the war.  I saw more what we could call combat condition rather than battles.  And we shoot the guys, and they shoot us.  And I remember at my arrival at the front, there was a lot of noise going on, and I asked one of my new soldier friends, I said, “Well, are they coming or going,” speaking of the obus that were streaking the air.  And he sort of laughed at me and said, “They are coming.”  But I couldn’t gather much fear of anything because I didn’t understand, so to speak, the rules of the game.  There was some aerial reconnaissance over us.  They were not planes; they were balloons, and those balloons as a rule were ours simply to raise the horizon so that we could correct the shooting of our field artillery by seeing further back.  It was still something where you used, instead of computers, well, your brain, your hands, and your eyes.  And sometimes there were some little, I think they were Messerschmitts, some little planes, German planes, that would come and pop their little bombs on those balloons, hoping to make them explode or some such thing, which at times happened, too.  But there was the most dangerous thing, which hasn’t been used or known in the Second World War, was gas.  And you had to be pretty careful using gas because of the wind.  The wind didn’t make any difference,7 and quite a lot of people died of it.

EDITOR: The recording tape ran out, so the following is based on notes taken at the time.

People died of gas.  It was heavy and clung to the ground.  One day he made a bad joke.  They were in sort of a camp, a ruined village.  When the attack was strong. the officers ran to a wine cave, where they thought they would be in less danger than the men outside.  Charlot didn’t like it, and he shouted down the stairs at the gold braid of the officers, “Gas!”  It made them all sick.  There was little to see—he didn’t see the enemy.  Some died from obus and gas.  It was a bad death: swelled, difficult breathing.  The masks were primitive.  Remember that gas smelled good.  If you were sleeping, you awakened feeling good.  You had to remember to put on your mask or die.