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Heyoka
magazine:
Tell me about
your childhood, when you were sent away to a Jesuit
school after the invasion of France in 1946 and
narrowly escaped arrest by the Nazis and then
through contracting tuberculosis you discovered your
talent for art.
JM. When I think of
childhood I think of the streets, the streets and
playing with my friends, and later, that first
beautiful, unattainable girl. I was thirteen at the
outbreak of World War II. I was in high school and
found myself confronted with all the moral and
political issues of the day. My mother was
transferred to the Orne, and I was
enrolled in a high
school run by Jesuits in Sées.
Politics, war, its
constraints and horrors, which fueled our
conversations and occupied our thoughts, did not,
however, prevent us from living out our other
passions. Fascinated by jazz from the age of
fifteen, we would often meet during curfew, which
was around 3 p.m., to listen to this banned yet
delirious, decadent, powerfully swaying music. The
poetry of Lester Young's saxophone, the high
trumpets of Artie Shaw, the singular voices of Count
Basie and Louis Armstrong, the rhythms of Duke
Ellington, Benny Goodman and Old Man River wildly
enlivened these confined evenings. Either boldly or
irresponsibly, we shuttled these subversive 78’s
around from house to house. What might have happened
had we been caught? These jazz-filled escapades
enabled us to blow off steam in the face of the
military occupation affecting our daily lives. These
early lessons in rebellion later extended to the
realm of painting.
One day in April
1943, Oleg and I were coming out of the Etoile
subway station when we were approached by German
soldiers distributing literature announcing the
liberation of Mussolini by the SS. After a brief
glance at the leaflet,my friend hissed at me to
"throw it away." All of a sudden we were brutally
attacked and surrounded by four men in uniform. We
quickly realized that they were not Germans, but
French activists against bolshevism and we instantly
understood the fate that awaited us. Bayonets at our
backs, we were marched down the Champs Elysées under
heavy escort toward the den of Doriot’s fanatics
near the place des Pyramides. We had every reason to
fear the worst as the avenue was swarming with
military. Near the Georges V metro, we decided to
act. The soldiers of the LVF had concluded that it
would be easier to return to Etoile and herd the
prisoners onto a truck, however, their attention was
momentarily diverted by another round of leaflet
distribution and in a split second, we made a run
for it by dashing inside the nearby subway and
jumping onto the first train we saw. We headed back
to the suburbs, our legs quaking
with relief.
At the age of
nineteen, I spent six months at the military
training camp in Valbonne, which entailed long
marches and chronic malnutrition. The meager menu
consisted of half a sardine, 300 gm of bread and a
few potatoes. The conscripts were getting thinner by
the day and care packages of food were rare treats.
I didn’t have any
aptitude for military training so I looked for ways
to avoid it by decorating the recreation room, where
I created Pop Art well ahead of its time. I put up
pictures of pretty girls on the beach to distract
the soldiers and I also designed sets for the army
theater’s classical productions. But in spite of
these circumstantial improvements,I was still
malnourished and soon succumbed to tuberculosis.
I was sent to Percy
Hospital in Clamart, where I met Michel Lassalle, a
strange and fascinating man, who inspired me to
meditate on the meaning of art and shared with me
his acquired knowledge of the subject. Together we
discretely escaped the hospital for a few hours in
the evenings in order to take courses in the
ateliers of Montparnasse. Later my civilian doctor,
Dr. Weiler, did his utmost to cure me while also
encouraging me to paint. He was a collector of
Fauve paintings.
After I left the
hospital, my response to the people who urged me to
pursue a career in painting was that painting wasn’t
even a career and in any event it seemed obsolete in
the Twentieth century. I suppose this is another
example of man’s contradictions and how his
instincts often lead him in illogical directions.
One sets out to build a
square and yet inner reflexes push one to form curves. I
didn’t choose painting, but it gradually took hold of me
until I accepted it.
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HM:
Your relation to Asian
calligraphy. Are you influenced by Zen philosophy?
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JM. Expression, as far as
I am concerned, must come out of spontaneity. This
spontaneity is the fruit of an inner confrontation,
an introspection that leads me
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to the first strokes:
they alone can describe what I intimately feel and I
would like for my art to be their accomplishment.
It is perhaps for
this reason that I feel such an affinity with the
Chinese artists I met in Peking where I had a show
in 1980. What art is as spontaneous and as daring as
Chinese painting? In China, contemporary artists
understand the necessity of immediacy.
This spontaneity is
born out of the imperative need to paint. And during
the work, need and expression gives birth to forms
that deploy themselves in the space of the canvas,
according to absolute necessity. Painting implies a
total commitment of both body and soul.
Those trips organized
by the local French embassies were important in the
evolution of my painting and some see a direct
connection between my gesture on the canvas and
Eastern calligraphy. In 1980, I had the opportunity
of exposing my spontaneous style to the classic
Chinese tradition. In a way it was a success because
I was warmly received, even though in all sincerity,
I had never really studied Chinese calligraphy. I
was seeking a certain refinement in my gesture,the
ability to render in a few strokes of color the
essence of an emotional truth, a sign that divides
the space with the utmost simplicity. I wanted to
discuss the heavy resonance pouring forth from a
purely symbolic creative fantasy. We shared a common
paradigm of rapid transcription and spontaneity. The
Chinese masters all have this vivid and eloquent
approach.
HM:
How has ballet affected your work?
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JM. 1946 my friend Genka
urged me to go to London to visit his brother. I
stayed with Zizi Jeanmaire and Skouratov. At Covent
Garden, I attended performances of the Diaghilev
ballets directed by Colonel de Basile and saw the
sets designed by Rouault, Matisse and Picasso. I
dreamt of a wonderful synthesis between painting,
music and choreography.
One day Rosela
Hightower, a dancer in the Marquis de Cuevas Ballet
asked me to create the sets for some of her
choreography. I was very interested in the proposal,
especially since the sets would be shown at the
Empire Theatre during the ballet’s opening.
For me dance,
choreographic expression, appears as the most acute
gesture, instant and intangible, once given and then
forever captured by the eye; movement, shifting
lines, fixing them in our imagination and in time –
abstract art par excellence. What a fantastic thing
is the communion between the arts – between
painting, music and choreography.
Donald Kuspit wrote:
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“…that painting can
be modeled on dancing – that abstract painting is
dancing in two dimensions: this idea is what gives
Miotte’s gestural painting its innovative edge.
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The musical metaphor
for painting has been familiar since Kandinsky, but
the dance metaphor is new, and demands more of
painting: dance is a matter of the body not only of
sound and sight. That is, it involves all of one’s
psychosomatic being not only two of one’s senses. In
dance one uses all of one’s body, and achieves a new
kind of intimacy with the body as such-a new sense
of its depth. The synesthetic experience that
Kandinsky aimed at was the first intimation of the
psychosomatic substratum – not to say underpinning-
of painting. This is the enigma that is lurking in
its dancing gestures. It is the greatest discovery
of modernist painting, and genuine modernist
painting is the exploration and unfolding of this
inner truth of painting. It was implicit in
Kandinsky’s paintings, and becomes explicit in
Miotte’s paintings. He completes the revolution that
began with Kandinsky. His is the originality of the
revelatory climax, Kandinsky’s the originality of
the initial insight. Miotte’s paintings make it
ecstatically clear that impulsive gesture is the
orgasmic trace of a self-dramaticizing bodiliness
not an aesthetically autonomous phenomenon.”JL
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HM:
What are you currently working on?
JM.
Two challenging orders: a 15 feet
painting for the “Four Seasons” Hotel in Hong Kong and a
sculpture for a public space in Madrid.
And several retrospective exhibitions for
which I create…. completely new paintings, I do not like
retrospectives: Geneva in Switzerland, St. Tropez and
St. Paul-de-Vence in the South of France, the Museo
Fundacio Cristobal Gabarrón in Valladolid, Spain and the
Musée des Beaux Arts of Ostende in Belgium. For my
eightieth birthday the Chelsea Art Museum starts to
prepare an exhibition, perhaps with choreographic
elements, who knows. After all, the American writer
Chester Himes dedicated an opera to me.
contact@chelseaartmuseum.org
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