JEAN MIOTTE

 

 

John LeKay.  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.

 

Jean Miotte.  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.

JL. Your relation to Asian calligraphy. Are you influenced by Zen philosophy?

 

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

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.

JL.  How has ballet affected your work?

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:

“…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.

 

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

 

JL. 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