Catalogue of l’Ecole nationale des Arts Décoratifs, January,1997, “The Need for Drawing” An interview with Charles Auffret by René Lesné.

René Lesné: There’s a single question at the center of our preoccupations. In the context of an educational reorganization, drawing is defined as constituting the backbone of our training. What does this backbone consist of for you?

Charles Auffret: In an art school, drawing is the framework, the soul of an artistic education. It serves the painter, the sculptor, the designer, the architect, the theater director, and the decorator all equally. It is absolutely essential. It’s a kind of mental gymnastics. One must learn to search. One must educate the eye. A man, an artist who penetrates into the realm of art, can take liberties later, but he must have a precise eye, an exact eye, just as a musician must have a precise ear, an exact ear; if not, he will not be able to establish a relationship between himself and his work; he will not find the harmony. The first step, I think, is to put students in front of nature, to teach them to see. Precise seeing is very rare. We know scientific researchers who are never without their sketchbooks. Drawing helps them to better observe and better understand. “You must always say what you see. Above all, and it’s more difficult, you must always see what you see.” (Ch. Péguy)

In relation to this initial difficulty, to this struggle with the motif, is there a particular order that the teaching must follow? Are there things that you absolutely must do in order to judge whether or not you’ve achieved a precise eye?

Start with simple exercises. Work patiently and simply with the spirit of an apprentice. Do not fear the compass or the plumb line. With a model, which is the presence of life, many exercises and observations are possible. You have to learn the art of working.

What you’re saying there makes me think of traditional training in which learning is based on gradually taking on more difficult things. And in particular, it includes copying drawings in order to understand them.

It’s common sense to approach difficulties gradually. To learn and discover by studying the masters who, through their continued relevance, remain contemporaries—the great educators, such as François Desvosges and Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who in turn trained masters such as François Rude, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Auguste Rodin, and Jules Dalou, and closer to our time, Lucien Schnegg and Robert Wlérick; these masters knew how to transmit a science, a consciousness, and a know-how that contribute to the glory of French art, not to mention Gustave Moreau and so many others.

For an initial exercise, Lecoq de Boisbaudran, suggests drawing a vertical line that the student must reproduce identically. Afterward, he complicates the figures and then goes on to volumes and then soon after to the human figure, the live model. Does this series seem to be useful to you?

The pedagogical method of confronting difficulties progressively has to be practiced from early youth. Too many students have an inert eye; they must be taught to see, understand, and remember. 

This method is not much appreciated today. The exercises are perhaps a bit too dry and too constrained.

No, they’re not too dry—it’s up to the educator to teach them how to discover the intelligence of the heart and mind in order to open up the world. Constraints—aren’t they what fortifies liberty? The world of drawing is a world of liberty, the liberty to think, to see, the liberty to express, the liberty to live. One sees through one’s gaze. Every drawing is authentic and personal. The personality isn’t fabricated; you have it, and you cultivate it. Your research is naturally guided by your instinct and your consideration. You must learn to seek.

Exercises with plasters, for instance, are no longer used, and in relation to that, a contemporary painter, Avidgor Arikha has said that since the 17th century, exercises based on plasters have not been properly understood.

It is enriching to consider antique statuary, the works of the great thinkers. Art is simplicity. A beautiful mold after an antique places you, above all, before a beautiful artisanal work. It puts you in front of a beauty reproduced by the plaster, a marvelous material that unveils the play of light. Drawing facilitates the study, the discovery by formal exercises, which are valuable if the word form is understood in its original sense, which is to say, that which has taken form, that which is formed, which has completed its development. The study of the antique develops the sense of space, the sense of surface, the sense of light. In the archives of the Ensad, you have many wonderful studies done by students named Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, and Alphonse Legros, which are beautiful examples.

To see forms is not to reduce them to envelopes, but to see in the heart of a form, points situated at a certain distance in space?

A form for the form alone has no interest. It’s the spirit of the form that counts. You must make it live in space and in good relationships. See beyond the reality and exalt the idea. You have to learn to construct it, to situate it, to place it harmoniously in space by seeking out its essential points, its constituent points, its strong points. You must develop a sense of its thickness, its depth, and its volume. Whether you’re drawing a landscape or a living model, it’s not a question of the truth of the line; it’s a question of proportion, light, space, and value. Often the line inhibits the expression because it hems it in. All the great painters have had a great notion of space, whether it was Titian or Cézanne, Mantegna or Degas, Velasquez or Matisse, Phidias (5th century BCE) or Germaine Richier, Antoine Coysevox or Jane Poupelet, or even Charles Malfray. All had a sense of depth. Since the most distant times, sculpture and painting have lived as brothers. The abstract formulation of sculpture has always been an important support for painting, and it’s still true today.

I’m going to return to the question about the line that I raised earlier, in order to come back to what you said about the situation of drawing today—what role does the live model play for you?

By studying the live model, all problems can be addressed at a level appropriate to the aptitudes and knowledge of each student—harmony, order, balance, precarity, value, coloring, orientation, planes, shadow and light, grace, force, and composition. You need to find the character in order to organize the whole composition … Search, choose, sacrifice … Each model’s character makes you approach all these questions in a different way … It’s life; it moves. I really do think that the live model brings it all together. First, life, and then great propositions; the live model is placed in space, it takes on light, it takes on cadences, rhythms, unique proportions, depending on the model. Each one has its character, and you learn to see the differences among them. In short, it’s always the same and never identical; it’s life.

Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran wrote regarding the nude: “The human figure sums up all possible forms, all the problems of drawing.”

All artists recognize the discoveries and the enrichments offered by the study of drawing. All are interested in working from a model, be they architects, graphic artists, designers, etc.—all artistic researchers become enriched by the study of nature: “Drawing includes everything except color.” (Ingres)

The figure is a volume in space. But for an architect, who has to manage voids as well as volumes, doesn’t the nude inhibit a full grasp of the void?

I prefer the word space to the word void because a void, by definition, contains nothing. To the architect, the nude offers a domain of study and reflection. Its masses in their dynamics, organization, balance, relations, characters, axes, counterweights … offer the architect a vast region of valuable research, analysis, observation, and study. The sense of spaces and their animation by light and shadow, the sense of large planes in their relationships and oppositions. He comes into contact with abstraction through combinations created by logic and sincerity. With the figure, if you have a hand on a hip, you have to know how to proportion that space; it has to be done so that it participates in the unity of the figure as a whole.

And as for landscape, you’ve told me: “Landscape is something that you can only take on once you’ve acquired a certain body of knowledge.”

I simply meant that a beginner will be in a better position intellectually when confronting a landscape if he has based his artistic research on the model. So much knowledge is needed, so many decisions have to be made, in order to address a scene that’s not posing. It’s a model in motion. You have to see the whole, the cadence, the architecture; you have to make choices, and the difficulty is to make these choices in relation to the whole.

To draw is to seek the simplest and the most expressive form of what you want to say, that which speaks best to the heart and the intelligence. You need a certain knowledge of constructed abstraction and emotion.

“Exactitude is not the truth,” said Matisse.

Matisse reaffirms what all the masters have affirmed: inexpressive minutia in execution is the refuge of the ignorant. The finish is nothing. It’s the emotion of the soul that goes straight to the soul that counts. An artist is a thinker who carries a world within him. “Exactitude is not the truth.”

Degas returned to the question when he said, “The drawing is not the form; it is the way to see the form.”

That’s absolutely true. Without meaning, the work has no beauty. It has to be expressed. Nature supplies the elements, and then disappears like all documentation after the construction of the work, like the dictionary disappears after a thing is written.

The person drawing must have a firm intention in relation to the model.

Yes, a design—a determination in its conception.

This intention and this vision must, in some way, be challenged when confronted with the model. 

From a certain angle, the model is the enemy. You must not let it lead you astray. To follow is to disappear. It’s the artist who decides. We have to consult our instincts, our reflections, our knowledge. You have to draw with the inner eye. From the moment that you’re no longer drawing with the inner eye, with the vision that is yours alone, the model carries you away, and you’re off-track. There’s nothing you can do, you’re stuck, and you can’t work anymore.

But how do you avoid being carried away by the model?  

It’s an attitude of domination in the sense of mastery. The man is behind the retina, and it’s the idea that leads. The decision is made by your regard, by that way of seeing that is yours alone.

The model is there to refresh your seeing in relation to this thought, which is always in motion?

It aids the development of vision and perception.

Matisse said: “I’ve always considered drawing not as the exercise of a particular skill, but above all as a way of expressing intimate feelings and describing states of the soul, ways simplified to foster greater spontaneity and simplicity, which connect with the viewer’s mind without being overly weighty.”

We must be suspicious of talent that is not the reflection of noble sentiments. To attain his desired end, the artist must see only what he wants to see, only what he chooses. To simplify in order the strike the mind of the viewer—that’s drawing.

In the search for natural poses, some advocate capturing the model in motion, rather than in a static pose. Rodin let his models move freely around the studio in order to capture more natural attitudes.

That method requires all your concentration. Through a powerful abstraction, it allows you to extract the synthesis and the character of the artistic proposition that nature offers you. Living abstraction distinguishes art from the academic or its alter ego, the anti-academic. As Flaubert put it, “What does it really mean, reality? Some see black, others see blue, and most see idiotically. Nothing could be less natural than Michelangelo, and nothing stronger! The concern for external truth denotes our contemporary baseness.”

It's very difficult to draw a model in motion. You notice a lot of problems among the students.

And yet the traps are perhaps even more numerous with a pose that seems static, and the possibilities are greater. I’ll mention Hera of Samos as proof of that.

The drawing must, therefore, be able to be interrupted at any moment; it must be the vision of the entirety?

Yes. You have to face it head on and conceive it before executing it. You have to know how to draw on the spot. You have to know how to draw from the head.

Did you develop a practice of sketching?

The sketch book is the secret garden; it reflects your world, your worries, your queries, your discoveries. You’re there with your defects, your infirmities, your qualities. It’s your heart laid bare. It’s your seismometer in which are inscribed your inner tremors. All artists have their sketch books.

What is the importance of various materials in drawing?

Materials can be grouped according to the ideas that they’re trying to express. They evolve with vision and research. Everything that is useless must be eliminated, and a beginner, when he’s just starting, doesn’t know what is useless because his sense of it isn’t clear, and so he doesn’t really have a notion of uselessness. A beginner adds more and more until it’s like being in a virgin forest—you can’t understand anything, and you’re suffocated.

Rodin said that you have to get to a “bold summary.”

Auguste Rodin proved that with his Balzac, which was the result of profound reflection, audacious research, and colossal and courageous decisions and sacrifices. It’s a “bold summary” that has the force of a sketch and the clarity of an outline. It’s not a work that’s easy to approach.

We’ve talked a lot about the eye and the mind, but you haven’t said much about the gestures of the hand.

“Man is intelligent because he has hands.” That was written by Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher, 500 to 428 BCE, a friend of Pericles and Phidias.

The line, doesn’t it have its own quality of expression?

The line is the writing.

Matisse said, “The path that my pencil makes on a sheet of paper has, in part, something analogous to the gesture of a man who gropes his way through darkness. I mean that I don’t know my route in advance; I am driven rather than driving.”

Instinct, reflection, and imagination all take part in the transcription. Execution requires that you abandon yourself to improvisation. The hand travels at the same time as the eye discovers and the thought constructs. The eye and the hand are at the service of the mind.

This firmness of intention and extreme availability are very important.

To draw is to decide. It’s like a boxer in a ring—he turns, and he analyses in order to understand and to find an opening. You move forward, move forward, and then bam! You’re incisive.

Ingres advised Degas when he was just beginning, “Make lines, lots and lots of lines, whether from memory or from nature.” How do you understand that statement?

Ingres used the word line and not the word stroke. The line senses invention, freedom, initiative, harmony, importance, direction, the observation of nature or imagination, and the dream in memory. “Make lines” to see, understand, and remember.

Should we increase the number of modes of drawing?

That would make sense. Depending on the immediate goal, the drawing will be different, whether you note, search, project, or document. Drawing is research. It can be like a gunshot, precise and rapid, or it can convey a slowly developed reflection. It can, through its light and matter, bring the artist to a choice of materials …

Are some tools more appropriate—for instance, does the pencil hold a privileged position?

No, no, use whatever tool works for you.

In order to find the best tool, shouldn’t an artist try several—a pencil one day, charcoal another, and then also paint …

From instinct and by necessity, you seek out the best tool. Complicity with and knowledge of the tool are wonderful augmentations; it’s personal.

Are you more sensitive to some tools than others? I see that you have many books on Rembrandt. Rembrandt’s drawings are practically scratches, not at all like Fantin-Latour’s, for example …

Rembrandt is an admirable example. His swift point, his pen, were part of his body. Incisive, they reflect his clear, lightning intelligence. The tool participates. A very beautiful example. In art, an example is better than a lesson.

It’s a matter of the universe of one’s own sensibilities. With a drawing by Rembrandt, so spirited, so agitated, we know that we’re not in the same universe as that of a red chalk drawing by Lorrain …

You’re so right. Each master has his own universe, and everything is a function of that universe. True beauty is always a singularity, and the singularity of the tool contributes to it.

Modeling dominates your sculpture.

Yes, it suits me, but I also like carving very much. With modeling, the sculpture develops like a fruit. The material may seem easy, but don’t be fooled. With stone, the sculpture is in the block; you must remove what’s hiding it. But who cares about the material! That’s not where the wealth of the work lies.

Rodin had two references for his sculpture, Greek sculpture and Renaissance sculpture. He discovered that the sculpture of the Renaissance differed in the composition of its planes.

The plane is the most important thing. Without great planes, a sculpture has no force. The opposition of planes creates a power dynamic among the masses. It’s a beautiful example of the sculptor’s thought.

How is drawing involved in sculpture?

It sets the scene; you need to draw from every angle. Seek out the form that you want to translate. Establish the relationships of mass and distance. Affirm the directions. Construct, build with order, measure, and precision. It’s a calculation, an exact mathematical operation that includes beauty. At every instant, follow the thought that leads you.

Let’s go back to something you said a moment ago. You frequently say that you must conceive of the drawing as a whole. That makes me think of the statement attributed to Cézanne regarding his relationship to the scene. Speaking of Mount Sainte-Victoire, he said, “There must not be a single thread loose, no gaps through which emotion, light, the truth can escape. Understand, I’m leading my entire canvas at once, all together.”
It seems to me that that sums up what you said about grasping the work as a whole, but isn’t he also saying a little bit different in so far as he engages the body as a participant in the landscape. As he made that statement, Cézanne, as he was talking, brought his two hands together and crossed his fingers, saying, “That’s how, between the eye and the scene, things must come together.” What do you think about that?

A whole is not a heap; it’s neither compressed, nor exploded, nor piled up. Cézanne saw space as a matter of planes and volumes. He had a great sense of form. In that space, light runs. The organized space becomes a construction, and no part of it can be suppressed. The form that appears is not reality but the truth of Cézanne, who is one with his scene. The great difficulty for an artist is to transcribe what he feels. He cannot say it by copying it. So, he becomes one with it. Cézanne’s relationship to the landscape is the framework of his sensation and at the same time the energy that will bring him everything he needs to construct his work. Cézanne was so scrupulous that went to any length to get the right values, the right light, and the right color from the first.

How do you interpret the extreme variety of drawing in concept and in form?

A work of art is an individual problem borne by a society. Eras get the artists than they deserve. Our era has been put to the test. Today, art is venturing deeply into the life of abstraction, breaking, compressing, accumulating, and diverting the object from its necessity to give it aesthetic virtues, distancing it from figurative themes. We are in a world of willful expression that is, I think, far from what we were talking about. Idea dominates. Research has become an end in itself. We often find ourselves in a mythographic world, which is to say, a construction of the spirit that’s not resting on reality.

Isn’t the loss of observational drawing at the root of what you’re saying?

Yes, no doubt—or perhaps it’s the inverse.

For you, drawing, as you most deeply feel it, is above all defined as based on a model, on a scene.

It’s based on a source of emotion.

Are we not in an era in which beauty has been replaced by the desire for novelty?

Novelty is as old as the world. The earth turns. Life is an eternal re-beginning. Modern art doesn’t date from today. All ages have had their own versions. The new is within us, and we discover it through work that both nourishes and transforms, through expanding perception. Vision intensifies. We perceive with increasing lucidity and intelligence the more we search. In the beginning, we only glimpsed, and our vision was superficial. Our discoveries feed our appreciation.

For you, the absolute quest for originality has the opposite effect on art.

Yes. If we don’t take the word in the sense of authenticity or sincerity. Originality is oddity, eccentricity, quirkiness, appearance, and coquetry. It’s Latin root, the verb “oriri” means “to leap out of.” It’s the opposite of art, which is interiority.

Must the artist keep himself apart?

No, on the contrary, he must wallow in life, but he has to find his own way of living, has to find his solitude, his distance in order to pursue his reflections.

What can you teach when you’re teaching drawing?

To tell the truth, the term teach bothers me. I feel I’m more like a coach who tries to help each person find and develop his or her own capabilities, avoiding a systematic approach. Each person has to find his own gold.

You have to listen, be attentive to each personality.

Yes, listen actively.

Does it require a lot of availability and attention?

It requires a lot of openness and attention. Everything takes a long time for a blind person who thinks he sees. One day, life clears up. The student progresses. You carry him. You support him. You guide him. It’s a real struggle. You’re there as a shoulder to lean on, to give advice … It’s a series of steps forward and then back. There is always another barrier to cross.

Yes, but they’re learning and don’t always have the means to surmount the barriers …

Educating young talent is a sort of paternity with heavy responsibilities. They learn to walk and end up running, if all goes well. Through drawing, they discover an inner wealth and realize their own means and possibilities.

In short, what makes a good drawing?

It’s one that touches me—by what it expresses and by its way of saying it.

You must be suspicious of certainties.

Doubt is inherent to love. Every artist knows doubt, but happily, there is also conviction.

You could be characterized as a great classic—can we say that?

Free and independent, carried along by my time, I live in admiration of life. I don’t believe in theories. My joy comes from searching, discovering. I interrogate nature and the masters. From the Venus of Willendorf to Charles Despiau (1874-1946) and Giacometti (1901-1966); with them, I feel at ease. The dead are not absent; their intimacy comforts me; they respond to my questions and support me. They are irreplaceable. The life of the street brings me “the rest.” “The apple trees bear apples,” Aristide Maillol used to say; that’s no doubt classic.