“Surrealist Despite Myself, Simply”

Hervé Télémaque: Both my wife and I didn’t see it as a particularly courageous act to leave the U.S. permanently for France. She had a major job at the New York Public Library, and I was just starting a modest career—nothing unusual. I had exhibited in New Haven, at Yale University, and a few other places. So, it was a big decision. Since you are mixed-race, I can share a small but significant story with you. We lived in Hoboken, which was a small German town, not very important back then—though today, it’s become quite chic. I had a little studio above a pharmacy, and the pharmacist, a Jewish woman, was very kind. One day, we went to the lakes together, and she seriously asked my wife—who is also mixed-race, but lighter skin than you—“Do you really love him?”

Carine Harmand: Were you there when she asked this?

Hervé Télémaque: Yes, I was there. She was actually being quite bold and honest. She didn’t personally have an issue with it—it was a problem for others. She was just articulating the general psychology of the society we lived in. Being Jewish, she was franker than a typical WASP. There was no hypocrisy between us—we vacationed together by the lakes, and we had no issues.

Carine Harmand: Did that hurt you?

Hervé Télémaque: Not really … but it gives you an idea of the small problems we faced daily. It was one detail among many others. For example, I dreamed of finding a bigger studio, but it was impossible to find a place downtown, in SoHo, or anywhere like that—not even a rundown apartment. I wasn’t asking for anything fancy, just a tiny, rundown space like any artist. But even those weren’t available to me.

Carine Harmand: When you were in New York, was there an African American art movement, following in the footsteps of the Harlem Renaissance?

Hervé Télémaque: I didn’t even know about Jacob Lawrence at the time. I only learned about Black American art later, from France. Back then, people didn’t talk about things like that. There was only Abstract Expressionism, dominated by major New York painters, and that was it. Americans were also very rigid in their thinking—very one-way.

Well, there was one small exception: MoMA had a long-standing policy of collecting Haitian naïve artists. They had some works in their collection long before my time. But this was part of their imperialistic approach—they liked to pretend to care about the entire world, showing interest in small, marginal countries like Haiti. There were a lot of Americans in Port-au-Prince, including intellectuals. For instance, Martha Graham, the great American dancer, spent time there. Maya Deren, whom I talk about a lot, was a filmmaker who made several films about Haiti.

Carine Harmand: What do you say about Maya Deren?

Hervé Télémaque: She was a friend of mine during my last two years in New York. I saw her very often. She was Russian-Jewish, and everything in her house revolved around a bottle of vodka—whether it was 10 AM or 10 PM. She was very generous, and I met her because she was interested in Haitian Vodou. In the U.S., she was the leading expert on Haitian Vodou. She wrote two major books on Vodou, but most importantly, she made a film called The Living Gods of Haiti. She believed that the only important thing in Haiti was Vodou—though I don’t entirely share that view. And I think she must have been initiated. She never admitted it, but I believe she was. She made films of great aesthetic beauty. I was her actor, too—at the time, I was younger and more presentable, so she used me a lot. She helped me enormously—she was the one who helped me earn money for the first time in my life. She would call the UN whenever they needed a young Haitian to play a role in a film, and that was me. She had considerable influence. She was friends with Marlon Brando and people like that.

And I always say, whenever people ask me about her, that she was the one who taught me to distance myself from the Haitian bourgeoisie, which she hated—just as I did, by the way. We shared a deep dislike for the Haitian bourgeoisie. She allowed me to take an intellectual distance from my relatively conventional background. After all, my father was a doctor…

Her hatred of the bourgeoisie was a great influence on me. Along with the vodka.

I come from the bourgeoisie, even though there are artists in my family. My uncle, Carl Brouard, was a great Haitian poet, a man who helped shape Haitian Négritude… He was my uncle. And I had an aunt who was a pianist, a more distinguished one.

Carine Harmand: So did you know a lot of poets? Did you grow up surrounded by poetry?

Hervé Télémaque: Not really. I left for the U.S. around the age of 20 to study. I took care of my uncle, because he was a serious alcoholic. My mother bought me a little Opel [a German-made car] so I could go pick up my uncle when he was passed out on the street or in the gutter for a week. That was my job. So, I came to know poetry in that way.

But I did meet Magloire Saint-Aude and a few other great poets. And, above all, one of the most important figures for Haitians, Jean Price-Mars—the great Haitian thinker of Négritude, who emphasized Haiti’s connection to Africa. He was a friend of my mother’s, so I was definitely exposed to an educated, highly intellectual environment.

Carine Harmand: And while in New York, you also delved into psychoanalysis with Georges Devereux.

Hervé Télémaque: For three years, in French. He was Hungarian-Jewish, with a French cultural background. And my analysis with him was both serious and not serious, because we became very close friends. At its core, my surrealist period—the Éclaireurs series—is deeply connected to the analysis he initiated in New York.

You could say that this surrealist period in 1962, after arriving in Paris in 1961, was triggered by that analysis—that I was surrealist for two years, and that Georges Devereux played a major role in that. He himself wasn’t interested in painting; he was more of a musician—he played the piano all the time. When I arrived, I would have to interrupt his practice sessions. He didn’t really like painting, he didn’t really understand it, but still, he was a decisive figure in my life.

He’s considered the founder of ethnopsychiatry, the idea that there is no proper psychiatry without ethnology. He knew Jean Price-Mars’ son, Louis Mars, who was the great Haitian psychiatrist—someone I knew as a child, and also a friend of my mother.

Louis Mars was actually the inventor of ethnopsychiatry. But when Georges Devereux came to France, he further developed this theory. Louis Mars was the one who sent me to see Georges in the chic Upper East Side, where he treated the minor ailments of Upper East Side bourgeois women and made a lot of money doing so.

He took me on as a patient for three reasons:

1. Because I was Haitian, coming from an educated bourgeois background, but still from a developing country.
2. Because I spoke French.
3. Because I lived in the context of an American industrial society.

My case was at the crossroads of several things—ethnography, industry, the French language, French culture, and Haitian culture—and because of that, it was a stimulating intellectual environment for an engaging analysis. That’s it.

Carine Harmand: And despite the fact that he wasn’t interested in art, was it something you brought into your sessions?

Hervé Télémaque: Yes, I brought in drawings. I would make studio sketches at school, and he would notice certain things, like how my lines were weak, etc. He made medical-like observations, even though he wasn’t actually a doctor. What was remarkable in our relationship was that we were both amateurs. In fact, he wasn’t really a psychoanalyst or a psychiatrist.

He arrived in the United States without a diploma, but he was so intelligent and extraordinary that he managed to integrate himself into academic circles to the point where they allowed him to practice psychoanalysis and psychiatry—even though, in my opinion, he wasn’t actually qualified. Just as I wasn’t qualified for anything either. We were two incompetents amusing ourselves with the French language. We played a lot with language, and he loved it too, since his first language was actually French, not Hungarian.

He came to France a little after me, but after reproaching me for abandoning him in New York in an Anglo-Saxon environment, strangely enough, he ended up doing exactly the same thing two or three years later. Pursued by alimony payments for multiple ex-wives, he fled. It sounds like a joke, yet he really fled New York because of that.

And in France, he was very close to Lévi-Strauss. Here, we come back to ethnography, and that’s how he entered the Collège de France right away, without any problems, with the support of Mr. Lévi-Strauss. So, you see, ethnography is always present—at its core, there is no psychoanalysis without ethnography.

And then, Haiti as well—because I also knew him through Haiti, after all. Haiti interested him because of Vodou and its entire religious framework.

Moreover, he was the great psychoanalyst who focused on Native Americans. He was very connected to Native American communities and delved into the question of what remained of these cultures, which had been uprooted by Westerners and devastated by the arrival of white people.

Carine Harmand: He must be somewhat of a precursor to what we call epigenetics today—the idea that the traumas experienced by people over time, such as enslavement and colonization, are embedded in DNA. Something that remains, even if we didn’t experience it directly, yet we inherit it physically in our genes.

Hervé Télémaque: Oh yes, absolutely.

Carine Harmand: And when you came to France, did you not want to continue with psychoanalysis? Did it no longer interest you, or was it just something you wanted to do specifically with Devereux?

Hervé Télémaque: I was in the middle of painting my Éclaireurs series. I was deeply fascinated by this psychoanalytic experience—amusing, even funny—conducted in French, in a hostile city. The racism there was so strong. 1960 was not the New York of today. And when I arrived in Paris, I was very conflicted as I discovered myself through this surrealist period, through Éclaireurs. That’s why this period was so important.

Unfortunately, I destroyed a lot of works from that time, because I had no money and was living in a tiny room. But there were some remarkable works. That’s when I painted some of my most famous pieces, including my Portrait de Famille (1962-1963), and others like that.

Carine Harmand: Why the title Éclaireur?

Hervé Télémaque: Eclaireur is a scout. It’s the one who goes ahead. All these paintings are inspired by Wifredo Lam’s early sugarcane paintings, including The Jungle (MoMA). That was a great stimulus for me. This entire period is based on two opposing forms: one very elongated shape stretching across the entire horizontal and a jagged sphere. So, when I settled in Paris, I wanted to activate a certain tropicalism of the time, meaning the light and energy of Lam’s paintings. At that time, I was deeply influenced by both Lam and Matta, particularly their love of drawing, which came to me through these two Latino painters.

I wanted to find artistic peers who were close to me ethnically and geographically. It wasn’t something I did systematically—it happened naturally, after my exposure to Gorky in New York, Willem de Kooning, and other artists. I wanted to reconnect, in a very indirect way, with something familiar. These were painters I had never really looked at before—I had never truly paid attention to Lam or Matta while I was in New York. I was much closer to figures like Gorky, and generally to American artists, simply because I was a young man of 18 or 19, immersed in the American art scene. At the time, Matta and Lam weren’t of much interest to Americans, even though Lam’s great painting was always on display at MoMA. I saw it, I knew it.

Carine Harmand: And did you later meet Wifredo Lam when you came to Paris? Did you seek him?

Hervé Télémaque: Yes, I met him here. I came across him very indirectly, through exhibitions. I didn’t get to know him through the Surrealist group directly, but on an individual level. Because we had organized a major Latin American exhibition, a Latin American salon, where all the Latino artists were present. That’s where I met Matta and Lam. At the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. It was a historic exhibition—we were all there. Julio Le Parc was there, too.

Carine Harmand: The artist I was telling you about over the phone, Heriberto Cogollo, was also in that exhibition.

Hervé Télémaque: He was there? How old is this young man?

Carine Harmand: 75 years old today. He arrived in Paris in 1966.

Hervé Télémaque: So I know him! Do you have a photo?

Carine Harmand: Yes. So, he is an Afro-Colombian artist from Cartagena. He arrived in Paris and was really taken by the collections of African art he saw at the Musée de l’Homme. He was very outraged by the racism in Colombia, something he didn’t necessarily perceive when he was young.

Hervé Télémaque: But I know him! I know him! And me too! That’s where I saw the Hottentot Venus from South Africa (Saartjie Baartman), which greatly inspired me.

So in 1961 in Paris, I developed this issue of elongated, organic forms opposing a circle. I was interested in spatial and dimensional problems, a bit like Matta. I worked on these two essential motifs. And the paintings in the Eclaireur series are essentially focused on these two themes. It also comes from my engagement with Surrealism through Gorky—his painting is very organic. It’s also vegetal.

The jagged sphere appeared unexpectedly at the time. In the painting Histoire sexuelle (1960), it’s the first time it appeared, without any specific intention, suddenly, this mouth emerged—it became an important motif. Pain, anger… What I developed in the 1960s was about settling my accounts with the U.S.—escape, anger.

At that time, there were no representations of Black people in my work—that would come a year or two later, during my Pop period. But here, you could say it was a mix of anger and unfinished business. Even today, I’m not particularly interested in COVID, but what happened with Mr. Trump fascinates me! I’m waiting to see how far this guy will go to reveal reality, because he perfectly reflects reality. It’s incredible—the Capitol! We had never seen anything like it. The horrible African dictators must have been laughing!

And then there’s the Hottentot Venus, which is also there. These were the three motifs I used frequently at the time. Then came the fourth one, which was the sheath, or things like that… A dark background, that’s not really in my nature…

Carine Harmand: The influence of figures interested in ethnology—like Maya Deren, or Georges Devereux, is closely linked to your surrealist period in Paris. How about Vincent Bounoure?

Hervé Télémaque: I worked with Vincent Bounoure a bit, on a simple idea: the paradox in literature. It was about Magritte, who painted a famous piece called Les Vacances de Hegel, where you see an umbrella and a glass of water above it—that is, a reflection on the play of opposites. We even wrote a few short pieces on the subject.

He was a remarkable man, poor, very poor. He and his wife would collect leftover lettuce that vendors discarded on Boulevard Vincent Auriol, not far from here. They would gather those lettuces and still find a way to save money to buy a painting from me. They had six of my works.

Carine Harmand: So you were in a period that reflected that past analysis. Your artistic creation became liberating at that moment.

Hervé Télémaque: Yes, both in terms of my racial conflicts in the U.S. and, of course, my Oedipal conflicts with my father. And then, that period became a sort of explosion—a liberation. And that allowed me to later develop a Pop Art style—much more joyful, amusing, etc. Because, in fact, one thing that’s important to me is that I am not a sad Expressionist painter. I am a funny, playful painter. Life is fun, and it continues to be—even today. I am a painter rather happy with his craft. And undoubtedly, I went from psychoanalysis to a morbid surrealist expression, and then to an art that was much more open to the world.

And I had only one psychoanalysis, and it was Freudian. Devereux was a strict Freudian—he couldn’t stand Lacan.

Carine Harmand: Devereux was very interested in Vodou, and so was Maya Deren. Did you have a connection to Vodou, or was it something you observed from a distance?

I am incompetent in this field. I have never explored the symbolism of Vodou. Well, I have engaged with it formally, through drawing and similar things, but I was never initiated. I have attended a few staged ceremonies for tourists. I have a general understanding of it. My uncle, the famous poet, actually married a manbo, which was quite unusual for a wealthy mulatto from a bourgeois background. My aunt was a priestess. I come from a very liberal family, where there were almost no significant prejudices. So, my grandfather would host this manbo for Sunday lunch, and she would dine among the bourgeoisie without any issues. Where I appreciate Vodou symbolism—which is rich, full of amusing connotations and other layers—is in the fact that Vodou is not a sad religion. Contrary to popular belief, it is a rather joyful, theatrical religion. Vodou is theater. All my references to Vodou in my work are rather lighthearted. And then, there is—how can I put it?—a general confusion. For example, the Vodou cross—you know, it’s actually the Maltese cross. And so, André Breton, when he saw my paintings, thought: “But this is the Maltese cross! What is it doing in Vodou?”

I told him, “That’s how it is. In every book I’ve read, that’s what I see, so I reproduce the Maltese cross.”

Carine Harmand: So, what did you think of André Breton’s relationship with Haitian art?

Hervé Télémaque: He arrived at an explosive moment—Port-au-Prince was in a state of insurrection. Some claim that the speech he gave at the French Institute at the time had a colossal influence on the Haitian revolution under President Lescot. Well, that’s a bit of nonsense. It looks very nice in a book, but it’s not very serious. He actually had no real influence on Haitian history, but he did discover a great poet, Magloire Saint-Aude, who remains the great Haitian surrealist poet. His work is almost Mallarméan, a collection of poems that are truly extraordinary.

No, Breton only stayed in Port-au-Prince for a few months, but he engaged with the entire Haitian intelligentsia. And he was very bold—he was the first to buy the early paintings of Hector Hyppolite.

Carine Harmand: A final word on Surrealism?

Hervé Télémaque: In fact, I never tried to be surrealist. Surrealist despite myself, simply.