Charlton Maryette
Manchester (Iowa, USA), 1924 -2013
Maryette Charlton arrived in Lebanon with a real feeling for novelty in what she believed was painting.
She channelled every possible way of speaking about oneself and what surrounds them to her visual expression, the essence of her pedagogy during the five years (1952-1957) she spent in Beirut in charge of the Department of Painting at the American University. She did not come from nowhere, but it was peculiar for her to know how to listen to the unknown and stand in front of it, without bullying it with an excess of rules about painting when she found herself faced with the echo of ancient civilisations.
Craftsmanship was ready to resist this iconoclastic approach, for it implied time, patience and everything that obeys too much to antique production methods to be sensitive to novelty.
Moreover, the instruments that Charlton had at her disposal were too elementary in relationship to the old mastery of line without drawing or model, and therefore without design, which threatened the copiers of craftsmanship. What she brought to Lebanon from her school in Chicago was the distant echo of a Bauhaus didactic rather than a sudden eruption of modernity.
A better photographer than painter, Maryette Charlton did not have sufficient academic training and approached the material as an exploration of her own possibilities. In a sense, she followed the same process as her students, who became her travelling companions along the way. She practiced a completely American pedagogy of equality, of awakening and sharing.
In Lebanon, Charlton painted her watercolors on site ; in which colors and shapes, dissolved in water, embraced the sensation of the moment while understanding the pictorial fact and ease of the genre. Misunderstanding arose when feelings were captured in a rigorous and difficult architecture that did not suit her purpose.
There was a historical and technical contradiction in the way that she assimilated the lessons of Cubism and the Bauhaus and turned them into equations, capturing reality with materials that could not surpass the poetic rendering.
Certainly, she refused to set an easel and canvas in the street, which was frowned upon in popular areas of Beirut in the 1950s. But her carefree point of departure was too obvious to portray anything but a sensation that took shape in a sort of unsettling awkwardness of form. All the landscapes of the world were equalised in theie echolalia.
Charlton’s approach drew conclusions about the impossibility of pushing the abstract any further, and made a kind of Academism about it. By nature and character, she opposed to all this the freshness of her gaze, as a way of going straight to the motif and of working on it with sufficient feeling, if not culture. She had understood that the best way to prevent her students from being crushed by Academism – which they would have little chance of quitting and which would risk making them spend the rest of their lives in a prolonged, incomplete apprenticeship – was to provide them with the possibility of improvising or composing an canvas on site.
Did she succeed in her enterprise? It is doubtful, since Khalil Zghaib, whom she echoed, ended up going back to a form of Academism. However, he did introduce the invigorating observation that prevented the repetition of motifs and, in by doing so, a part of the neurosis of painting. But Zghaib always gave the impression of working on an image of the painting rather than the painting of an image.
Ultimately, echoing Zghaib was Maryette Charlton’s only success.