Jean Charlot

Biography

In 1922, in the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, Jean Charlot finished the fresco “Massacre in the Templo Mayor”: the slaughter of Aztecs in the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. Among the figures he portrayed himself, his friend Fernando Leal and Diego Rivera. It was the first finished mural among those commissioned by José Vasconcelos, the Mexican minister of education, and the first painted specifically in the fresco technique.

Charlot was born on 8 February 1898 in Paris. His father, Henri Charlot, an émigré from Russia, ran an import-export business; his mother, Anna Goupil, was an artist from a family that originated in Mexico. As a child he became fascinated by the Mexican manuscripts in the collection of his great-uncle Eugène Goupil and by the pre-Columbian objects kept by a neighbour, the archaeologist Désiré Charnay. As a teenager he began to learn Nahuatl. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and from 1917 served in the artillery; in 1920 his scale drawings for the mural decoration of a church were shown at the Louvre in an exhibition of religious art. By some accounts he left the army in 1920, by others he stayed longer. In 1921, after his father’s death, Charlot moved to Mexico City with his mother. He shared a studio with Leal, assisted Rivera, got to know young artists, among them Pablo O’Higgins, and travelled the country with them. The model Luz Jiménez, a native Nahuatl speaker, taught him the language while she posed. In the building of the Ministry of Education he painted several more panels; one of them, “Dance of the Ribbons”, Rivera later painted over with his own mural. Charlot called this project a first attempt at “communal painting”, and, I think, his resentment is understandable.

Alongside the frescoes ran another line of work. In 1922 he saw the prints of José Guadalupe Posada sold on street corners, and later he found the forgotten printing blocks in the workshop of Posada’s former publisher. The article on Posada that he published in 1925 is regarded as the first biographical article on that printmaker; with O’Higgins and the publisher’s son he took part in the catalogues of Posada’s prints of 1928 and 1930. Charlot himself also became interested in avant-garde woodcut.

From 1926 to 1928 he spent three seasons at Chichen Itza. He was hired by Sylvanus Morley of the Carnegie Institution, and the fieldwork was directed by Earl Morris. As the excavations proceeded, Charlot traced and copied bas-reliefs and painted surfaces. Together with Morris and his wife Ann he wrote the two-volume “The Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá, Yucatan” (1931), considered a classic in its field.

In 1928 he moved to New York with his mother; she died there in the winter of 1929. He taught at the Art Students League, and worked on commissions for the Federal Art Project, a government programme employing artists: in 1934–1935 he painted murals for Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan, and in 1942 he painted the oil on canvas “Cotton Gin” for the post office in McDonough, Georgia. In 1940 he became an American citizen and kept his French citizenship. His book “Art from the Mayans to Disney” appeared in 1939, and in 1944 Josef Albers invited him to the first Summer Institute of Black Mountain College, where Charlot left two frescoes, “Inspiration” and “Knowledge”; they are probably the only surviving artworks on the site of the college’s Lake Eden campus.

In 1945–1947 Charlot held a Guggenheim Fellowship. From 1947 he taught at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, where he gave instruction in fresco painting and made lithographs with Lawrence Barrett. He left the Center in 1949, after misunderstandings with its trustees and director. He then went to the University of Hawaii at Manoa and stayed there for more than thirty years. The fresco “Relation of Man and Nature in Old Hawaii” (1949) is at the university; “Early Contacts of Hawaii with the Outer World” (1952), eleven by fifty-seven feet, was painted for a bank in Honolulu. He was a close friend of the local artist Madge Tennent and, with Juliette May Fraser, carried out several major commissions in and around Honolulu. In 1966, when he retired, the Honolulu Academy of Arts gave him a solo exhibition, “Jean Charlot Retrospective, Fifty Years”. His writings number more than sixty-five books and articles, among them “Dance of Death” (1951), “Art Making from Mexico to China” (1950), “The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920–1925” (1963) and the collected essays “An Artist on Art” (1972). His works are in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Hawaii State Art Museum, the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the library of the University of Hawaii.

Charlot died in Honolulu on 20 March 1979.