Jean Charlot

Louis Henri Jean Charlot (born February 8, 1898 in Paris , † March 20, 1979 in Honolulu ) was a painter and graphic artist of French origin who was active in the United States and Latin America .

Family roots

Jean Charlot was born in Paris as the son of the St. Petersburg merchant Henri Pierre Jean Charlot (1860–1914) and the artist Anne Goupil (1870–1929). He and his sister Odette grew up speaking Spanish and French. But he also read Russian literature and, thanks to his father's business connections, also knew German. His sister, with whom Jean Charlot had a split relationship, later studied medicine with Marie Curie and became a urologist.

His father was the illegitimate son of the Frenchwoman Henriette Charlot from Cussy-les-Forges , who worked as a hat maker in Russia. Jean Charlot had little contact with his paternal grandfather, with whom his father grew up after his grandmother Henriette Charlot died in Moscow in 1871 at the age of 31 as a result of the smallpox epidemic prevailing there. The name of his paternal grandfather was removed from the family book.

His mother Anne Goupil came from a French- Aztec family. His Jewish great-great-grandfather Pierre Nicolas Goupil came from Normandy and had been in Mexico again and again from 1820 . Jean Charlot's great-grandfather Joseph Victor Ferdinand Sénateur Goupil was born in Rouen and also spent extended periods of time in Mexico. In 1830 he married the Spanish-Aztec Anna Benita Meléndez in Mexico City. In 1851 he acquired the Pavillon de Sully of the New Castle of Saint-Germain-en-Laye , imported several agave plants from Tacuba in 1853 and grew them. The marriage with Anna gave birth to eleven children, including the future collector and essential patron Jean Charlot's Charles Eugène Espidon , the second son Jean Charlot's grandfather Louis Cyriaque (Spanish: Luis Ciriaco ) and the third child Alice, who later became Léon Harmel married the son of the ecclesiastical and social industrialist Léon Harmel . His grandfather Louis Cyriaque was considered a free thinker. He married the Paris-born Mexican Sara Louisa Meléndez, who was Jewish, which was unusual for members of the (mostly Catholic) middle class at the time. Jean Charlot's mother was the third daughter of the marriage.

life and work

Charlot suffered from pronounced strabismus as a child , which was corrected by surgery on the weaker right eye when he was seven years old. He was also left-handed and was retrained in accordance with the customs of the time. He dealt with the indigenous culture of Latin America as a child. Through his grandfather Louis Cyriaque, he also had contact with the archaeologist Désiré Charnay , heard about him and studied his work. In July 1914, his father died after a nervous breakdown. From 1914 to 1915 Charlot studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (ENSBA), then went to Saint-Mandé and traveled through Brittany . During the First World War he served as a horse artilleryman from 1917 and during the subsequent occupation of the German western territories. At a height of 1 meter 65, his stature is described as athletic.

In 1920 he left the army as a sub-lieutenant and went to Mexico, where he had numerous contacts and relatives through the relationship of the maternal line. Here he joined a circle of revolutionary artists, learned from Fernando Leal and assisted Diego Rivera with his mural “La Creación” in Mexico City. In 1922 he painted his first own mural at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria there with the title “La Masacre en el Templo Mayor”, in which he depicted the massacre in the Templo Mayor during the Spanish conquest . In 1923 three more murals followed at the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP). After that he painted mainly on the easel until 1925 in his so-called "Dark Period" .

From 1926 to 1928 he worked as an archaeological artist in the researches and excavations of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) of Chichén Itzá and then went to New York City , then a year later to Washington D. C. , where he worked with Earl Halstead Morris and Ann Axtell Morris worked on the texts and illustrations for The Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá , published in 1931 by the CIW . From 1930 he lectured at the Art Students League of New York and at Columbia University and met the Los Angeles-born graphic artist Lynton Richards Kistler . He also started illustrating children's books at this time. In 1932 he published together with Harry Evelyn Dorr Pollock and John Eric Sidney Thompson under the title A preliminary study of the ruins of Coba, Quintana Roo, Mexico studies on the ruins of Cobá and a year later gave a book of pictures with 32 lithographs with text contributions by Paul Claudel . In 1939 he married the actress Dorothy Zohmah Day and in the same year published Art from the Mayans to Disney ( Art from the Mayans to Disney ). The marriage with Dorothy Zohmah resulted in three sons Martin, John and Peter and a daughter named Ann. From 1939 and 1940 he illustrated a special edition of Prosper Mérimées Carmen with 34 color pictures . The book was printed by Albert Richardson Carman and published by the New York Limited Editions Club. In 1941 he received an artist in residence grant from the University of Georgia and a year later he painted a mural at the post office in McDonough, Georgia , also one on the building of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Georgia in 1942 and one there in 1944 Faculty of Journalism. As a Guggenheim Fellow , he went back to Mexico from 1945 to 1946, where he wrote about Mexican muralism in his book The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920–1925 , published in 1963 by Yale University Press. Under the title Mexihkanantli ( Nahuatl for Mexican mother ) he published 16 illustrations from 1946 to 1947 in Mexico City and in 1947 he became head of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center School in Colorado Springs .

In 1949 he went to Honolulu as a professor at the University of Hawai'i, where he painted a mural in the Bachmann Hall. Among his students were the painter Kenneth O. Goehring and his son Martin Charlot . In 1950 his book Art Making from Mexico to China was published in New York . From 1951 to 1953 he painted murals on the administration building of Arizona State College (now Arizona State University ), at the branch of the first national bank in Waikīkī and another at the Bachmann Hall of the University of Hawaii. In 1958 he worked on ceramic tile paintings in St. Catherine Church on Kaua'i . In addition, from 1958 to 1963 additional murals were created at St. Leonard Convent of Centerville , Montgomery County , Ohio , the convent chapel of St. Benedict Abbey in Atchison, Kansas, and the Catholic Mission Church building in Naiserelagi , Fiji . In 1962 he published a treatise on Mexican art through the University of Texas at Austin and the Academia de San Carlos from 1785 to 1915. In the year of his retirement in 1966, the Honolulu Academy of Arts held a solo exhibition in his honor under the title Jean Charlot Retrospective, Fifty Years 1916-1966 . In the same year, he painted the mural on the bank building in Waikīkī a second time after it was destroyed, and a year later he visited his hometown Paris for the first time since 1923. As part of the cultural program on the occasion of the 1968 Summer Olympics , he exhibited his pictures in the Museo de Arte Moderno and was honored in the same year by the National Art Council in Washington. In 1969 he worked with Tony Smith at the University of Hawaii , completed a ceramic statue in Hanalei , Kauai County , and set up a foundation in Honolulu. In 1972 he wrote an autobiographical treatise for the University of Hawaii. In addition to two other murals at the Leeward Community College (1974) in Pearl City , Oahu , and at the Maryknoll Elementary School (1978) in Honolulu, he published a second book of pictures in 1973 with Kistler in Los Angeles and wrote Two Hawaiian for the University of Hawaii in 1976 Plays ( ISBN 0824804996 ).

Charlot died after suffering from cancer.

Web links

• Literature by and about Jean Charlot in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin
• Jean Charlot (photo) , taken by Tina Modotti
• The Jean Charlot Collection (JCC)
• The Jean Charlot Foundation

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John Charlot: Jean Charlot - Live and Work ( Memento December 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (English), 2003-2006.
2. ^ Peter Morse: Jean Charlot's Technique in Children's Book Illustration ( Memento of February 8, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (English).
3. ^ Jean Charlot (1898-1979) , Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles.