1. Louis Henri Jean Charlot was a French-born American painter and illustrator, active mainly in Mexico and the United States.
26 Facts About Jean Charlot
1. 2.
Jean Charlot's father, Henri, owned an import-export business and was a Russian-born emigre, albeit one who supported the Bolshevik cause.
3.
Jean Charlot's mother's family originated from Mexico City; his grandfather was a French-Indian mestizo.
4.
Jean Charlot's great-grandfather had immigrated to Mexico in the 1820s shortly after the country's independence from Spain, and married a woman who was half-Aztec.
5.
From an early age Charlot was fascinated with the Mexican manuscripts and art in the collection of his great uncle Eugene, and by the pre-Columbian artefacts of a neighbor and family friend, Desire Charnay, who was a well-known archaeologist.
6.
Jean Charlot studied art in Paris before serving in the French Army during World War I In 1920, his scale drawings for the mural decorations of a church were included in an exhibition of religious art at the Louvre.
7.
Jean Charlot spent an extensive period of his life living and working in Mexico.
8.
Jean Charlot met Fernando Leal and shared his studio with him.
9.
Jean Charlot was deemed "a fine person who is doing important work" by Diego Rivera, the renowned Mexican painter and muralist.
10.
Jean Charlot married a close friend of O'Higgins, Dorothy Day, an artist who had grown up in Salt Lake City.
11.
Jean Charlot's family was Mormon but later left the church.
12.
Jean Charlot got involved in the Mexican art movement of the 1920s and 1930s, and became close friends with young Mexican and American artists, such as Charlot and O'Higgins, in the circle of Diego Rivera.
13.
When in Mexico City, Jean Charlot would stay in a humble room Pablo rented in downtown Mexico City on the roof of a dilapidated building on the street of Belisario Dominguez.
14.
In 1940, Jean Charlot applied for and was accorded American citizenship.
15.
Jean Charlot is generally recognized as having brought international attention to Jose Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican printer who had produced more than 15,000 prints and lithographs, devoted mostly to the popular readers of newspapers in pre-revolutionary Mexico, in which he would present political satires using cartoon-like skeletons; these are a variety of calavera.
16.
Jean Charlot himself was much interested in and started avant-garde woodcut.
17.
Jean Charlot was one of them, and his friend and roommate Fernando Leal who invited him to get involved.
18.
Jean Charlot's was the first mural finished and the first in the fresco technique.
19.
Rivera eventually wrested control of the project, acquiring more space for himself and recasting the other artists in the role of assistants, even painting over one of Jean Charlot's finished murals, Danza de los Listones to create room for his own Market Place.
20.
In 1928, works by Jean Charlot were included with those of 21 other artists in an exhibition at the Art Center Gallery in New York organized by Frances Flynn Paine, the manager of a Rockefeller fund to sponsor Mexican artists.
21.
Between 1926 and 1928 Jean Charlot spent three seasons deeply immersed in the excavation of Mayan temples at Chichen Itza.
22.
In 1944, Josef Albers invited Jean Charlot to teach at the first Summer Institute of Black Mountain College.
23.
Jean Charlot went to Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1947 to take a job at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, where he taught fresco painting and worked with Lawrence Barrett on several editions of lithographs.
24.
Jean Charlot left the Fine Arts Center in 1949 under a cloud of misunderstandings between himself and the Arts Center's Board of Trustees and the Art Center's director, Mitch Wilder.
25.
Jean Charlot then went to teach at the University of Hawaii, where he stayed for over 30 years.
26.
In 1972, Charlot published An Artist on Art: Collected Essays of Jean Charlot, which discussed Mexican art history.