JEAN CHARLOT

by Anita Brenner, 1926

Copyright the Anita Brenner Estate; Susannah Joel Glusker, manager.. Published with the permission.

Jean Charlot says that one must be always choosing in life, and he practices what he preaches. He is French by birth and training, notwithstanding one Mexican grandfather and a Spanish Jewish grandmother, but he has chosen to be a Mexican. For several generations, his family has been closely connected with Mexico. His uncle, Louis Goupil, accompanied Désiré Charnay when this great explorer discovered Maya ruins (Chichén-Itzá, Uxmal, Palenque), and recorded them by means of early photographic processes, carrying his own materials and manufacturing his own films. The nephew, not entirely by coincidence , has carried on this family interest and today holds a position as artist on the staff of the Carnegie Expedition in Chichén-Itzá, where he copies frescos and carvings, and studies the Maya ruins from a purely plastic viewpoint, having become in a short time, a recognized authority on the subject.

Charlot has lived in Mexico for a number of years, but he has lived with Mexico all his life. His family possesses, through its active interest in Mexican culture, many fine examples of Mexican art, both pre and post Hispanic, and another of his uncles had a famous collection which, upon his death, mysteriously disappeared and has not yet been traced.

Although only twenty-eight years old, Charlot has had a very full life. During the World War, in spite of the fact that he had scarcely come of age, he was a lieutenant in the French artillery corps, in which service he was decorated for bravery. After the war, he came to Mexico, together with his mother. In 1923, when Vasconcelos was, Minister of Education, Charlot was a member of the "Syndicate of Painters and Sculptors" and participated in all the activities of this body, from painting frescos to drawing revolutionary cartoons for El Machete. With the fall of Vasconcelos, he was left in the same difficult financial situation as most of the other members of the Syndicate, but he did not cease painting, with the result that his work developed amazingly and changed so completely that nothing remained in it to link it with what he had done in Europe except the same technical facility.

Deeply interested in Mexico and all its expressions, especially plastic, he experimented with the elements to be analyzed in them, and was the first of several artists to see the Mexican native as a square, plastic vision corroborated in Tarascan art especially, where foreshortening of arms and legs confines the body to a cube. Entirely unseduced by the picturesque and colorful quality which catches superficial observers, he began to paint Mexico grey, as it essentially is, with its volcanic topography and its structures of lava rock, and instead of guitar strumming and jarabe dancing rancheros, the first figures which again catch the eye of the casual visitor, he devoted himself to painting the silent man of the soil, portraying his enormous potentiality by accentuating the massive quality which is not so much physical as spiritual.

Few people understand the Mexican Indian as well as does Charlot. This is evidenced not only in his painting, but in his occasional writing on subjects of Mexican expression. He is entirely in accord with the philosophy of the Indian, and it is in great part his own. He has nothing in common and refuses any contact, with the aesthete and the dilettante. His painting is his profession, and his subjects are the intimate things of the life of the Indian—religion, love of the soil, personal courtesy, and the mystery of existence—concepts crystallized so simply that only those aware of them and of Mexico, that is, intimate as Charlot with Mexico, can give them their full significance.

Like Goitia, his attitude is one of assertion, not of negation. Like all the modern Mexican artists, his revolution consists in the assertion of things really Mexican, and the repudiation of importations. Occasionally, again in line with Mexican tradition, he flares into caricature, producing cruel portraits of the "bourgeoisie" in which appear all the evil characteristics which he holds are the result of too much money and no soul. His woodcut The Rich in Hell and his Portrait of a Member of "The Sisters of Mary"—an organization of Catholic society women—are particularly fine examples of this phase of his work.

Personally, Charlot is unobtrusive, highly sensitive, very energetic, leading, in spite of his wide acquaintance, a solitary life. He is exceedingly malicious toward the things and people he dislikes, and these are many; and he is loyal and self-sacrificing to the extreme, for the things and people which he does like. He has no ambition other than perfection of his work, and the development of mind and spirit which such advance implies to him. He is most versatile and works with ease, a quality which he attempts to hold in check, in order that the finished product may have other virtues than those purely plastic. His idea is simplicity, as well in painting as in other things. This is one thing that has been instrumental in assimilating him so completely to Mexico, an assimilation recognized and accepted especially by his fellow-painters, who often assert: “Charlot is even more Mexican than we are.”