Introduction to the Spanish–Language Writings

of Jean Charlot: Escritos sobre Arte Mexicano

 

Peter Morse and John Charlot

 

A mis queridos compañeros con los cuales quisimos crear arte mexicano—

Esta prueba de que tal arte ya nacido desde siglos goza siempre de muy buena salud.

 

‘To my beloved companions with whom we wanted to create Mexican art—

This proof that such art, born centuries ago, still enjoys very good health.’

 

“Ebauche d’un Essai sur la Religion Populaire Indo-Americaine” 1925

 

This book contains all the completed writings by Jean Charlot in the Spanish language. It also includes some significant but less formal materials. His original texts in Spanish were written mostly during the years when he lived and worked in Mexico: 1922–1928 and 1945–1947. They cover many aspects of Mexican art, from native dances to the art of the great mural painters. In his lifetime, Charlot was the author of nineteen books and several hundred articles, most of them in the English language. He would be well–known today as an art historian if he had never painted a stroke. 

Jean Charlot was born in Paris in 1898. He learned Spanish as a child in France. He was descended, through his mother, from the Goupil family, French people who had settled in Mexico in the 1830s. His mother's grandmother, María Beníta Meléndez (1811–1875), wife of Victor Joseph Goupil (1805–1884), was of Aztec descent. A knowledge of Mexico and of the Spanish language was considered an important part of the family heritage. In the years of the artist's youth, the  Charlots still had relatives in Mexico and often entertained Mexican guests. Frequent visitors were the French Mexicanists, Désiré Charnay and Auguste Génin. Young Charlot grew up with a special awareness of the unique character of the Spanish language. Over a lifetime of eighty–one years, he would write in five different languages: French, Spanish, English, Náhuatl, and Hawaiian. He tried to use the distinctive qualities of each language and culture, but his style also remains personal, even idiosyncratic, in each. 

When Charlot first arrived in Mexico in 1921, he had already published in French. He spoke the Spanish language well, but did not have full confidence in his literary idiom. His first impressions of Mexico were written in French. His friend, Diego Rivera, translated them into Spanish. The article, “México de los humildes,” however, was never published (until now) in either language. It appeared, in Charlot's own English version, only in 1926. 

When he started, Charlot would first write a draft in French, and then follow it with the definitive text in Spanish. His “Pinturas murales mexicanas,” published in 1926, seems to be the first text written entirely in Spanish, a practice he followed thereafter. He had a special fondness for Mexican language and literature. He felt that Mexicans had preserved older modes of speaking that had been lost in Spain. He once said: “When you read Don Quixote with Mexican pronunciation, it is really beautiful!” The Indian influence, he felt, was also an essential ingredient of Mexican culture. He always spoke with admiration of such writers as José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, José Vasconcelos, Mariano Azuela, and Gregorio López y Fuentes. He later illustrated English–language editions of El Periquillo Sarniento and El Indio. 

Charlot's worldwide fame is based mainly on his Mexican murals, especially the great Massacre in the Main Temple in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, completed on January 31, 1923, and the three fresco panels (one later destroyed) in the Second Court of the Ministry of Education, completed on October 2, 1923. For these monumental works, he was paid eight pesos per day, as is seen from two receipts for payment in Charlot's files. 

Charlot’s first writings published in Spanish were a collaboration with his life–long friend, David Alfaro Siqueiros. The two young artists wrote a series of five articles for El Demócrata under the name Ing. Juan Hernández Araujo. It was a common practice at the time to use a pseudonym when criticizing contemporaries (as, for instance, in the famous Obregón and Carranza articles of the same era). Siqueiros and Charlot worked closely together, and their ideas were so much in harmony that it is impossible to distinguish the styles of two different writers. In his The Mexican Mural Renaissance: 1920–1925 (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1963: 203 f.), Charlot wrote:

Araujo—champion of Charlot and Siqueiros—gave us in his “Contemporary Movement of Painting in Mexico” the only art historical survey truly contemporaneous with the beginnings of the movement. It rather adds to the interest of the work to know that its four installments…were a literary hoax. At the time, Siqueiros and I were living together in Colonia Roma. As our causeries lengthened, our points of view merged. Mexican art criticism seemed to us inadequate and we decided to give it a lift. To lend authority to the text, which the names of two budding modernists lacked, we hit upon the impressive nom de plume Ingeniero Juan Hernández Araujo. The nom de plume was also a wise move inasmuch as the engineer did not spare our friends or shy away from proclaiming our worth. 

Although Charlot and Siqueiros clearly wished to continue their commentaries, the newspaper stopped them after only five articles. 

Now more confident in the Spanish language, Charlot began to write regularly on many aspects of Mexican art. He praised his contemporaries: Orozco, Mérida, Revueltas, Pintao, Günther. He discussed many aspects of indigenous Mexican art. He vigorously defended the murals in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, which were under attack by the students of the school. (They opened the pages of their own newspaper to him.) These passionate essays are among his most original works. Without the use of clichés or conventional expressions, he achieves a high, powerful rhetoric. Strongly rhythmical sentences, of unusual but expressive syntax, convey the writer's emotions along with his thoughts. This complexity of expression deepens these short essays into dense manifestoes of Charlot's central concern for the vitality of Mexican art.

Contemporary and later records mention Charlot's essays as important explanations and means of publicity for the Mexican art movement. These aspects of his writings were continuations of his earlier work in France. There he had used his writings to explain the new liturgical art movement, in which he participated, so that the public could understand and appreciate it. For the rest of life, he would write helpful articles of this kind. A strong positive spirit always animated his efforts. Although he sometimes attacked critics outside the circle of artists, he held back (except for the Araujo articles with Siqueiros) from attacking those within the circle, even when they opposed him.

Had he written nothing else, however, he would be famous for his discovery of José Guadalupe Posada, the great Mexican graphic artist. Charlot's article, “Un precursor del movimiento del arte moderno: el grabador Posadas,” published in August 1925, was the first ever to discuss Posada as an artist. (Actually, the first mention of Posada's name as an artist was in the first article of Araujo, July 11, 1923, and an earlier article by another author has been found.)  Before Charlot, Posada's work was known only as anonymous Mexican “folklore.” Indeed, it had been published by the great Dr. Atl as folk art without naming the artist. In effect, this Frenchman, Charlot, was saying to Mexicans: “Look! A giant once lived among you, and his name was Posada.” Soon all Mexico and then all the world was to recognize the truth of this discovery. Charlot followed this appreciation with many other writings on Posada and his colleague, Manuel Manilla. His list of works by Manilla, published here for the first time, will be a valuable aid to scholars in distinguishing this artist's work from Posada’s. 

Seen in the perspective of sixty years, Charlot's Spanish essays assume an importance beyond their own time. They are contemporary witnesses to the intellectual basis of the Mexican Mural Renaissance. In some cases they can correct later misconceptions. The Araujo articles, for instance, show the deep respect the young artists had for Mexican colonial art and architecture. The reader can feel their struggle to create a national style that was truly continuous with the great classical Western traditions. These essays also enable historians to assess Charlot's intellectual influence on the movement, in addition to his generally recognized technical influence. He presented ideas of the artist as craftsman, of art as science, of the inspiration of indigenous art, and of scholarship as an aid to creation. All these ideas came from Charlot’s classical French background, and all became widely accepted in the Mexican movement. 

In 1926, Charlot went to Yucatán as staff artist for the archeological expedition that excavated the great Temple of the Warriors at Chich’en Itza. Although this work earned him a living and enriched his own artistic vocabulary, it removed him from the artistic life of the capital. He wrote extensively on the art of the Mayas, but with one brief exception, it was all in the English language. In early 1929, he went to the United States in order to correct proofs of the text and illustrations of the report on the excavations. With no immediate prospects of employment in Mexico, he found work in New York and stayed, gradually receiving a greater acceptance in international art circles. He resumed work as a muralist in the United States in the late 1930s. In 1942, he became a professor of art at the University of Georgia. 

In 1945, he returned to Mexico with a Guggenheim fellowship to pay for the support of himself and his growing family. “They gave me a grant as a historian, not as an artist!” he said with a smile. Indeed, his researches resulted in two great studies in art history: Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos and The Mexican Mural Renaissance 1920–1925; the latter book has been published by Editorial Domes in Spanish translation. His classic study of the great Mexican mural painter, Juan Cordero, written in 1945, is published here in full for the first time. We have been fortunate to find among Charlot’s papers the transcript of a radio interview, which gives details of his life and work up to 1945. He also continued his study of thework of José Guadalupe Posada, which resulted in many published writings in English. He always hoped to compile a complete catalogue raisonné of Posada's prints, but he never had the time or support for the necessary detailed research. 

During this period, Charlot also studied the Náhuatl language with the famous scholar R. H. Barlow. Charlot had already studied the language as an adolescent in France, and in the 1920s, he learned conversational Náhuatl from the model and linguistic informant Luz Jiménez. The painter Pablo O’Higgins described Charlot conversing with her in Náhuatl while she was posing nude for him (“Pablo O’Higgins on Jean Charlot: Extracts from an Interview with Dr. and Mrs. Lester C. Walker, March 21, 1974”).  Charlot loved the language and would recite the famous poem Nonantzin ixkwak nimikis, attributed to Nezahualcoyotzin.  Charlot wrote a puppet play in Náhuatl that was performed from the back of a truck in many Mexican villages.  Charlot remembered that the actors added verses—for instance, lamenting the death of the Aztec emperor—and that the audience listened with great attention, unaccustomed to hearing their language used in such a setting. (Later Charlot wrote two plays in the Hawaiian language.) We thank Dr. Frances Karttunen for her help in editing Charlot’s play and for her valuable study of it, published as an appendix to Escritos. 

In 1947, Charlot returned to the United States, where he became director of the art school in Colorado Springs. In 1949, he was invited to paint a mural at the University of Hawai’i. Charlot and Hawai’i were immediately attracted to each other, and he spent his remaining thirty years in Honolulu as a professor at the University of Hawai’i. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, he painted some fifty fresco murals in churches and public buildings across the United States and the Pacific. 

Writing to his friend. Carmen Barreda, on April 29, 1965, he expressed one thought in Spanish, in a letter otherwise in English: “¡Aunque no he podido regresar a México, siempre será el país preferido de mi corazón!” ‘Although I have not been able to return to Mexico, it will always be the favorite country of my heart!’ In 1968, he did return once again to Mexico, as a guest of the government, to attend a large retrospective exhibition of his work organized by Carmen Barreda and held at the Museo de Arte Moderno, in honor of the XIX Olympic Games. Mexico had at last honored “el Francesito”—of Aztec descent —who had come to live there almost fifty years earlier. His importance was confirmed by a second retrospective organized in 1994 by Blanca Garduño and Milena Koprivitza for the Mexican government.   

In his last years, Charlot wrote a few articles in Spanish about his old friends among the artists, tragically sometimes upon their death. He seldom wrote letters in Spanish during his life and kept copies of even fewer. Thus we lack, for instance, Charlot's side of the important published correspondence with José Clemente Orozco. He used a typewriter only in the 1960s and 1970s. Often, when Mexican friends wrote to him in Spanish, he would reply in English. As a result, we have only three of Charlot's letters in Spanish to include in this book. He also wrote poetry, but none in Spanish. Even the “Poemas de Jean Charlot” that appeared in Contemporáneos (Mexico, number 37, June 1931) are in French.  

After the artist's death in 1979, the University of Hawai’i created the Jean Charlot Collection in the Hamilton Library. Here may be found his personal library and files, as well as most of his eight hundred original prints, his sketchbooks, mural drawings, and diaries. Also included are many works of art and literature by his Mexican, French, and North American contemporaries. The collection has become, in fact, a center for the study of all art and literature of the twentieth century, with special attention to Mexican art. From its files have come all the original Spanish texts that make up the present book.  

 

 

 

 

This paper is the original English of the introduction to Jean Charlot’s Escritos sobre Arte Méxicano, written in 1986 and published on the web site of the Jean Charlot Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai`i, 1991–2005.  The book has now been published on the site of the Jean Charlot Foundation. 

 

We express our sincere thanks to Zohmah Charlot and Daniel Morse for permission to publish Escritos sobre Arte Méxicano. 

 

Copyright 1991–2000 Peter Morse, John Charlot, and the Jean Charlot Estate LLC.