Charlot, Jean, 1898-1979

Jean Charlot was an artist, teacher, scholar, critic, poet, and playwright. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and served in the French Army from 1918 to 1920. After the war he moved to Mexico, where he had relatives, and joined a group of other young artists in the Mexican Mural Renaissance of the 1920s. Charlot's fresco mural in the Preparatoria Nacional was the first of many he completed. While in Mexico, he wrote numerous articles on art, among them the first on the Mexican printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada, and worked as an archeologist and illustrator with the Carnegie expedition to Chichen Itza. In the 1930s, Charlot lived and worked in New York, also spending time in California and Iowa. During the 1940s, he worked in Georgia, Mexico and Colorado. In 1949, he was invited by the University of Hawaii to paint a mural. He remained there as Professor of art, traveling extensively in the United States, the Pacific, and Asia. He died in Honolulu in 1979, at the age of 81.

As an artist, Charlot's international reputation rests on his more than sixty murals in the United States and Mexico and on his more than 700 prints. His paintings, drawings and numerous illustrated books are also widely known and admired. His high standing as a scholar and historian of art is largely independent of his own painting. He is the author of some twenty five books on art, including the definitive studies of the Mexican Mural Renaissance, the Academy of San Carlos, and, as co-author, the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza. He also authored a large number of scholarly and popular articles on numerous aspects of the arts.

His output of drawings, paintings, murals, prints, cartoons, books, articles, and other writings was prodigious. His life was full of significant connections within the intellectual and political milieu of the diverse communities where he lived — with artists and writers, with art and educational institutions, with the Roman Catholic Church, with indigenous and working people. With his wife, Zohmah Day Charlot (1909-2000), he nurtured students and friendships, maintained links lasting many years, and with his fine sense of history preserved many tangible records of his experience. He observed events and people precisely and wrote succinctly.