Head of Christ

Jean Charlot

This is Jean Charlot's rare first print, done in France when he was just eighteen years old. He wrote about this work in the catalog raisonné by Peter Morse, page 3:

"I wanted to make a repeated image that could be sold...This was probably the first thing of mine put up for sale, even though it didn't sell. I was one of a group of young Catholic artists - 'La Gildel Notre Dame' - in Paris before I went into military service. Maurice Denis was our 'elder statesman'. I aquired a roller and rolled the watercolors on my block. My original was probably a Spanish sculpture."

This impression, one of nine states, is likely one of, according to Morse, "Eight early proofs in final state that are printed in watercolors, variously red, purple, or blue...". This image is a purple/brown with a touch of red in the lower left corner. It is pencil signed with the artist's early signature.

Charlot brought this skill to Mexico in 1922 when he set up his printmaking workshop in Coyoacan and began to teach woodcut. This impression was from the collection of friend and collaborator, author Dorothy Rhoads.

Jean Charlot was born in Paris, France on October 29, 1868. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris before serving in the French Army during World War I. His maternal grandfather was a French-Indian mestizo and his mother, Anna, was an artist. After Charlot's father died in 1921, he and his mother moved to Mexico City and he became fascinated with Mexican art and manuscripts and studied the Aztec language. Charlot sketched for archeologists excavating Mayan ruins and he assisted Diego Rivera and other members of the Syndicate of Painters and Sculptors on a series of mural paintings in Mexico City.

Charlot and his mother moved to the United States in 1928. After working in 1929 with lithography printer George Miller in New York, Charlot began a lifetime collaboration in 1933 with Lynton R. Kistler, master lithography printer in Los Angeles, reputedly making the first stone-drawn color lithographs in the United States. Between 1934 and 1935, Charlot worked for the WPA Federal Arts Project and painted murals for the Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan.

In 1944, Josef Albers invited Charlot to teach at the Summer Institute of Black Mountain College and, in 1947, he headed the art school at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and worked with Lawrence Barrett printing lithographs. In 1949, he moved to Hawaii where he taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Charlot died in Honolulu, Hawaii on March 20, 1979.