Woman with Basket in Blue, 19/33

Alu Mai 2021 Silent Auction

Jean Charlot was a distinguished artist, teacher, art historian, and playwright. He was born in Paris and moved to Mexico in 1921, where he played an instrumental role in the Mexican Mural Renaissance, completing the movement's first mural in true fresco in 1922-1923. After working as an illustrator for an archeological expedition in the Chichén Itzá, Mexico, he came to the United States in 1928, where he worked as an artist, professor, and writer; moving to Hawai‘i in 1949 to teach at the University of Hawai‘i, where he stayed for over 30 years. There, he developed a close friendship with the world-famous local artist Madge Tennent and collaborated with Juliette May Fraser, an accomplished muralist in her own right. Charlot produced more than seven hundred prints in all major print media, beginning with early woodcuts produced in France and Mexico, and continuing through etchings and serigraphs created in Hawai‘i. Many of Charlot’s prints utilized the medium of lithography, both stone and offset. Lithography is a planographic printmaking process in which a design is drawn onto a flat stone (or prepared metal plate, usually zinc or aluminum) and affixed by means of a chemical reaction. These remarkable prints would be superb accents to the furnishings and collections in your home.

Footnote: Born in Paris, Louis Henri Jean Charlot (1898-1979) was descended from those he would later refer to as "sundry exotic ancestors" (Charlot 1954:99). He had French, Russian, Spanish, Sephardic, Mexican, and possibly Aztec ancestry!