Jean Charlot: Danza de Amanecer
SCHOLARSHIP AUCTION 2009
Artist: Jean Charlot
Title: Danza de Amanecer
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 13-1/2" x 17-1/2"
Date: 1974
A painting that inspires joy in both the dance and the exuberant relationship between grandmother and child, Danza de Amanecer is a gem of a painting by renowned 20th century artist, Jean Charlot (1898-1979). The many admirers of this masterwork appreciate its vibrant color contrasts and the jubilant gestures of the two dancers. Their angular forms derive from Charlot’s cubist legacy and reflect his respect for the folk art of the Mexican and Southwest cultures he so loved. Why are the child and grandmother so elated? Is it the sunrise that warms their hearts and brings the hope of a new day? Charlot, when he created a similar image on a stone lithograph in 1931, wrote: ”It is Luz’s mother (Luz was Charlot’s favorite model), age about ninety, and one of the grandchildren. It’s a sort of private ritual. There’s no real explanation.” (Jean Charlot, A Catalogue Raisonne by Peter Morse, 1976).
Danza de Amanecer (Dance at Daybreak) will be a favorite masterpiece in any collection and will continue to brighten each day.
Jean Charlot devoted himself to themes of family and the working class, revealing the universality of human nature. He was known as the “Champion of the Everyday” showing people doing things which were important to them – the simple, everyday activities that make up living. He wanted to make art popular, even useful and felt that could be accomplished by making art that was reproducible. His muses were Daumier, Posada, and the Images d’Epinal de Francois Georgian. Charlot felt that “art is to thought what man’s voice is to man – a fast and faithful means of communication”. He created art for the people – art that instructed, edified and amused. He is best known for his extraordinary sense of color and for the sublime simplicity of his compositions.
Jean Charlot was born in Paris and, being descended from parents he later described as “sundry exotic ancestors” -- (his father, a French businessman reared in Russia, and his mother, with her French, Mexican and Jewish lineage) he was drawn to the Mexican part of his heritage. From the age of two, he was surrounded by pre-Hispanic antiquities. He studied in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, exhibited in the Autumn Salon, and made the usual training tour of Brittany. During this time, Charlot painted small landscapes in oil on paper and pursued what was to become a lifelong interest in folk imagery. In 1920, his mother introduced him to Mexico where he sketched for archeologists excavating Mayan ruins. In 1922, after fighting in the First World War he decided to move to Mexico. He shared a studio with the painter Fernando Leal and became involved in the booming artistic scene promoting wood engraving and lithographic techniques. He quickly established himself in the art community of Mexico City and befriended Diego Rivera, David Álfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, main figures in the Mexican Mural movement in the early twenties (known as the Syndicate of Painters and Sculptors) that came to the U.S. Rivera credited Charlot for reviving and refining the art of true frescoes. His own composition, Massacre in the Great Temple, is the first mural painted as a fresco with a critical and historical subject, in what is called the Mexican Renaissance. Charlot and the others visited the U.S. and taught--mostly in New York--this true fresco technique. After working from 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. In 1947, he moved to Hawai’i to teach at the University where he remained for about thirty years until his death in 1979. While in Hawai’i he continued to create monumental murals, produce large numbers of lithographs and illustrate many books.
Hawai'i Preparatory Academy Collections