dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: spanisch (spa/es)
akteur: Charlot, (Louis Henri) Jean
biografische angaben: * 8 de febrero 1898 en Paris; † 20. März 1979 en Honolulu. Pintor francés decendiente de imigrantes rusos activo en México y en los Estados Unidos.
Jean se mudó a la Ciudad de México en 1921. Ahí conoció el arte prehispánico el cuál siempre le asombró e influyó su obra. En sus inicios fue asistente del muralista Diego Rivera. También participó ilustrando las excavaciones en las ruinas de Chichen Itzá dirigidas por el arqueólogo estadounidense Sylvanus Morley. Más tarde, en 1949, se mudó a Hawaii, donde se dedicó a impartir clases de arte en la Universidad de Manoa en Hawaii. Continuó trabajando y viviendo ahí hasta su muerte en 1979. El pintor expresionista abstracto Kenneth O. Goehring fue su alumno.
Another union [Sindicato Revoluctionario de Obreros Técnicos y Plásticos] member was Jean Charlot, fine-featured, bespectacled, scholarly Frenchman, then twenty-five, with a dash of Mexican and a dash of Jewish admixture in his French ancestry. He left a Paris university to join the French army during World War I, served as an artillery officer, then came to Mexico which had filled his dreams since childhood and adopted it plastically and literally as his country. Later he resided in New York, but his work was still devoted to Mexican motifs. Though fresco work attracted him, he was more at home in small sketches, woodcuts, and paintings. Subtle, erudite, skilled in expressive distortion, he loads each work with the cerebral burden of some aesthetic investigation, succeeding every so often in solving one of his self-imposed problems with startling skill. Charlot is a devout Catholic with a touch of delicate mysticism in his creed, making it singular that he should have been able to work in amity and brotherhood with this Jacobin crew. The point of contact was his admiration of the humble common folk, women servants and burden bearers whose labors he delighted to represent monumentally within a tiny compass, and a strain of primitive Christian anticlericalism that mingled with his piety.