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French born artist Jean Charlot became enchanted by Mexican culture and the Native people when he first visited the country in 1920. His mother’s family was originally from Mexico City and he was eager to discover his Mexican roots. It was this first visit which began Charlot’s life long obsession with the art and the people of Mexico and set him on the path to becoming one of Mexico’s most iconic artists.
Just one year later Charlot moved to Mexico with his mother in 1921, spurred by his desire to become involved in the blossoming muralist movement. Once there, he became heavily involved in the movement. He began first as an assistant to notorious Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and later went on to create his own mural in the Escuela Preparatoria entitled The Massacre in the Main Temple (1922-1923), which is believed to be the first work of the movement to be completed using true fresco. Charlot proved to be a technical asset to the muralist movement due to his formal European training in the medium of fresco and was able to teach the other muralists how to properly prepare and apply fresco. Charlot also completed the Shield of the National University of Mexico, with Eagle and Condor at the Pan American Library in 1925.
Charlot, like many of the other muralists saw the mural as the art of the people. It could be used to reach workers and bourgeois alike and teach them the beliefs and values of the Revolution; which drew attention to the plight of the indigenous peoples and glorified the travails of the Mexican worker. Also, like the other muralists, Charlot made prints using various techniques such as wood block, etching, and lithograph. Similar to the mural, the print was seen as an art of the people due to its ability to be replicated many times and widely dispersed. They bring the Mexican native and the worker into the realm of high art, but rather than relegating them to become inaccessible to the very people who the artists depict by painting their images in oils, they instead elect to create them in the very easy to reproduce and thus easily accessible medium of the lithograph. Therefore, immortalizing and glorifying the lives of the people in a way they can understand and appreciate.
Charlot’s lithograph First Steps is a perfect example of rendering native subject matter in a modern European style. A small child is shown in the act of taking its first steps suspended in the upright position by its mother, who holds the ends of the cloth wrapped around her child’s middle, preventing the child from falling. The forms of the mother and child are simplified into basic geometric shapes shows the modern interest in the abstraction of life. Heads, arms and bodies are reduced to circles, cylinders and rectangles.
Though the execution of the work is decidedly modern, the subject of mother and child in their native dress is of indigenous Mexican origin. The large ruffled collar on the mother’s dress is taken from the ruffled dresses worn by the indigenous women of Mexico. The cloth used to suspend the child also echoes the daily lives of the indigenous people. Native women used cloths such as this to carry their children on their backs as they went about doing daily activities such as cooking or gathering crops. The weight Charlot gives to these figures is also influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, particularly that of pre-Columbian art which treated the human body as an extension of the earth. As a child Charlot was exposed to pre-Columbian art through his maternal Grandfather who owned a collection of indigenous artifacts. Diego Rivera also gives many of his figures this same weighted quality, possibly to set them apart from the long, aquiline forms found in European art, so it seems reasonable to also believe that Charlot might have also been influenced through his close work and association with Rivera.
Allie Brandt