Jean Charlot -Mexico's Brethren Printmaker

The prints of Jean Charlot reveal a man in love with foreign culture, and the exotic indigenous peoples who inhabit them. Charlot originally hailed from Europe, but he came to live in the Americas and embraced the culture, the food, women, the innocence of youth and the nurturing of family life.

He loved to portray daily rituals and embraced small moments in one’s life. The gentle simplicity of his compositions and blended colors vibrate life under the surface of one’s skin. The gentle kiss of a mother to her infant, and the intimacy of watching a mother combing a young girl’s hair are examples of an artist who is presently witnessing the event. He is not a voyeur sneaking a peak, at an intimate moment. He is part of the activity, and so are we.

Charlot’s compositions are closely cropped to his subjects. There isn’t a lot of excessive space around his figures, and their short, squat stances pull us closer to them, as though they are children to be cared for, looked after, and protected. Charlot’s Hawaiian-inspired images show mythic figure which look like statues, or personified spirits in the natural settings. His colors are flatter and more colorful that the previous Mexican-inspired work. The later pieces express more peacefulness and a oneness with the environment.

In all, Charlot brings small moments of observation to a grander level of tranquility and internal peace. I hope you enjoy seeing these prints, and reading more about his life, which was fairly instrumental in re-introducing Jose Guadalupe Posada’s work to the Mexican people; and bringing Posada’s skeleton figures to such joyful prominence every year when we celebrate the Day of the Dead.

Bio
Jean Charlot (1898 –1979) was a French/ American artist, who worked in Mexico and the United States. Charlot was born in Paris, but he claimed to have Aztec roots. This was because his mother was from Mexico, his grandfather was a French-Indian mestizo, and his Spanish great grandfather had married a woman who was half Aztec.

Charlot was fascinated with pre-Columbian artifacts and Mexican manuscripts. He studied art in Paris before serving in the French Army during WWI. In 1921, Charlot and his mother went to Mexico City, where he met Fernando Leal, Diego Rivera, Dorothy “Zohmah” Day and Pablo O'Higgins. He later married Day, who had originally moved to Mexico to be involved with the Mexican art movement.

Charlot is credited for having brought the work of Mexican printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada, to international acclaim. Posada was prolific, having produced more than 15 thousand political satirical prints and lithographs, which were known from Mexico’s pre-revolutionary newspapers. Because Charlot was impressed with Posada’s cartoon-esque style, he sought out Posada's former publisher and in 1928 and1930, he published catalogs of Posada’s prints. Posada's images ultimately influenced several great Mexican artists like Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Pablo O'Higgins, and still is a major influence on today’s younger Mexican artists.

After the Mexican Revolution, mural painting became one of the more accessible visual means to convey the government’s messages about social justice. Charlot participated in this mural art movement with his fresco called "Massacre in the Templo Mayor".

From 1926 to 1928, he spent time at Chichen Itza, helping to excavate, trace and copy bas-reliefs and painted surfaces from their newly revealed ancient Mayan temples. This had a major influence upon his own art.

While Charlot lived in the US, he also did some commissions for the Work Projects Administration's Federal Arts Project. In 1947, he moved to Colorado and spent two years teaching fresco painting and making lithographs at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. He then moved to Hawaii to teach art at the University of Hawaii. His latter works reflect images from his thirty years’ living on the island, and they exude his fascination with nature and the Hawaiian people.

Public Collections:
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Cleveland Museum of Art
Hawaii State Art Museum
Honolulu Museum of Art
University of Hawaii at Manoa

1940 - illustrated Tito's Hats, which was written by Mel Ferrer.
1972 - published "An Artist on Art: Collected Essays of Jean Charlot", on Mexican art history.

The Artistic Politics of David Alfaro Siqueiros

Okay, my friends, today we are talking about one of Mexico’s heavy-hitters, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974, born José de Jesús Alfaro Siqueiros).  He was a Mexican painter/printmaker who worked with Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco, as part of the Mexican Muralist movement. Overall, Siqueiros believed art should be public, educational, and ideological. 

During his career, he visited the United sattes, the Soviet Union, and several Latin American countries as a guest lecturer and visiting artist. His prints are stellar examples of mass and volume and expressive abstraction. Their capacity to evoke passion and anger are beyond the world's sometimes limited scope of understanding of printmakers and the work they do. His background as a painter helped keep his original prints from Looking like prints, thus making them unique compared with his colleagues. 

Throughout his career, Siqueiros' art accentuated angles, muscles and joints of the human form in his portrayal of a strong, revolutionary figure. In addition, many works prominently feature hands, which could be interpreted as another symbol of heroic strength through work.

Born in  Chihuahua, but growing up in Guanajuato, many details of Siqueiros’ childhood were confusing, in part because he gave misleading information regarding his life. What is known is that Siqueiros was the second of three children. His father, Cipriano Alfaro, was well-off, and his mother, Teresa Siqueiros, watched after their children: David, his sister, Luz, and his brother "Chucho" (Jesús). When Siqueiros was four years old, his father sent the children to be raised by their paternal grandparents after his mother had died.

The main part of Siqueiros’ life was spent between making his art and his interest in politics. Schooling aside, the opportunity to network with fellow students for political debate and marches and protests was a larger part of his educational experience. While in school, he came across the writings of Dr. Atl, who in 1906 published a manifesto calling for Mexican artists to look toward their ancestral roots to develop a national Mexican art style. This inspired the young artist to become active in politics. At the age of fifteen, Siqueiros was involved in a student strike at the Academy of San Carlos of the National Academy of Fine Arts, which eventually established of an “open-air academy”. Three years later, he and several of his friends from the School of Fine Arts joined Carranza’s Constitutional Army. In 1914, Siqueiros became interested in the army’s “post-revolutionary” infighting.  He traveled throughout Mexico during his military service and saw the difficult conditions of his country’s poor working class.  It instilled in him a lifelong passion to speak for the masses with his art and his political activities.

In 1919, he went to Paris and learned about Cubism, the work of Paul Cezanne and there he met Rivera, with whom he traveled to Italy to study the work of the Renaissance fresco painters. During this period, Siqueiros' artistic and political activities had become conjoined and  by 1921 he wrote a manifesto in Vida Americana, called "A New Direction for the New Generation of American Painters and Sculptors." He called for a "spiritual renewal" to bring back classical painting while infusing "new values" about the “modern machine” and the “contemporary aspects of daily life". Through this style, Siqueiros hoped to create a bridge between a national and universal art.

In 1922, Siqueiros returned to Mexico City work for the government with fellow artists Rivera and José Orozco painting murals in several prominent buildings. In 1923 Siqueiros helped found the Syndicate of Revolutionary Mexican Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, which addressed the problem of widespread public access through its union paper, El Machete, the weekly paper that became the official mouthpiece for the country's Communist Party. 

Siqueiros remained deeply involved in union labor activities, as well as the Mexican Communist Party, until he was jailed and eventually exiled in the early 1930s for his political connections.  Siqueiros produced a series of politically themed lithographs during this period, which were exhibited in the United States. His lithograph Head was shown at the 1930 exhibition “Mexican Artists and Artists of the Mexican School” at The Delphic Studios in New York City.   Siqueiros also worked in Los Angeles, where his murals there told the story of America's forceful relationship with Latin America. Siqueiros’s work was honored at the XXV Venice Biennale in the first ever Mexican exhibition with Orozco, Rivera and Rudolfo Tamayo in 1950, which recognized the international status of Mexican art. 

Siqueiros was involved with the Communist Party who in 1940 unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Leon Trotsky. In 1960, he  was unjustly arrested for openly attacking the President of Mexico and protesting the arrests of striking workers and teachers. While imprisoned Siqueiros continued to paint, and his works continued to sell.

He later settled in Cuernavaca where he lived until his death in 1974.

Most of this man's printmaking efforts were composed of strong figures, and the later colorful works, moved toward abstraction and abstracted brushwork that didn't look like his contemporaries. They are in fact quite curious pieces and call to mind spiritual musing upon his own travails and the seemingly bi-polar nature of his career path. I find the subtlety of his prints color, the massive weight of his self-portraits and the political bent of his action figures a reasonable and persuasive argument for his diverse subjects. In all, they relate closely to his painting style, and the somewhat chopped off compositions which remind me of El Greco's paintings of earthly and heavenly realms simultaneously depicted. There is also an element of Francisco Goya's Disasters of War prints with his butchered figures. Siqueiros butchers the body of Christ, showing his suffering, floating his body between the earth and heaven. 

Some people don't get those weirdly surreal images, but no matter. Siqueiros' work was consistent showing us the suffering of humanity, the suffering of the poor and the suffering of an artist as all artists suffer to bring forth their view of the world. His world wasn't a calm or happy place, but it was real, and it still speaks volumes for present-day Mexico's  suffering masses about the societal and political woes that have befallen that poor abandoned country.

The Pride of Jamaica: Albert Huie

Jamaica's painter/printmaker Albert Huie - who died in 2010 at the age of 89, was a man truly in love with his work. He was born in the town of Falmouth, in Trelawny, and was a largely self-trained artist. Born into a poor family during colonial rule,  his grandmother was only person of his family who encouraged his artistic ambitions.

At 16 years of age, Huie moved to Kingston and took a position as a china painter.  His family wanted him to become a teacher so he began some formal art training with the Armenian painter Koren der Harootian. He then met and became a part of the circle of friends and acquaintances of sculptor  Edna Manley. She became one of Huie's first admirers and he later co-founded an art school with her called the Jamaica School of Art. He taught classes there from 1940-44.  

 In 1939, Huie's work was selected for two world art exhibitions, one at the New York World's Fair (he won a prize) and the San Francisco Golden Gate exhibition. He later exhibited his work in the United States, Canada, Cuba and England, including an exhibtion at  the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia.

Huie was more known as a painter, but he also did a series of relief prints. They are considered rare compared with the numbers of artworks he produced, but they are gemes of the local life in Jamaica and give us a glimpse into the story-telling world of the working-classes. Indeed, his black and white prints has been compared favorably with the Mexican muralist painter Diego Rivera, and they evoke a rhythmic, visceral passion for life.

 In 1943, Huie's  first major solo exhibition was at the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston, which was notable because it was the first solo show ever given there to any living Jamaican artist

Huie then went to the Ontario College of Art on a British Council Scholarship in 1944. He went on to study aesthetics at the University of Toronto.  Later that same decade,  he moved to Britain and studied at the Leicester College of Art, and the Camberwell School of Art in south-east London, were he studied under artists Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers.

The National Gallery’s Chief Curator, Dr. David Boxer said,  “Albert Huie in these early days turned principally to portraits and to figure compositions which dealt with the everyday life of the average Jamaican. Baptismal scenes, the reaping of crops, market vending, washing by the river, all became subjects for his precocious talent.”

By the early 1950s, Huie’s style was fully developed. His work was relatively small in scale but it possessed an epic, monumental feel reminiscent of Diego Rivera’s murals.  His visual ties are also aligned with artists like Cortez, Millet, and Courbet in that he chooses to show the masses working together, although one doesn't sense the drudgery of the job as much as a comraderie of a team effort to complete a task.

Dr. Boxer also wrote, “Huie has subjected reality to  into a single composition showing a myriad of activities: growing sugar cane, hoeing, planting, reaping, dressing, sorting, bundling, and carting, all enacted against the almost Cubist backdrop of the sugar factory.”

The only thing that seemed a slight to Huie's artistic dominance in Jamaica was that the intellectual elite of his own countrymen had turned away from the type of art ne produced in favor of the untutored, Rastafarian-influenced artists, whose work resembles Haitian voodoo imagery. These were thought to be more representative of Jamaican sensibilities  linking themselves with African their African roots.

In spite of that, Huie was often described as the father of Jamaican art. He produced folkloric simplified compositions, showing his love of Jamaica's rich landscape and its beautiful people. His legacy is still growing and we can only hope the people of Jamaica and the world continue to embrace his rhythmic and sincere depictions of the working class.

Huie 's genial personality was much loved and he was always celebrated whenever he returned to Jamaica.


Awards:
The Institute of Jamaica, Silver Musgrave medal -1958
The Institute of Jamaica, Gold Musgrave medal -1976
The Order of Distinction -1983
Commander of the Order of Distinction -1992
Jamaican postage stamp, "The Vendor"

Pablo O'Higgins' Unique Trail in US/Mexican Printmaking

Pablo Esteban O'Higgins (born Paul Higgins Stevenson ,1904 - 1983) was an American-Mexican artist, illustrator and a blond-haired, blue-eyed Presbyterian  who became a celebrated Mexican muralist. He  was born in Salt lake City, UT and was raised between there and San Diego, CA. His father was a lawyer of blue-blood 'English of Mayflower' descent, and his mother  was a refined upper-middle class housewife. He had one grandfather who was Scots-Irish, who died before Pablo (then Paul Higgins) was born.  In 1922, he went to study at the Academy of Arts in San Diego, but soon afterward he became a student of and assistant to the famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Rivera said if he ever had a son, he’d wanted him to be like O’Higgins. 

O'Higgins was so taken with Mexican culture from an early age when he lived on his father's rach in California. It was there that he met and became acquainted with the Mexican workers. As for their politics, that came in 1924 when after moving to Mexico permanently, he joined his mentor Rivera and became a member of the Mexican Communist Party (which he remained a member until 1947.)

From 1928-1930 Pablo O'Higgins worked on Cultural Missions in Durango, Hidalgo, Veracruz, and Zacatecas.  In 1930, he co-published, with Jean Charlot and Frances Toor, Las obras de José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican engraver. In 1931 O'Higgins founded, together with Leopoldo Méndez and Juan de la Cabada, the Proletarian Intellectual League.  He also contributed illustrations to the newspaper of the USA Communist Party, called the Daily Worker.  

1933 was a busy year for O'Higgins. He was teaching drawing in primary schools. His illustrations won him a Soviet scholarship to go to Moscow to study at their Academy of Art. He also contributed artwork to Mexican Folkways magazine, and he co-founded the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, LEAR). 

One of O'Higgins' major contributions to printmaking came In 1937, when he joined with fellow artists Leopoldo Méndez and Luis Arenal  and became co-founder of the world-famous political graphic arts workshop, Taller de Gráfica Popular ("People's Graphic Workshop"). The Taller became an inspiration to many politically-motivated artists and  a place for artists to speak their minds, so much so that it became a major forum for political artwork in Mexico.  Recently the Taller was commemorated with a publication and a tour of some of the artists' works  by some of the artists associated with the Taller... O’Higgins educational and printmaking contributions continued when he worked with San Francisco artists Byron Randall, Victor Arnautoff, and Adelyne Cross Erikson establish a graphic arts workshop in 1947. With seemingly endless energy, in 1947, he worked with Los Angeles printmakers Jules Heller and Arnold Mesches to establish the Los Angeles Graphic Arts Workshop, which was the predesessor of the now famous Tamarind Institute in New Mexico. O'Higgins also taught at the California Labor School in San Francisco in 1945 & 1949, and in 1948 he and Xavier Guerrero founded the Sociedad para el Impulso de las Artes Plásticas, and the Salón de Plástica Mexicana in 1949. 

Joining the National Assembly of Artists in 1952, O'Higgins exhibited his paintings at the Salón de Plástica Mexicana. In the late 1960s he traveled and taught mural painting courses in Russia and Eastern Europe. 

A side note *O'Higgins once followed Tina Modotti, the radical photographer, to Russia. In the 1950s, he was placed on the U.S. attorney general’s blacklist, and on a Mexican Govt. deportation list . Being from a well-to-do Anglo-American family, he kept quiet about his father’s 1915 involvement as an assistant attorney general in the  execution  of Utah miner and labor martyr Joe Hill. In 1959 Pablo O'Higgins married María de Jesús de la Fuente Casas, a lawyer from Monterrey , Nuevo León. 

O’Higgins is admired not only for his art but also for his love of Mexico and his determination to bridge the two countries and their cultures through art. O'Higgins painted the people he respected… the ordinary, hard-working Mexican campesinos and workers whom he respected as the “Real Mexicans”. His subject was their struggle for dignity. O'Higgins will be remembered for his desire to bridge the two cultures he loved, and for promoting the arts with  so many worthwhile organizations.

Particular noteworthy is that O'Higgins'portrait is included in a mural in Chicano Park, in San Diego County, the largest collection of Chicano murals in the U.S. He appears next to Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso,  Che Guevara, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. 

Awards and Exhibitions:

San Francisco at the Art Center Gallery, 1925 and 1927 

John Levy Gallery,1931,

Gallery of Mexican Arts

Association of American Artists, 1943

Burial with honors at the El Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City

First prize, Salón Anual de Pintura, Grabado y Escultura of the INBA , 1959

Elías Sourausky Award in Arts, 1971 

He also exhibited in Cuba, Spain, Los Angeles and Mexico. 

He was the only non-native Mexican artist whose work was included in the first major exhibit of Mexican art held in the United States at the MOMA's,"Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art" ,New York, 1940.

Murals:
Ship Scalers Union, Seattle, WA, 1945
International Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) in Honolulu, HI, 1952. 
and a dozen others in Mexico

Hale Aspacio Woodruff: The African-American Regionalist

Hale Aspacio Woodruff was born in 1900 in the southern Illinois town of Cairo. After the death of his father, Woodruff and his mother moved to East Nashville, Tennessee. He was always interested in art, but segregation prevented him from receiving art education classes at that time, although he did do cartoons for his high school newspaper.

Woodruff later went to study art at the Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana. He served as a political cartoonist for an African American newspaper, called The Indianapolis Ledger. Woodruff also studied for a short time at the Harvard's Fogg Museum School. After a brief stay in Chicago, where he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, Woodruff returned to Indianapolis in 1923, where he developed one of the country’s most successful black branches of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA).  

It was in 1926 that Woodruff received an award from the prestigious Harmon Foundation which allowed him to study abroad. He went to Paris in 1927 and studied at L’ Académie Scandinave, and at  L’ Académie Moderne with the great painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. During that time Woodruff developed a distinctive American regionalist style albeit inspired by Cubism. In Paris, Woodruff also painted landscapes and black genre, although he matured into an abstractionist emphasizing African symbolism. Woodruff's prints are clean and beautifuly carved images. The scenes aren't always so easy to take; showing a broken down existence, and the brutal price African-Americansoften paid to exist in a society that didn't want them. 

In 1931, Woodruff decided to return to the States. He took a teaching position and taught for  at Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University) for fifteen years, where he was one of Georgia’s first college professors of studio art. Due to his hard work and enthusiasm, the school became a mecca for young African-American artists. Woodruff also conducted art classes on the Spelman College campus for Atlanta University's Laboratory High School and for Spelman and Morehouse College students.

Woodruff brought art to Atlanta University from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection, and works by fifty-four contemporary black artists sponsored by the Harmon Foundation. He started a national competition series of art exhibitions for African-American artists, called the Atlanta University Art Annuals, from 1942-70. The university's amazing collection of African-American art is entirely due to Woodruff's efforts to bring it to the public. 

He once said, "The one thing I think that must be guarded against is that, in our efforts to create a black image and to assert our quality, our character, our blackness, our beauty, and all that, the art form must remain one of high level."

In the late 1930s, he painted black history murals for Atlanta's Talledega College Slavery Library, reflecting the great mural painters’ tradition of Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera - the latter with whom Woodruff briefly studied in Mexico in 1936. While Woodruff may be best known for his murals, drawing parallels between Mexican art and African art, his prints about black lynchings and poverty are his most striking and poignant.

“I think abstraction is just another kind of reality” – H.A. Woodruff

On a personal note, Woodruff married Kansas teacher Theresa Ada Barker in 1934. They had one son, Roy, in 1935.

Woodruff moved to New York to teach art at New York University in 1946; retiring in 1968. In the mid 60s, he and Romare Bearden established Spiral, a weekly discussion group for African American artists. The group was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 

Woodruff died in New York in 1980. His legacy for the African-American art movement in Georgia and New York is critical to the understanding and accessibility of their work to mainstream venues across this country. Woodruff tirelessly encouraged countless young artists to pursue their talents and dreams and for this we must pay homage to his work as a lightning rod of enlightenment for the masses. 

Recognition and Awards:

Julius Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship, 1943

Harmon Foundation fellowship, 1926

First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal – Chair, US visual arts committee

Memberships:

New Jersey Society of Artists

New York State Council on the Arts  

Society of Mural Painters

Public Collections:

Atlanta University  and Talledega College, Atlanta, GA

Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI

Howard University and Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

New York University and New York Public Library, NY

Newark Museum, NJ

Murals: 

1951 - The Art of the Negro, Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries. Atlanta, GA

1949 - The Negro in California History, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, CA 

1939 - The Amistad Mutiny,Talladega College, Atlanta, GA