Jean Charlot
Shepherdesses (Pastoras)1964

Not on view

Oil painting of five stylized figures in pink robes gathered under a stone arch, holding poles, with a large wheel on a staff and two small birds above

Artist or Maker: Jean Charlot
France, active Mexico, New York, and Hawaii, 1898-1979
Title: Shepherdesses (Pastoras)
Date Made: 1964
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 24 × 20 in. (60.96 × 50.8 cm)
Credit Line: The Bernard and Edith Lewin Collection of Mexican Art
Accession Number: AC1997.LWN.324
Classification: Paintings
Collecting Area: Latin American Art
Curatorial Notes: Jean Charlot, whose maternal grandfather was born in Mexico City, grew up in Paris surrounded by his family’s collection of Mexican art and antiquities. This early exposure to Mexico’s rich popular-art traditions and Mesoamerican artistic legacy had a profound impact on his future aesthetic interests. Living in Mexico through most of the 1920s, Charlot created dozens of small-scale easel paintings featuring Indigenous subjects. Although he left the country in 1928, he returned to Mexican themes throughout his career. This late canvas repeats a composition he first painted in 1925 after visiting Chalma, a small town near Cuernavaca with an important pilgrimage site. It depicts the traditional dance of the shepherdesses (danza de las pastoras), which was performed each year around Christmas to celebrate the birth of Christ. Charlot also created a lithograph of this subject (M.72.118.5) in his 1933 Picture Book, a collaboration with Los Angeles−based printer Lynton R. Kistler (18971993), which features a collection of thirty-two original prints inspired by Charlot’s time in Mexico.

Charlot played a pivotal role in the development of the Mexican mural movement. Soon after arriving in Mexico City in 1921, he was commissioned to paint one of the murals at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory School; now known as the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso). Widely considered the movement’s birthplace, the school houses important works by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. Charlot was also a prolific writer, as demonstrated by his seminal books Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 1785–1915 (1962) and The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920–1925 (1963), which helped to codify formative moments in the history of Mexican art.

Rachel Kaplan

2024
Copyright: © The Jean Charlot Estate LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Jean Charlot
Shepherdesses (Pastoras)1964

Not on view

Artist or Maker: Jean Charlot
France, active Mexico, New York, and Hawaii, 1898-1979
Title: Shepherdesses (Pastoras)
Date Made: 1964
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 24 × 20 in. (60.96 × 50.8 cm)
Credit Line: The Bernard and Edith Lewin Collection of Mexican Art
Accession Number: AC1997.LWN.324
Classification: Paintings
Collecting Area: Latin American Art
Curatorial Notes: Jean Charlot, whose maternal grandfather was born in Mexico City, grew up in Paris surrounded by his family’s collection of Mexican art and antiquities. This early exposure to Mexico’s rich popular-art traditions and Mesoamerican artistic legacy had a profound impact on his future aesthetic interests. Living in Mexico through most of the 1920s, Charlot created dozens of small-scale easel paintings featuring Indigenous subjects. Although he left the country in 1928, he returned to Mexican themes throughout his career. This late canvas repeats a composition he first painted in 1925 after visiting Chalma, a small town near Cuernavaca with an important pilgrimage site. It depicts the traditional dance of the shepherdesses (danza de las pastoras), which was performed each year around Christmas to celebrate the birth of Christ. Charlot also created a lithograph of this subject (M.72.118.5) in his 1933 Picture Book, a collaboration with Los Angeles−based printer Lynton R. Kistler (18971993), which features a collection of thirty-two original prints inspired by Charlot’s time in Mexico.

Charlot played a pivotal role in the development of the Mexican mural movement. Soon after arriving in Mexico City in 1921, he was commissioned to paint one of the murals at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory School; now known as the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso). Widely considered the movement’s birthplace, the school houses important works by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. Charlot was also a prolific writer, as demonstrated by his seminal books Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 1785–1915 (1962) and The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920–1925 (1963), which helped to codify formative moments in the history of Mexican art.

Rachel Kaplan

2024