- Title
- Dance of the Malinches (Danza de las malinches)
- Date Made
- 1948
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 20 1/8 × 24 3/8 in. (51.12 × 61.91 cm)
- Accession Number
- AC1997.LWN.461
- 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. This canvas depicts two girls engaged in a popular mock battle called the “Dance of the Malinches” (danza de las malinches). Charlot first saw the dance, named after Hernán Cortés’s Indigenous translator, while visiting friends near Querétaro in 1926. Although Charlot left Mexico in 1928, he returned to versions of this scene throughout his career. Lurking beneath this playful performance, the tragic history of conquest is conveyed by the triumphant girl stepping on her fallen friend.
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
