The monochrome woodcut, made in 1924, depicts two damned souls dancing in fiery agony, poked at by grinning horned demons with pitchforks. The top hat, white gloves, jewels and opera glasses show why.
It’s called “Rich People in Hell.” It’s one of the many striking works from “Mexican Prints at the Vanguard,” an exhibition now on view through Jan. 5 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The show explores Mexico’s deep tradition of social criticism and revolution-making through graphic art: 200 years of prints, posters, broadsheets and other dispatches from the anticolonial, anticapitalist avant-garde. With their pistoleros and peasants, fat plutocrats and grinning skeletons, the printmakers made cheap, plentiful and highly popular pictures, songs and poems for the masses. A century or more later, as “Rich People in Hell”shows, their work can still deliver a punch in the gut.
What viewers might be surprised to learn—and the exhibition does not explore—is that the man who made “Rich People in Hell,” and who, through his personal contributions and connections, amassed much of the Met’s entire collection of almost 2,000 Mexican prints and illustrated books, was a committed Roman Catholic who spent much of his long career making devotional and liturgical art.
He was Jean Charlot, an artist and scholar of French and Mexican Indian descent, born and trained in Paris. He moved in the early 1920’s to Mexico, where he joined the artistic renaissance being led by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and other now-renowned muralists. His groundbreaking fresco in Mexico City depicting a massacre of Aztecs by Spaniards was a seminal work of that post-revolutionary movement.
Charlot was the mural maestros’ friend and peer. But in one important way, he was not one of them. His “Rich People in Hell” is not political propaganda, but the other kind. It’s straight-no-chaser Christianity, evoking not Lenin but Luke.
“Rich People in Hell” was created for El Machete, a trade-union newspaper (and Communist Party organ) with a slogan that beats the hell out of “All the News That’s Fit to Print”: “The Machete Serves to Cut Cane, Open Trails in Shady Woods, Behead Serpents, Lop Off Bad Weeds and Humiliate the Arrogance of the Impious Rich.”
But when asked about the woodcut, Charlot once set an interviewer straight: “It is not political, but religious—the eye of the needle.” Of that Gospel message, Charlot said: “It was a narrow point of contact with the political artists. None of us had much love for the rich. The feeling has stayed with me.”
Charlot was born in 1898. His father was a businessman and a free-thinker; his mother was devout. As a teenage student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Charlot joined a small group of Catholic artists that called itself Gilde Notre-Dame. John Charlot, his son and biographer, wrote, “Charlot was an admirer of such writers as the Catholic mystic Léon Bloy and Jacques Maritain, who based their radical social reformism on a stringently interpreted Christianity.”
With a Mexican-born grandfather and a great-uncle who collected Mexican antiquities, Charlot was steeped from childhood in Mexico’s history and ancient artistic heritage. He traveled there, with his mother, in 1921, just in time to join the creative awakening bubbling up in Mexico City, assisting on Rivera’s first important mural, Creation, while also working on his own.
Charlot had much sympathy and admiration for his Marxist, atheist friends, who were at work building a new Mexican art suitable for their independent nation, fused from Indian and Spanish roots. By their accounts, that affection was warmly returned.
Mark McDonald, a curator in the Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints, who organized the exhibition and wrote in the Met’s Bulletin about it, said in an interview that the museum’s collection owes its existence and character to Charlot’s wide-ranging Mexican friendships and his eclectic, open mind.
Charlot first connected with the Met while visiting New York in the late 1920s. He started its Mexican print collection by donating many of his own acquisitions, urging other artists to give and later scouring the country for art with a budget from the Met.
“He was picking up stuff that maybe another, less open-minded artist might not pick up,” Mr. McDonald said. “He was so interested in ephemera, things such as flyers, posters and small items —time-sensitive objects. Not eternal paintings or sculpture.”
The works’ unifying attribute was graphic excellence, even in prints so cheap and lurid as to be despised by sophisticates. Charlot was an early champion of the Mexico City printmaker and illustrator José Guadalupe Posada. Now remembered for giving the world Mexico’s main artistic cliché, his animated skulls and skeletons, Posada was also known for gleefully grotesque drawings for penny gazettes with headlines like “The Man Who Eats His Own Children” and “Lovers Go to Hell on Account of a Dog.”
Charlot was deeply moved by folk art, especially the little votive paintings called retablos, made by the faithful to thank God or a saint for some heavenly intercession. These were, he wrote, “usually small oils painted on tin, piled high against the walls of the sanctuary around the venerated image, together with other testimonials of thanksgiving, such as crutches, photographs, trusses, and those silver cutouts that represent the miraculously healed limb—leg, spleen, ear, heart, foot, eye.”
Charlot was well qualified to recognize the kernel of old faith in the new work that surrounded him. He wrote, “So deep were the roots of modern Mexican art in its colonial past that my new friends, despite avowed Marxist aims, could hardly conceive at first of an art that was not religious.”
It did not matter what his free-thinking, anarchist friends might have said about their secular motivations and subject matter, painting with government money in a time of anti-clerical purges. Charlot still considered the muralists to be producing “astonishing examples of Catholic art.”
“The one puzzling thing in this Marxist paradise,” he wrote, “is the religious attitude of the folk, who hold guns and machetes as if they were holy candles, and finger sickles and hammers as if they were rosaries. Such thanksgiving, somewhat incongruous in revolutionary pictures, is a reminder that the universe created by Rivera is blown to architectural size from the microcosm of the retablo.”
Putting it another way, he wrote: “Mexican Marxists found it difficult not to hold on to the apron strings of the Mother they kicked.”
One very rare example can be seen in the Met’s Bulletin (though not in the exhibition): an illustration from a flyer titled “The Parceling of the Land to the Poor Is Not Contrary to the Teachings of Our Lord Jesus Christ or to Those of the Holy Mother Church.” The illustration is by the Communist, atheist Diego Rivera, of all people—an apparition of the Sacred Heart to a peasant plowing a field.
Charlot’s Mexican adventure proved to be a short interlude in a very long career as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, author, critic and teacher. He ranged from Paris to Mexico to New York to Hawaii, with stops in Colorado, Georgia, California and other places.
Charlot settled in Honolulu in 1949, where he lived until his death in 1979. He was a dear friend to the Catholic Church there. Visiting the Jean Charlot Collection at the University of Hawaii can provide a window into his astounding output. His vast oeuvre of paintings, prints, books, essays, sculptures, plays and other works ranges from intimate to monumental. You’ll find works like “Compassionate Christ” and the “Way of the Cross” in little churches in Hawaii, and his series of large tile murals of garbage collectors, laundry workers and other public employees ennobles what would otherwise be a nondescript office building in Honolulu.
Charlot, who maintained a long collaborative friendship with the Catholic poet Paul Claudel, remained at his core a Catholic artist and intellectual—though he humbly described his brand of religion as that of “parishioner.” His dream as a young man was to retire in old age to a woodworking shop in the shadow of a cathedral. For many years the Catholic publisher Sheed & Ward published his books of essays and drawings. Frank Sheed once observed:
Charlot’s faith must have been rock-built, invulnerable, or it could not have survived his work with the Mexican Muralists, who were not much given to patience with religion. I used to wonder how his faith stood up to them, how they tolerated a man so Christ-centered.
Maybe it was not as surprising as all that. Those who knew him said Charlot was an unusual kind of Catholic, devout without being dogmatic, carrying himself with great personal sincerity but relaxed among others, never proselytizing.
Yet he was able to recognize that any didactic artists who preach from walls and ceilings, Catholics or Communists, were basically in the same line of work. “When we refer today to art as propaganda,” he wrote, “we think of closed fists and red banners, forgetting that other kind which, for centuries, disseminated the lessons of martyrdoms and miracles.”
Charlot’s decades-long association with the Met ended with the donations of two works after his death in 1979. One was “Rich People in Hell.” The other was a Christmas card.
