French artist Jean Charlot once joked that he had stayed in Hawai'i for so long — nearly 30 years — because he didn't have enough money to leave. But the truth was that Charlot had found in the Islands a culture that endlessly fascinated him.
Charlot was many things: muralist, painter, writer, book illustrator, cartoonist, teacher and playwright. But more than that, Charlot was an artist whose portrayal of ancient Hawaiians in his art glorified their past.
Charlot once said he didn't see himself as an artist but more of an artisan — "a man who handles well the tools of his craft."
He was born Louis Henri Jean Charlot in Paris in 1898. His mother was a well-known painter, and as a child, the young Charlot wandered through the Louvre, gazing for hours at his favorites, the Italian primitivists.
His art studies were interrupted by World War I, during which Charlot served as an artillery officer with the French army.
In 1920, he moved to Mexico to live with an uncle. Mexico was undeniably attractive to the young artist, and he could trace family roots there, too — his great grandmother was of undiluted Aztec stock. In Mexico, Charlot discovered his love of painting primitive cultures while working on an archaeological excavation of an ancient Mayan city in the Yucatan. He helped uncover and record pre-Columbian wall frescoes.
Later, he lectured and taught at Columbia University, Yale and Smith College, among others. He came to Hawai'i in 1949 to teach a summer class in fresco-painting at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.
For Charlot, Hawai'i was a case of "love at first sight," he once said. He became a professor of art, and Hawai'i became the family home.
While in Hawai'i, he painted numerous massive works: the frescoes at Bachman Hall and Jefferson Hall on the UH-Manoa campus, those at the Leeward Community College theater, and the mural outside the United Public Workers building on School Street. The public works were an expression of Charlot's effort to reach as wide an audience as possible. He considered himself "a popular artist."
And Charlot was prolific. He produced 63 murals and monumental sculptures, wrote 24 books, illustrated 51 books and completed seven portfolios of prints.
Hawai'i offered a culture as heroic as the one he knew in Mexico, and the artist embraced it, learning to speak Hawaiian, writing plays in the language and creating paintings and murals that drew heavily on Polynesian themes.
The dean of the Hawai'i art establishment, Charlot was a short, frail-looking and gentle man.
In 1974, he was diagnosed with cancer of the prostate. Radiation treatments and chemotherapy kept the disease under control for four years and left him confined to a wheelchair during the last months of his life.
Until the end, he remained an active artist and scholar. Charlot died in 1979. He was 81.
