First Steps is a lithograph created in 1946 by Jean Charlot. It is pencil signed in the lower right margin and was published by Associated American Artists in an edition of 250. First Steps was printed on cream wove paper by José Sanchez at Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City. The references are Morse 485 and AAA 764. The image measures 14 x 9-7/8 inches.
Charlot created several lithographs entitled First Steps. His imagery gives motherhood the monumentality that it justly deserves. He portrays the Mexican mother in her roles of protector, nurturer, and teacher and, in doing so, defines the importance of family in society.
Jean Charlot, muralist, painter, printmaker, and illustrator, was born in Paris, France on October 29, 1868. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris before serving in the French Army during World War I. His maternal grandfather was a French-Indian mestizo and his mother, Anna, was an artist. After Charlot's father died in 1921, he and his mother moved to Mexico City and he became fascinated with Mexican art and manuscripts and studied the Aztec language. Charlot sketched for archeologists excavating Mayan ruins and he assisted Diego Rivera and other members of the Syndicate of Painters and Sculptors on a series of mural paintings in Mexico City.
Charlot and his mother moved to the United States in 1928. After working in 1929 with lithography printer George Miller in New York, Charlot began a lifetime collaboration in 1933 with Lynton R. Kistler, master lithography printer in Los Angeles, reputedly making the first stone-drawn color lithographs in the United States. Between 1934 and 1935, Charlot worked for the WPA Federal Arts Project and painted murals for the Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan. In 1944, Josef Albers invited Charlot to teach at the Summer Institute of Black Mountain College and, in 1947, he headed the art school at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and worked with Lawrence Barrett printing lithographs. In 1949, he moved to Hawaii where he taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The work of Jean Charlot is represented in the collections of the Black Mountain College, Asheville, North Carolina; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the British Museum, London; the Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Jean Charlot Collection at the University of Hawaii Library, Manoa; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the La Salle University Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, Florida.
Jean Charlot died in Honolulu, Hawaii on March 20, 1979.
