"Charlot" (Portrait of Charlie Chaplin)
Cléanthe (Cléante Carr)
American, 1911–2001
c. 1932
A lithograph that depicts the small, mustachioed screen tramp—the artist aiming to capture the figure’s comic pose and underlying melancholy in a single printed image.
What strikes you is the contrast between the figure’s oversized, rumpled trousers and tiny bowler hat and the wistful, rouged face that reads as both clownish and vulnerable against the sketched urban stoop.
By translating a popular film character into lithography, the print bridges early cinema and modern printmaking, showing how artists used popular imagery to explore character, performance, and mass culture.
Medium
Lithograph
Dimensions
plate: 17 3/16 × 9 3/16" (43.7 × 23.4 cm); sheet: 21 × 14 15/16" (53.3 × 37.9 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
Accession
695.1940
Palette
Exhibitions
