Raul Anguiano; great Independent obit ( Painter and muralist )
Hyfler/Rosner
08 February 2006
Raúl Anguiano Valadez, painter, sculptor and muralist: born
Guadalajara, Mexico 26 February 1915; married (one son, one
daughter); died Mexico City 13 January 2006.
His paintings:
http://www.mexconnect.com/MEX/kyron/kyanguiano1.html
http://www.zermeno.com/Vota.JPEG
http://www.pasqualeart.com/anguiano/
http://art.fullcoll.edu/exhibitions/Anguiano%20Exhibit/
Raúl Anguiano was the last of Mexico's great 20th-century
muralists - the last of those who had worked with Diego
Rivera but one who took the influence of Mexico's 1910-17
revolution to a new, sometimes surrealistic level.
Internationally, he was perhaps better known for his oil
paintings, notably those portraying indigenous Mexican
culture, and particularly images of Mayan women from the
Lacandon jungle near the Guatemalan border. His work, in
which he said he "sought to glimpse the soul of the Mexican
people", has featured in more than 100 exhibitions worldwide
and examples hang permanently in locations from the Museum
of Modern Art in New York to the Vatican, which houses his
mural La Crucifixión.
Born during the revolution of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho
Villa, Anguiano, as a child and young man, was taken not
only by the Mexican revolutionary images of artists such as
Rivera but by painters from the faraway colonial power,
Spain, notably Picasso and Salvador Dalí. Anguiano's
earliest works could only be described as Cubist and
Picasso's influence was clear, including that of Guernica on
his later murals.
By the time of his death, Anguiano's paintings were selling
for six figures in US dollars. He bequeathed most of his
movable works to Mexico City and to a museum named after him
in Guadalajara.
Raúl Anguiano Valadez, eldest of 10 children of a cobbler,
was born in Guadalajara, capital of the state of Jalisco, in
1915, at the height of the revolution. Gifted at drawing as
a child, he opted against normal school and attended the
city's Open Air Art School from the age of 12. By the age of
19, he had moved to Mexico City, meeting Rivera and José
Clemente Orozco and studying their work, and he painted his
first mural that same year, in a school in the capital.
In 1935, still only 20, he became the youngest painter ever
to be featured in an exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas
Artes, before teaching art at the capital's National
Autonomous University (Unam) and founding the Popular
Graphics Workshop to help young artists branch out into new
fields of the visual arts.
From 1936, he moved into a surrealistic period, which was to
last a decade, when he produced some of his greatest works
portraying freaks, prostitutes, circus clowns and acrobats,
including La Mujer Rosa y el Cirquero Gris ("The Pink Woman
and the Grey Circus Performer", 1941).
Anguiano later moved back closer to realism. After visiting
the Lacandon jungle in the state of Chiapas, he concentrated
on portraying native Mayan women, notably in his
Nativity-like Nacimiento en la Selva ("Birth in the Jungle",
1953), depicting the divine birth of a Mayan child king, and
El Rebozo ("The Shawl", 1983), showing an indigenous woman
draped in a white shawl. His best-known painting, however,
is La Espina ("The Thorn", 1952), in which a saint-like
Mayan woman sits gouging a splinter out of her foot with a
knife. The work sold for $156,000 at Christie's Latin
American auction in New York on 25 May 2004.
Raúl Anguiano worked almost until the end. He was 88, and
teaching art students at the East Los Angeles College in
California, when he completed his last and largest mural for
the foyer of the college's Performing Arts Auditorium.
Measuring 68 feet by 13, it depicts the history of
20th-century Mexican art and depicts his fellow muralists
Rivera, Orozco and David Siqueiros.
Phil Davison