Alberto Beltrán

Biography

A drawing of Benito Juárez entering Mexico City hung for decades in the Zócalo metro station as a mural, with a caption crediting “an unknown artist of the last century”. Its author was Alberto Beltrán, who was alive and quite well known in professional circles. He replied that he would rather have lived in the nineteenth century.

He was born on 22 March 1923 in Tepito, a rough, poor neighbourhood of Mexico City, to Hesiquio Beltrán Franco and Josefina García. The family was poor, and he went no further than primary school: he had to work. In 1939 he entered the Escuela Libre de Arte y Publicidad, a free school of art and advertising, where he studied drawing, and soon he was making illustrations for local publishers. In 1943 he became a student at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, the national school of fine arts, where Carlos Alvarado Lang taught him the basics of engraving and Alfredo Zalce taught fresco painting. Much of his skill, though, he taught himself, including cutting linoleum. It was Zalce who in 1944 brought him into the Taller de Gráfica Popular, the People’s Graphic Workshop. There he made engravings on the Mexican Revolution, social criticism and peace, working alongside Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O’Higgins, Adolfo Mexiac, Fanny Rabel, Elizabeth Catlett and Mariana Yampolsky. The Workshop opposed American imperialism, Nazism, fascism and Franco’s regime. He remained in it until 1959 and several times served as its president. He signed his work “beltran”, with no capital letter and no accent.

In the late 1940s came the newspapers. His cartoons and drawings appeared in Excélsior, Novedades de México, Diario de la Tarde and La Prensa. He travelled to cities and mountain villages as a reporter, telling the story in drawings. He founded or co-founded several publications, among them El Popular, with Alejandro Carrillo Marcor. In the 1970s he helped found the daily El Día and directed its cultural supplement, El Gallo Ilustrado. In 1976 he worked with a children’s magazine, Caminito.

Books with his illustrations include Origen, vida y milagros de su apellido by Gutierre Tibón (1946), Juan Pérez Jolote: Biografía de un tzotzil by Ricardo Pozas Arciniega (1948), La ruta de Hernán Cortés by Fernando Benítez (1950), Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos (1954), La visión de los vencidos by Miguel León-Portilla (1959) and Las tierras flacas by Agustín Yáñez (1968). For these he used woodcut, metal engraving and lithography. He also illustrated Todo empezó el domingo by Elena Poniatowska. Part of his work grew out of trips to Indigenous communities: he drew for publications of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista and for Roberto Weitlaner’s book on the traditions of the Chinantla. He took part in literacy campaigns, often in Indigenous languages, and with the Secretaría de Educación Pública, the Mexican ministry of public education, produced textbooks in Spanish and other languages. He directed the Escuela Libre de Arte y Publicidad, where he had once begun.

Later he turned to murals and sculpture. In 1959, with Francisco Zúñiga, he made a relief on the Pulmonology Institute at the Centro Médico Nacional Siglo XXI. In 1967 he made for the outside wall of the Xalapa Museum of Anthropology, in Veracruz, the mural Quetzalcóatl y el hombre hoy, in mosaic tile, snail shells and ceramics; it was later moved to the campus of the Universidad Veracruzana. In 1969 he laid a mosaic on the vault of the Museum of the City of Veracruz, in 1972 he made a large glass piece for the Civil Registry of Veracruz, and in 1988 he painted an acrylic mural for the Attorney General’s office in Mexico City. He had a particular affection for Veracruz and thought of himself as a Veracruzano at heart.

Prizes came one after another: the Premio de Carteles de Alfabetización for a literacy poster (1953), the National Engraving Prize (1956), first prize at the Inter-American Biennial of Painting and Engraving (1958), the National Journalism Prize for his political cartoons (1976), third place in the Satire for Peace contest in the Soviet Union (1984) and the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes (1985). From 1966 he was a member of the Academia de Artes, and in 1993 he was named Creator Emeritus of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

He lived simply, never sold his engravings, did not always charge for book illustrations, and spent almost none of his savings. He wanted to use them to found a fund for the training of artists, but legal and financial difficulties prevented it. Near the end of his life he moved into the Club de Periodistas, a home for elderly journalists, and worked on the editorial board of the magazine Agua-Cero until his last days. He died in Mexico City on 19 April 2002. By his wish, the farewell was held at the magazine’s offices.

In the last year of his life there were three exhibitions of his work, but much of it was shown in copies, since the originals were lost or in poor condition. How much he made in all, and where the surviving work is kept, is not known exactly. The largest collection, donated by him to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, was published in 2003 as the book Alberto Beltrán, 1923–2002: Cronista e ilustrador.