Arturo García Bustos

Biography

In 1947 Arturo García Bustos helped Frida Kahlo with a mural at the Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez House in Coyoacán. He was twenty, and already belonged to the circle that would later be called “Los Fridos”.

He was born on 8 August 1926 in Mexico City, not far from the Zócalo square. His youth coincided with the heyday of Mexican muralism; by his own recollection, he watched Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco at work, and these “visual shocks” made him dream of painting murals. He finished high school at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria No. 1, specialising in architecture, entered the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 1941, and in 1943 moved to the school of painting and sculpture known as “La Esmeralda”. There he studied for five years with Frida Kahlo, Feliciano Peña, Agustín Lazo and María Izquierdo; according to other accounts, Diego Rivera was among his teachers too. Kahlo’s students formed a group of four who came to study with her in Coyoacán. They became known as “Los Fridos”. Rivera took García Bustos on as an apprentice in mural painting. He learned engraving and lithography at the Taller de Gráfica Popular under Leopoldo Méndez; by some accounts he joined it in 1945. Together with Guillermo Monroy and Arturo Estrada he founded the association Artistas Jóvenes Revolucionarios (Young Revolutionary Artists). Through Rivera and Kahlo he met the painter Rina Lazo, and married her in 1949.

The frescoes of these years were made quickly and in various places: at the Hotel Posada del Sol in Mexico City (1948), one depicting Zapata at the rural school in Temixco, Morelos (1950), and a series of seven murals for an ejido cooperative (a communal farming society), made with Rina Lazo and Atilio Carrasco (1952). According to some reports, in the 1950s he also took part in the murals of the Ciudad Universitaria, but confirmation is not available everywhere, and without checking it is better not to take it on trust.

In 1953–1954 García Bustos lived in Guatemala and taught engraving at the School of Fine Arts in Guatemala City. There he received the Peace Movement gold medal and first prize from the group Saker-Ti. In 1955, at the Fifth Festival of Youth in Poland, he won first prize and a gold medal; in 1957 he received a silver medal at an engraving exhibition in Moscow, and in Mexico, at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, first prize at its annual engraving show. In the same year, 1957, he visited Korea and China: in Pyongyang he studied with the Korean artist Wan Jon Ja, and in Beijing he took up Chinese printing. In 1958 he worked at the National Institute of Fine Arts with the graphic designer Miguel Prieto. Later he travelled to Cuba (1959).

Among his later murals: “Pobladores de las Siete Regiones de Oaxaca” (Inhabitants of the Seven Regions of Oaxaca) at the National Museum of Anthropology (1964); sixteen printed panels for the Venustiano Carranza House Museum in Cuatro Ciénegas, Coahuila (1969); nine panels for the Casa del Obrero Mundial in Mexico City (1971); “Oaxaca en la historia y en el mito” (Oaxaca in History and Myth) at the state government building in the city of Oaxaca (1980); and a mural at the cultural centre in Azcapotzalco. Though best known as a printmaker, he left a notable mark in mural painting as well.

He left the Taller de Gráfica Popular in 1967. In 1973 he became a member of the Academia de Artes, and in 1974 of the World Peace Council and of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.

He spent most of his life teaching and lecturing. He founded the engraving workshop at the Casa del Lago in Chapultepec, where he also gave classes in drawing and painting, and taught at the School of Fine Arts of the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca and at the Escuela de Iniciación Artística No. 3 in Mexico City. He lectured on the history of engraving and lithography at the state universities of Oaxaca and Sinaloa, and in Germany, Italy and Guatemala he spoke on Mexican muralism and printmaking. His solo exhibitions were held in Mexico City, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Michoacán and Guadalajara, and also in Guatemala, El Salvador, the United States, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Germany, the Soviet Union and North Korea. In 2005 eleven of his paintings were shown at the Diego Rivera Mural Museum.

He and his wife lived for more than sixty years in the colonial house Casa Colorada in Coyoacán. In 2006 part of the ground floor was opened as a gallery. García Bustos’s last exhibition, shared with Rina Lazo, was held at the Universidad Iberoamericana. He died in Mexico City on 7 April 2017.