Enrique Echeverría

Biography

The first job of Enrique Echeverría Vázquez was designing window displays for a pharmacy. At the same time he studied aeronautical engineering at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, the national polytechnic institute, but left it for the sake of art.

He was born on 14 July 1923 in Mexico City. His father, Martín Echeverría, came from Navarre in Spain, and his mother, Florentina Vázquez, from Apizaco in the state of Tlaxcala. The Spanish roots of the family are visible in his early paintings.

After the polytechnic he entered the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda”, the national school of painting, sculpture and printmaking, and also studied topography and hydrology at the Escuela Superior de Ingeniería y Arquitectura, part of the Ministry of Public Education. The critic Paul Westheim explained this spread of interests by saying that one point of view was not enough for Echeverría: any solution he found he regarded as only a step along a road. He then studied with the Spanish painter Arturo Souto and for about ten years tried his hand at various genres under his guidance. To my mind, this habit of trying out approaches shows clearly in his later shifts from one style to another.

In 1952 a grant from the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica allowed him to travel to Europe, where he spent most of his time in Spain and in several capitals. At first he was drawn to Goya, El Greco, José Gutiérrez Solana, Picasso and Impressionism, and then to the semi-abstract painting that dominated Paris in the 1950s.

In those same years he took part in founding the Galería Prisse (1952). It was founded together with Vlady, Alberto Gironella, José Bartolí, Héctor Xavier and José Luis Cuevas. Painters of the Generación de la Ruptura found it hard at that time to exhibit in state institutions such as the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and the art market in the country was run by the established Mexican School of Painting. The gallery was meant to break that hold.

His first solo exhibition took place in 1954 at the Galería Proteo in Mexico City. Later came shows at the Pan American Union Building in Washington (1955), the Main Street Gallery in Chicago (1957) and the Vieille Galerie in Brussels (1958). In 1954 he was admitted to the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. In 1957 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and married Esther Sierra. In 1961 he took part in the biennials in Tokyo and São Paulo, and in 1962 in São Paulo again; there were also group exhibitions in France, Colombia and Brazil. His 1964 exhibition at the Galería de Arte Mexicano strengthened his standing in Mexico. In all he had more than twenty-five solo exhibitions in Mexico, not counting shows in the Americas and Europe. In 1966 he lectured at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and in 1972 he taught at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 1968 his work “Oc” won the Salón’s Acquisition Prize. He also illustrated Augusto Roa Bastos’s book “El perro y la sombra”.

The 2003 retrospective “Tiempo Suspendido” at the Palacio de Bellas Artes divided his work into four periods. The earliest is tied to his apprenticeship with Souto and to Spanish landscape tradition; it includes portraits of his mother and of the writer Pío Baroja. In the second, figuration gives way to abstraction with elements of Cubism, and the influence of French painting and Nicolas de Staël is noticeable: “Maternidad”, “Guitarra para Ester”, “Niños bajo el Puente”.

By the end of the 1950s he was interested in all the current movements, abstraction above all: figurative painting, he felt, too easily turns into propaganda. In 1959 he wrote that little by little he had left realism in order to convey vibration, colour, space, time and speed. In the early 1960s he went to New York and began working more with the palette knife than the brush, in rich colours, as in “Sin Titulo (Cabeza)” of 1961. It is a kind of still life in which light, shadow, solidity and colour matter more than form.

In his last works figurative elements returned, although he had never abandoned them entirely. They are flowers and other natural motifs with an emphasis on colour: “Ofrendas”, “Reminiscencias del Paisaje” and the more personal “Umbral”, made shortly before his death.

Echeverría died on 25 November 1972 in Cuernavaca. An exhibition in his honour was held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1973, and a retrospective there thirty years later.