Federico Cantú Garza

Biography

Later in life Federico Cantú gave his year of birth as 1908 and his birthplace as Cadereyta Jiménez, a town in Nuevo León where his family came from. In fact he was born on 3 March 1907, most probably in Monterrey, shortly before the Revolution. His mother, María Luisa Garza, wrote novels; his father, the journalist Adolfo Cantú, opposed the regime of Porfirio Díaz. His childhood was divided between Nuevo León and San Antonio, Texas; the family returned to Mexico for good in the 1920s.

In 1922, at fourteen, he entered the Open-Air Painting School in Coyoacán, directed by Alfredo Ramos Martínez, and in 1924 he studied fresco briefly under Diego Rivera. That same year he left for Paris and settled on the Rue Delambre in Montparnasse. There he met Picasso, Alfonso Reyes, the poet César Vallejo and the sculptor Mateo Hernández, and he studied with the sculptor José de Creeft. At the Académie de la Grande Chaumière he drew so much that the drawings filled more than two chests; both were lost. What survived his son Federico Cantú Fabila later named the “Paris Collection”. Until 1934 Cantú lived sometimes in Europe and sometimes, briefly, in the United States. His first exhibition was held in Los Angeles, at the Exposition Park Museum; until 1931 he showed his work in America and Europe, and at home he exhibited for the first time only in 1933, at the Salón de Arte of the Ministry of Public Education.

In Mexico at the time the muralists set the tone, and he did not fit in with them.

Even on walls Cantú painted in a classical, academic way, combined ancient myth with modern symbolism and was the only major artist of his time to take up religious subjects. This pushed him to the margins. He objected: “Is it fair to discount me as a Mexican, just because my paints do not drip mole or sweat pulque?” The nickname that stuck to him means “the great forgotten one”. He read a great deal and loved François Villon above all, but also Alfonso Reyes, Rimbaud, Valéry, Byron, Goethe, Artaud and Éluard. His drawing was especially admired: into his historical and religious compositions he brought the people and the landscape of Mexico.

In 1934 he returned to Mexico, and that same year he painted one of his first murals together with Roberto Montenegro. Inés Amor’s Galería de Arte Mexicano showed him alongside Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, Tamayo and Montenegro. Soon he also opened a studio in New York, where his friends from Montparnasse had moved to escape the war; in 1940 he joined the Perls Gallery and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, at the Macy’s department store gallery and at the Tate Gallery in London. His work was collected by MacKinley Helm, whose book “A Matter of Love” he illustrated in 1946. From 1945 Cantú worked with Carlos Alvarado Lang in burin engraving and drypoint and illustrated poems by his friends Renato Leduc, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Antonin Artaud and Alí Chumacero. In the 1940s he taught at the school known as La Esmeralda, and in 1951 he lectured at the University of California.

From 1951 to the early 1960s he painted murals mainly in private houses; many of them were later bought by the government of Nuevo León. One of these houses belonged to an official, Benito Coquet, and when Coquet became head of the Mexican Social Security Institute in 1958, he invited Cantú to make sculptures and emblems for it. This is how “Maternity” came about, the image that became the institute’s symbol and was nicknamed “Our Lady of Social Security”. For the institute’s headquarters in Mexico City Cantú made “The Teachings of Quetzalcoatl” and “Reclining Mother”; the first was damaged by the 1985 earthquake and restored by his son and daughter-in-law, Elsa. Much has been lost, above all from the European years, and how much exactly is hard to say. Two stone slabs for the theatre of the Unidad Independencia housing estate were stolen in 1958, the day after he finished them; one of the copies of the emblem disappeared in the same way. The relief “The Archer Shooting at the Sun” (1961), about 650 square metres in area, carved into the Sierra Madre beside the highway between Linares and Galeana, collapsed in 2002, and the surviving pieces are now in a museum on the site. Murals for a church in San Miguel de Allende were defaced after a dispute with the commissioners over how the figures were painted. Also known are “The Informants of Sahagún” in the former monastery of San Diego, which housed the Pinacoteca Virreinal, and a mural on Greek myths in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León.

In 1970 the Palacio de Bellas Artes held a retrospective of his work, and in 1986 it honoured him in his lifetime, a distinction granted to few. His last monument, dedicated to Alfonso Reyes, dates from 1988. Federico Cantú died in Mexico City on 29 January 1989. His remains rest at the foot of his mural “God the Father and the Crucifixion” (1959) in the chapel of the Universidad Intercontinental in Tlalpan.