Fernando de Szyszlo

Biography

In late-1940s Paris, Latin American artists and writers living in France met regularly at the Café de Flore. They argued about the same question again and again: how to enter the international modern movement without losing their Latin American identity. Among them was a young Peruvian, Fernando de Szyszlo. In Paris he met Octavio Paz and André Breton.

I think all his later work can be read as one long answer to that argument.

He was born in Lima on 5 July 1925. His mother was Peruvian, of mestizo descent; his father had come from Poland and was a geographer. In 1943 Fernando entered the school of architecture at Peru’s National University of Engineering, but gave up the idea of becoming an architect and moved to the school of plastic arts at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. After graduating in 1948 he left for Europe. There he looked at the old masters, above all Rembrandt, Titian and Tintoretto, while absorbing Cubism, Surrealism, Informalism and abstraction. He lived in Paris and in Florence. In 1955 he returned to Peru.

At home his work became one of the main forces for the renewal of Peruvian art. Szyszlo painted Peruvian subjects without depicting them: the themes were local, the language non-representational. He is described as one of the leading figures of abstract art in Latin America from the mid-1950s onwards, and as one of Peru’s foremost plastic artists. He was a painter, sculptor and printmaker, and he taught a great deal.

He taught in the United States as well. In 1962 he became a professor of art at Cornell University, and in 1965 he lectured at Yale University as a visiting lecturer.

His wife was the Peruvian poet Blanca Varela (1926–2009), and they had two sons; later, in 1988, he married Lila Yábar. Szyszlo’s paintings were collected by museums across the Americas: the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, the Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz, and, in Peru, the Museo de Arte de Lima and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Arequipa.

Fernando de Szyszlo died on 9 October 2017 in Lima, where he had lived and worked to the end.