Gabriel Flores

Biography

In 1955 the organisers of the Corn Fair in Guadalajara needed a portable mural on the theme “Corn in the Colonial Era”. The commission went to the twenty-five-year-old Gabriel Flores, as did two others, to Raúl Anguiano and Armando Abundis. The mural itself has not survived.

The artist’s full name was Gabriel Flores García. He was born on 8 February 1930 in Guadalajara, Jalisco; some sources give El Arenal as his birthplace. At seventeen he began studying painting in the workshop of José Vizcarra, and in 1948 he entered the School of Arts and Letters of the University of Guadalajara. There, with Guillermo Chávez Vega and Ignacio Martínez, he founded the Neo-realist group. Its members opposed abstract art, drew up a manifesto of seventeen points, and held open-air exhibitions, lectures and debates about the social role of painting. Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco are named among his early influences. In 1950 Flores won the school’s first prize and began teaching drawing and painting there.

In 1951 his first exhibition, which included crucifixions among other subjects, was held at the Benjamin Franklin Library in Guadalajara; critics praised him as a draughtsman. From 1952 to 1955 he lived in Mexico City and took part in several mural projects alongside established muralists, among them David Alfaro Siqueiros and Juan O’Gorman, including work at University City. Back in Jalisco, he gave up teaching and devoted himself entirely to murals.

After the corn mural came a ceramic mural for a school in Lagos de Moreno on the theme of Mariano Azuela’s novel of the Revolution (1956). In 1958 the governor of Jalisco, Agustín Yáñez, commissioned two works for the State Public Library: “The Printing Press in Jalisco” and “The Jaliscan Parnassus” on the dome of the reading room. The latter is usually called the most characteristic work of his early period: clear figurative drawing and soft, subdued colours.

In 1960, at the Experimental Theatre of Jalisco, Flores painted “Allegory of the Theatre in Mexico”, with a nude female figure of Indigenous appearance. The figure provoked protests from influential local people, and the artist was in effect forced to cover her breasts. At about the same time he painted “War and Peace”, a portable mural for a bank in Zamora. It was later shown in Mexico City at the exhibition “Art of Jalisco”. He received the Jalisco Award in the visual arts in 1962, and the city declared him a “favorite son”. That year he also painted five panels on the history of New Galicia in the stairwell of Guadalajara’s city hall. He was dissatisfied with the work and said that if he could cover one of his murals it would be this one: he had done it in haste before a trip to an exhibition in Europe.

The second half of the 1960s was the high point of his career. In 1965 came “Philosophy and Science”, on the frontispiece of the Salvador Allende auditorium at the University of Guadalajara’s Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities. In it he turned to poverty, social injustice, discrimination and the consequences of industrialisation. The mural “Los Niños Héroes” in Chapultepec Castle honours the cadets who died in the Battle of Chapultepec during the Mexican–American War. It shows a cadet, according to tradition Juan Escutia, leaping from the tower wrapped in the flag so that it would not fall into American hands. The date is given differently: 1967 in one list of works, 1970 in another. Flores himself, according to his widow, was also dissatisfied with this work. For the Sauza distillery in the town of Tequila he painted “Tahona and Fiesta” (1969) and “Mythology and History of Tequila” (1970). All of these works are in acrylic, not fresco on wet plaster: Siqueiros, too, used polymers in his murals.

Around 1970 his subjects changed: instead of history and universal themes, he began to paint his own view of social and political events. “Worship of Money” and “Prints of Life” (1975) went almost unnoticed and were taken off display. For more than ten years the canvases lay in his widow’s house, and then they were given to the Forum of Art and Culture of Guadalajara. His other works of these years include “Our Civilization” (1979) and “The Failure of Our Civilization” (1980) for the university, and “The Homeland” and “Justice and Liberty” (1988) for the Attorney General’s Office. In 1971 he won first prize in an international competition held by the USSR for the centenary of Lenin’s birth. He is also said to have painted a great deal away from the wall: in his easel paintings the most frequent subjects are Christ, Don Quixote and Juan Escutia in the flag. Flores loved Don Quixote “even for his failures”.

In 1984 the government of Jalisco awarded him its Medal of the Arts.

His last mural, “The History of Medicine” at the Antiguo Hospital Civil in Guadalajara, was unveiled on 29 June 1993. According to those close to him, it was the work he valued most: in it he drew together everything he had done before.

Flores died in Guadalajara on 14 December 1993. In 2005, when the University of Guadalajara and the state congress honoured him as a distinguished Jaliscan, his remains were moved to the Rotunda of Illustrious Jaliscans. His statue, by the sculptor Miguel Miramontes, stands there too. It seems to me that his words “I do not want much; I have what I like, above all my freedom” are worth remembering when one looks at the neglected walls: mould, cracks and bird droppings on many of his murals have been noted in the local press.