Ignacio Aguirre

Biography

At fourteen Ignacio Aguirre was already fighting: from 1915 to 1917 he served under Venustiano Carranza against Pancho Villa.

He was born on 23 December 1900 in San Sebastián del Oeste, in the state of Jalisco, the son of Ignacio Aguirre de Santiago and Delfina Camacho. When the war ended he worked as a sorter in several mines, and in 1920 he took part in the uprising in support of Álvaro Obregón. He came to painting through friends, Julio Castellanos and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano: he began learning to paint from them and from Diego Rivera. From 1921 to 1929 he worked as a civil servant in the Secretariat of Communications and Public Works and in the president’s private secretariat. There is also a less reliable version of these years: that in 1921 he left for Argentina, fearing arrest, lived in Avellaneda and returned to Mexico later. I could not confirm this, so it is left out of the main account. In 1928 he joined the theatre group Teatro Ulises and worked in it as a stage designer. From 1931 he taught drawing and painting at the National University of Mexico and at the National Institute of Fine Arts. In 1934 he became one of the founders of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR), in 1937 he took part in creating the Taller de Gráfica Popular (the Popular Graphic Workshop), and in 1953 he became its director. He was a member of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana and for long periods worked alongside Pablo O’Higgins and Alfredo Zalce. In the 1930s he became friends with the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who photographed him during his first trip to Mexico, including in the 1934 picture “Santa Clara”.

His work was shown in New York in 1940, 1942, 1944 and 1948. In 1952, with other artists, he founded the Frente Nacional de Artes Plásticas (the National Front of Visual Arts). The exhibition he regarded as his most important was this group’s tour of Eastern Europe in 1956–1957; by some accounts it also reached China. In Mexico he showed an exhibition titled “La China, nueva vista por un mexicano” (China, a new look by a Mexican). In 1965 Aguirre left the Taller de Gráfica Popular.

He made woodcuts, painted in oil, designed tapestries, engraved, and worked in watercolour and pencil. His engravings are considered his most political work: “El Regreso del Bracero”, “Campesinos”, “Adelita” and “Zapata”. Among his landscapes are “Paisaje de Morelia”, “Manzanillo” (1966) and “Paisaje Mexicano” (1976). His line is hard and his colours intense, favouring green, yellow, pink, blue and red, and his subjects are most often rural and popular scenes.

Aguirre died on 11 July 1990 in Mexico City.