1916–1977
José Antonio Gómez Rosas
José Antonio Gómez Rosas (1916–1977), nicknamed “El Hotentote”, was born in Orizaba, Veracruz, and studied at the National School of Plastic Arts in Mexico City. He painted theatre curtains that mocked the art world, with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco and the officials of the art establishment among their figures. His contemporaries found that irony uncomfortable.
Biography
His nickname was El Hotentote, “the Hottentot”. It is by this name that he is remembered in Mexico.
Gómez Rosas was born in Orizaba, in the state of Veracruz. The year of his birth is given differently: most often 1916, but sometimes 1917, with the date 16 October. Which is correct is hard to check, and I keep 1916 as the more common one.
In 1936 he entered the National School of Plastic Arts (ENAP) in Mexico City. At first he took individual subjects there, and the following year he was already studying on the course for teachers of plastic arts. His studies went unevenly: according to the researcher Zurián, who assisted him at San Carlos, Gómez Rosas chafed at the ossified, traditional system of teaching.
He is known above all as the author of large painted theatre curtains, and in them one can see why he was a nuisance to his contemporaries. His circle included Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and he looked at them with a fine irony. The curtain “Funcionarios de Bellas Artes” (“Officials of Fine Arts”) gathers a group of people that includes Carlos Chávez, then director of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA). Luis Sandi and Fernando Gamboa pump air into Diego Rivera, turning him into a balloon. His large body of easel painting, packed with calla lilies, flies out of the Palace of Fine Arts and, as it falls, crushes the people. Another curtain, “La tragedia griega” (“The Greek Tragedy”), mocks the presentation of a prize for the plastic arts. Orozco receives it as if it were a lottery win from the hands of the secretary of public education, Jaime Torres Bodet. The critic Justino Fernández carries the train of his toga. Behind the podium an angry Rivera consoles a tearful Frida Kahlo, although her second place has brought her a purse of five thousand pesos, which she holds in her left hand. The jury of Dr. Atl, Julio Castellanos and Francisco Goitia looks very pleased with itself. At one end Siqueiros, in warrior dress, addresses the other losers, and above the group hover the Greek symbols of wrath and envy.
Gómez Rosas died in 1977.
Profile notes