Julio Castellanos

Biography

Julio Castellanos held his first solo exhibition in 1925 in Buenos Aires. He was nineteen or twenty years old.

He was born on 3 October 1905 in Mexico City. In 1918 he entered the National School of Fine Arts (the Academy of San Carlos). His teachers there were Saturnino Herrán and Leandro Izaguirre, and among his fellow students were Agustín Lazo, Rufino Tamayo and Leopoldo Méndez. Later he studied drawing under Adolfo Best Maugard. In the 1920s he went to the United States to improve his engraving. There he met the artist Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, who, by a number of accounts, strongly influenced his development. On returning to Mexico, Castellanos took part in the Open-Air Painting Schools (Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre), which were then being set up across the country. After the exhibition in Buenos Aires he went to Paris, where he came to know European modernism; its mark is visible in his later work. He is known to have travelled in Europe, North America and South America in different years, but I cannot reconstruct the routes or the dates of the trips.

Back in Mexico, he joined avant-garde ventures: he belonged to the circle of the theatre group Teatro Ulises and took part in an exhibition organised by Los Contemporáneos, a group of Mexican writers and artists. There he showed six paintings that differed markedly from his earlier work.

There is little mural work by him. In 1933 he painted two walls of the Escuela Melchor Ocampo in Coyoacán, built to a design by Juan O’Gorman; these two murals remained the only ones he completed. He was then commissioned to paint a mural at a school in the Peralvillo district of Mexico City, “El ojo enfermo” (“The Injured Eye”), but it was left unfinished.

He gave far more time to easel painting and drawing. His pictures include “La cirugía casera” (1932), “El baño de San Juan” (1939), “El día de San Juan”, “El bohío maya” and a self-portrait of 1947. He also made lithographs and engravings. His work was shown in Buenos Aires, Paris and New York, and in Mexico and the United States he took part in several group exhibitions.

In 1946 the Ministry of Public Education honoured him and Frida Kahlo with an award. That same year Castellanos and his wife, Zita Basich Leija, had a son, Antonio, later a sculptor.

In 1947 Castellanos was appointed director of the Department of Plastic and Fine Arts. Soon afterwards, on 16 July 1947, he died in Mexico City, aged forty-one.