Luis Filcer

Biography

At seventeen Luis Filcer read a biography of Van Gogh. After that he began drawing the market workers of Mexico City, whose poverty he saw every day, and then went to Guanajuato to get to know the life of the miners and to draw them and the hard conditions in which they worked.

His father considered painting a pastime. Filcer managed to change his mind only by selling his first painting at the Galería Romano.

Filcer was born on 4 December 1927 in Zhytomyr, into a Jewish family. When he was six months old, the family left. The departure is usually explained by persecution of Jews after the revolution, although by then ten years had passed since the revolution; the family never spoke about what they had been through. In Mexico City they settled in the La Lagunilla district. His father knew a few words of Spanish and sold clothes in the street, and later opened a sweater factory with other immigrants. The boy disliked school but learned to draw; to help his father he trained as an accountant. Working in the family business was hard, but, he recalled, it was how he came to know a great many people, and he often drew them just for the pleasure of it. At sixteen he entered the Academy of San Carlos: he studied in the morning, worked in the afternoon and painted in the evening, after the shop had closed. He then spent three years studying drawing and painting in the workshop of the Spanish painter José Bardasano.

In 1949 he worked at the Taller de Gráfica Popular. In 1949 and 1950 the Círculo de Bellas Artes awarded him gold and silver medals, and in 1953 he received the José Clemente Orozco gold medal. He represented Mexico at biennials in Chile, Japan and England. An award from the Círculo brought him a scholarship for two and a half years in Paris and Rome. At the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris he spent hours drawing models, and outside its walls, together with his friend the painter Juvenal Sansó, he painted fishermen, peasants, dockers, factory workers and beggars. He went with Sansó to Rome to continue his studies, but there a teacher asked him why he did not paint more bohemians; Filcer was angered and left the Italian school after a month. He toured the museums of London, Madrid, Amsterdam, Rome and Florence and said that he learned more that way than in class, and that the first paintings by Goya he saw changed his life. His work was also included in “Jewels of Mexican Art”, an exhibition that the Palacio de Bellas Artes sent around the world for fifteen years.

In 1957 he returned to Mexico and at first painted for the Galería Havre. The success of that show allowed him to travel to Europe again and to visit Jerusalem and several cities in the United States. He then lived for twenty years in the Netherlands, where he had many solo exhibitions, including at the De Beyerd, Van Bommel-van Dam and Frans Hals museums, and in 1988 he was shown at the Grand Palais in Paris. In 1998 Maastricht made him a Knight of the City. Back in Mexico, he exhibited at the Museo de Arte Moderno (1990, 1991), at the museum of the National Autonomous University (1994), at the Museo Nacional de la Estampa (1998), at the Centro Cultural Mexiquense and the Museo Casa del Risco (2000), and in 2001 at the Museo Francisco Goitia in Zacatecas and the Jaski Gallery in Amsterdam. In all he had more than three hundred exhibitions, above all in Mexico, the Netherlands, the United States, Belgium, Japan, France, Israel, Italy and Germany.

He found his manner early: sharp chiaroscuro and thick brushstrokes meant for a sudden, strong effect. He said of himself that he painted everything he lived through, including his own fantasies and demons. In Van Gogh he was drawn to the hard life of the miners, in Goya to the images of war, and in Orozco, whose influence can be seen in some of his works, to sarcasm. There is no idealisation in his paintings: they show the emaciated faces and bodies of people struggling to survive, and they mock indifference, intolerance and people’s failure to understand one another. He made works about the Tlatelolco massacre, the casinos of Las Vegas, the Mexican Revolution and the Mexico City Metro. Later he turned to mystical and religious themes.

Luis Filcer died on 19 July 2018 in San Miguel de Allende.