Nemesio Antúnez

Biography

At seventeen Nemesio Antúnez won a French-language competition, and the prize was a trip to France. There he first saw the paintings of Picasso, Juan Gris and Miró.

He was born on 4 May 1918 in Santiago, the eldest child of Nemesio Antúnez and Luisa Zañartu. His brother Enrique Zañartu became a painter, his brother Jaime Antúnez a sculptor. He finished secondary school at the College of the Sacred Hearts. In 1938 he entered the school of architecture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and graduated in 1941. He showed his first solo exhibition, of watercolours, in 1943 at the Chilean-British Institute of Culture in Santiago.

A Fulbright scholarship took him to Columbia University in New York, where he received a master’s degree in 1947. At the same time he began working at the studio Atelier 17 under Stanley William Hayter, who applied printmaking techniques to Surrealist art. He worked there alongside his brother Enrique; by some accounts Yves Tanguy, Kurt Seligmann, Jacques Lipchitz and Joan Miró passed through the workshop, and all of them tried old printing techniques. In 1950 the French branch of Hayter’s workshop moved.

In 1953 he returned from Paris to Santiago and tried to introduce printmaking into university teaching, but without success: at the University of Chile it served reproduction more than original creation. So in 1956 he founded his own Workshop 99, named after the street number on Calle Guardia Vieja. He took its principles from Atelier 17: teacher and pupil pursue technical and artistic research together, with freedom to experiment and a high standard of technique. Metal was preferred (burin, etching, aquatint), although in Chile woodcut had until then been the stronger tradition. To my mind, the main thing the workshop did was to draw young artists to printmaking. In the same year Antúnez received the Critics’ Prize, and in 1958 he moved the workshop into the university, where a printmaking specialisation was opened within the art department. In 1961 he became director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Chile and founded its Society of Friends of the Museum there. Three years later he went back to the United States as cultural attaché of the Chilean embassy; there he painted the mural “Heart of the Andes” for the United Nations. Together with the Brazilian attaché Thiago de Mello he organised four American Biennials of Engraving in Santiago, held between 1964 and 1970.

In all, Antúnez painted fifteen murals, five of them in Chile. In Santiago these are “Luna” and “Sol” (commissioned in 1955, with gold and silver threads and leaf, for the landings of the Gran Palace theatre and cinema), “Quinchamalí” and “Terremoto” (both of 1958). “Terremoto”, a red work of more than thirty square metres, covered the wall of the vestibule of the Nilo cinema. The fifth mural, “Bailarines con volantines”, is in the Open-Air Museum in Valparaíso. The Santiago works were declared national monuments in 2011, but by 2012 “Quinchamalí” was peeling from damp, and the owner of the building was unwilling to preserve it.

In 1969 Antúnez returned to Chile and became director of the National Museum of Fine Arts, and the Senate awarded him the Medal of Chile for achievement in cultural work. From 1971 he hosted a television programme, “Ojo con el Arte” (literally “Watch Out for Art”). In those same years he played the President of Uruguay, Jorge Pacheco Areco, in Costa-Gavras’s film “State of Siege”, shot in Chile. After the military coup of 11 September 1973 he left his post and the country, settling in Catalonia. He returned to Chile in 1984, exhibited in Santiago, Curicó, Concepción and Temuco, and two years later reassembled Workshop 99 in the Casa Larga in the capital. In March 1990 he again took charge of the National Museum of Fine Arts and ran it until his death; in August he revived the television programme, now on Chile’s state television.

In 1993 President Patricio Aylwin awarded him the Gabriela Mistral Order of Merit for contributions to education and culture. Antúnez died in Santiago on 19 May 1993. That same year a stamp was issued with his “Tanguería en Valparaíso”, and a year later the government set up the Nemesio Antúnez Commission. Exhibition halls, schools and streets across the country bear his name.