Ramón Alva de la Canal

Biography

The first fresco of twentieth-century Mexico, if what has been written about him is to be believed, appeared in 1922 at the San Ildefonso College in Mexico City. It was called “The Landing of the Cross” (El desembarco de la cruz), and it was painted by the thirty-year-old Ramón Alva de la Canal.

He was born on 29 August 1892 in Tacubaya, then a separate town and now a district of Mexico City, and was given the name Ramón Pascual Loreto José at birth. He studied at the Academy of San Carlos, then at the open-air painting school in Coyoacán under Alfredo Ramos Martínez. He took part in the Mexican Revolution, as did Dr. Atl and José Clemente Orozco; little is known of his part in it. In the early 1920s he was brought into the work by the Secretary of Education, José Vasconcelos, who recruited artists to paint public buildings. In 1923 Alva joined the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, set up on Vasconcelos’s initiative. Working alongside him in this field were Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Orozco, Jean Charlot, Fermín Revueltas and Carlos Mérida. A year earlier, in 1922, he had learned woodcut from Charlot; his first work in the technique was the cover of “Plebe” by Germán List Arzubide, published in 1925. Most of his engravings are connected with his political activity.

In 1921–1926 he belonged to the circle of the Stridentists, a Mexican avant-garde movement, together with Leopoldo Méndez and Fermín Revueltas, and designed many of its publications. In 1928 he was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Group of Painters “30-30”; its members also included Revueltas, Fernando Leal, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma and the Cuban Martí Casanovas. The group was linked to the open-air painting schools.

Among his murals I will single out four for the Secretariat of National Defence: “La paz”, “La Guerra”, “El dolor Humano” and “La Victoria” (Peace, War, Human Pain and Victory). In 1938, together with an artist named Pepe Díaz, he painted the monument to José María Morelos on the island of Janitzio in Michoacán: fifty-six fresco panels, by general agreement his largest and most important work. In the same year he began a mural at the university law school in Xalapa but did not finish it. His fresco “La enseñanza” (Teaching) in Coyuca de Catalán, in Guerrero, was lost when an earthquake destroyed the school.

He taught at the National School of Fine Arts and at a middle school, and taught engraving at the People’s Painting Centres. At the end of the 1950s he became head of the School of Plastic Arts in Xalapa.

The stage interested him as much as the wall. In 1932 he formed a theatre group at the Palace of Fine Arts with Germán Cueto, Lola Cueto and Roberto Lago, and in 1934 he became head of the children’s theatre department at the Secretariat of Public Education. He helped to revive puppet theatre in Mexico and ran a theatre with his two sisters. He is also known as a portraitist. In one statement he wrote that to understand and make art one needs above all sensitivity, delicacy of spirit, a certain nervous make-up and the will to embrace art. The cities in his pictures, in scholars’ assessment, are shown with sympathy: as places where technology is within people’s reach and where they can fulfil their potential.

In 1981 he was elected a member of the Academy of Arts of Mexico. He died in Mexico City on 4 April 1985. In 1989 Javier Audirac made a documentary film about him.