Raúl Anguiano

Biography

A woman of the Lacandon people, Maya of the Chiapas rainforest, sits digging a thorn out of her foot with a knife. “La espina” (“The Thorn”) is considered Raúl Anguiano’s masterpiece; for many years it illustrated the free textbooks of Mexican primary schools.

His Indians, to my mind, are above all contemporaries: he painted Lacandon women roasting howler monkeys, “Nákin de perfil”, and the destruction of the natural world they live in.

José Raúl Anguiano Valadez was born on 26 February 1915 in Guadalajara, at the height of the Mexican Revolution, the eldest of a cobbler’s ten children. He began drawing at five, copying photographs of film stars and celebrities: Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, Charlie Chaplin, Álvaro Obregón, Venustiano Carranza, the bullfighter Rodolfo Gaona. At twelve he left school for Guadalajara’s Escuela Libre de Pintura. His teacher Juan Ixca Farías (Ixca means “potter” in Nahuatl) showed his pupils prints after Michelangelo, Raphael, Murillo’s workshop and Luca Giordano, and the boy knew the murals of Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros from photographs in magazines. He also studied with José Vizcarra and José Salomé Piña. In 1933 Anguiano left the school and organised a group, the Jóvenes Pintores Jaliscienses.

In 1934 he moved to Mexico City, met Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, and that same year painted his first mural, in a school. In 1935, aged twenty, he became the youngest artist ever shown at the Palacio de Bellas Artes: together with Máximo Pacheco he exhibited works on factories, smelting and the workers’ movement. In 1936 he received a commission for the mural “La educación socialista” for the Carlos A. Carrillo school. He joined the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, and in 1938, with Leopoldo Méndez, Alfredo Zalce, Pablo O’Higgins and Fernando Castro Pacheco, he founded the Taller de Gráfica Popular, where he made etchings and lithographs in support of workers and peasants. That same year his first solo exhibition was held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

He tried many styles, and the strongest influences on him were Picasso and Orozco. His early works are close to Cubism; from 1936 to about 1946 came a Surrealist period: dreams, the anxieties of the age, circus performers and prostitutes, the paintings “La llamada del instinto”, “Caín”, “Volviendo a la tierra”, “El sueño marino”, and a series of drawings from dreams in cold silver-grey tones. In 1941 he studied and taught in the United States. In the 1940s, after visiting the Lacandon rainforest, he turned to realistic depictions of Maya women, and in April 1949 he took part in the first expedition to the ancient murals of Bonampak; his sketches of them went into the book “Expedición a Bonampak. Diario de un viaje” (1959). From 1957 to 1966 he painted in an Expressionist manner, and from 1970 he returned to realism, with vivid colour and Mexican motifs. He described his language as realism, but not naturalistic realism. At its base there was always firm drawing and a strict geometry, which he reinforced by studying Cézanne. Later came a book he illustrated on the world of the Huichol, “Mawarirra” (1972).

In all he painted about fifty murals, mostly in Mexico and the United States; there are some in Jamaica, too, and in the Vatican (“La Crucifixión”). For the Museo Nacional de Antropología he made “Rituales mayas”, for the Procuraduría General de la República the “Trilogía de la nacionalidad”; there are murals at the Secretaría de Educación Pública, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cámara Nacional de Comercio, and in the states of Jalisco and Guanajuato. In 1999 he painted a mural for the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, and his last and largest was an autobiographical mural measuring 68 by 13 feet in the auditorium of East Los Angeles College: the history of twentieth-century Mexican art, with Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros. He taught for almost his whole life: at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, at the “La Esmeralda” school and at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México; among his students were Vicente Rojo and Fanny Rabel. He was also one of the founders of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.

Anguiano’s honours include the José Clemente Orozco insignia from the Congress of Jalisco (1956), the gold medal of the Pan-American Salon in Porto Alegre (1958), the Italian Order of Merit in the rank of Commendatore (1977) and the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes (2000). Shortly before his death he was preparing to paint a mural on the main campus of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional. He died on 13 January 2006 in Mexico City and was buried in the family crypt in the Panteón Jardín cemetery. He gave more than a hundred works to Jalisco, and in 2003 the Museo de Arte Raúl Anguiano opened in Guadalajara.