Cuban, 20th century, male.
Born 1892, in Havana; died 1966.
Painter, illustrator, caricaturist. Landscapes.
Abela studied at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Cuba, after a period of working in a cigar factory. He lived in Paris from 1927 to 1930, then was made director of the free academy in Havana in 1937. He contributed to many Cuban newspapers. He is well-known as a caricaturist, having created the character of ...
Cuban, 20th century, male.
Active in France from 1963.
Born 1943, in Havana.
Painter (including gouache), engraver, illustrator.
José Ramón Alejandro studied at the school of fine arts in Buenos Aires and later at the school of fine arts in Montevideo. He went to Paris to work in the studio of the engraver Friedlaender. During his time there he showed his work in a number of solo exhibitions and in ...
Argentinian, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in France.
Born 1949, in Buenos Aires.
Painter, illustrator. Figures.
Nouvelle Figuration.
Ruben Alterio studied at the school of fine arts in Buenos Aires. He has lived and worked in Paris since 1975 and is known as a press and advertising illustrator. Solo exhibitions of his paintings took place in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro and in Paris in ...
Brazilian, 20th century, male.
Born 1940, in Belo Horizonte.
Painter, illustrator.
Alvim has exhibited in Rio de Janeiro since 1968. He illustrated the Marquis de Sade's Justine. In 1972, he received a scholarship from the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. He also obtained a diploma in museology and was a professor at the college of museology in Rio de Janeiro, as well as a curator at the museum of fine arts....
Brazilian, 20th century, female.
Born 1 September 1886, in Capivari (São Paulo); died 17 January 1973, in São Paulo.
Painter, illustrator. Genre scenes.
Born in Brazil, Tarsila do Amaral spent much of her youth in Europe, attending school in both Barcelona and São Paulo. She was a student of Pedro Alexandrino and M. E. Renard. She worked in Paris from 1920 to 1923, along with Lhote and Léger, discovering Cubism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. She was the wife of the poet Oswald de Andrade. Waldemar George introduced her to the Parisian public. After returning to São Paulo in 1923, she connected with other modernist artists, forming the ‘Group of Five’ which included her predecessor, Anita Malfatti. In 1928, she produced a series of paintings known as the Anthropophagites, most notably Apaboru (1928), which inspired Andrade to write the Manifesto of Anthropophagy. This suite of surrealist paintings embodied the goals of the Anthropophagic movement, which sought to resist hegemonic structures, by cannibalising European culture to make it distinctly Brazilian. At a time when Brazil was rapidly becoming industrialised, Amaral told stories of her rural childhood, but did so in a style that was decidedly modern and surrealist in tone....
Mexican, 20th century, male.
Born 1901, in Ixlahuana; died 1976.
Painter, watercolourist, illustrator. Murals.
Amero was a student at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, then worked under the supervision of Alfredo Ramos Martínez. He had many exhibitions in the USA and in Latin America. He contributed illustrations to the newspaper, ...
Costa Rican, 20th century, male.
Born 1907, in San José.
Painter, draughtsman, engraver, illustrator. Murals.
Amighetti studied painting at the academy of fine arts in Costa Rica, under the supervision of Tomás Povedano and Arcos, then taught drawing and engraving in Heredia to the future teachers there, as well as history of art and engraving at the school of fine arts at Costa Rica University. In Mexico, he discovered the techniques of mural painting under the supervision of Federico Cantu. He showed his works in exhibitions in Europe, Japan, Latin America and the USA. His drawings and wood engravings have illustrated many books and magazines....
(b San José, June 1, 1907; d 1998).
Costa Rican engraver, painter, illustrator, draughtsman, writer and critic. He studied for a year from 1931 at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes but was otherwise initially self-taught, using Louis Gonse’s L’Art japonais (Paris, 1883) as a source. He produced a series of caricature drawings, influenced by Cubism, in the Album de dibujos de 1926. During 1929 he met the sculptors Juan Manuel Sánchez and Francisco Zúñiga (the latter was also a printmaker), and through his interest in German and Mexican Expressionist printmakers, he developed a passion for wood-engraving. His first wood-engravings were published in the periodical Repertorio Americano (1929). He went on to contribute wood-engravings and drawings to collections of short stories and poetry, educational books, periodicals and newspapers. In 1931 he taught drawing and wood-engraving at the Escuela Normal in Heredia. He exhibited at the Salones Anuales de Artes Plásticas in San José (1931–6...
Chilean, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born in Santiago.
Painter, watercolourist, draughtsman, illustrator. Portraits, genre scenes.
Arcos y Megalde devoted himself mainly to genre and portrait painting, but he also produced watercolours and illustrations. His works include: Philip II at the Escorial Receiving a Deputation from the Netherlands...
Uruguayan, 20th century, male.
Active in Spain.
Born 5 February 1898, in Montevideo; died 12 February 1929, in Montevideo.
Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, draughtsman, illustrator, scenographer. Religious subjects, genre scenes, scenes with figures, landscapes, urban landscapes. Stage sets, comic cartoons.
The son of Spanish emigrants, Rafaél Pérez Barradas spent most of his artistic life in Spain, where he was soon contributing illustrations to the press. In 1913, he traveled in Italy and France, then settled in Condal. In 1928, he decided to return to Uruguay. He died prematurely of an illness. He is considered to have formed part of the Spanish artistic avant-garde at the beginning of the 1920s. Starting in a Post-Impressionist style that was soon influenced by Gauguin, he rapidly lightened his palette and became interested in the Cubist vision of reality while breaking out of the unitary vision of form. His canvases, with grey and ochre colours, represent landscapes and burlesque scenes from daily life. ...
Argentinian, 20th century, male.
Born 1895, in Pergamino; died 1977.
Painter, illustrator, decorative designer. Figures, still-lifes.
Basaldua was a student at the national academy Buenos Aires and then went to work in Paris. He produced almost all the scenography for the opera and ballet productions at the Colon Theatre in Buenos Aires between ...
(b Pergamino, Buenos Aires, Sept 22, 1894; d Buenos Aires, Feb 21, 1976).
Argentine painter, stage designer, and illustrator. He studied drawing in Buenos Aires under the Italian painter Augusto Bolognini (b 1870) and at the Academia Nacional before moving in 1923 to Paris, where he worked in Charles Guérin’s studio and at the Académie Colarossi. He also studied in the studios of André Lhote and Othon Friesz and became associated with other Argentine artists based in Paris. Like others of his generation and nationality, he sought in the 1920s to escape from pictorial provincialism by rejecting academic norms, as in Still Life (1926; Rosario, Mus. Mun. B.A.). He learned how to paint while living in France and developed a range of imagery typical of Argentine art without showing any great originality.
More than any other painter, Basaldúa depicted life in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, concentrating humorously and without sentimentality on the wide boys, dance-hall girls, loose women, and handsome, dangerous men of the tango in such pictures as the ...
Mexican, 20th century, male.
Born 1923, in Mexico.
Draughtsman, engraver, illustrator.
After working with his father, who was a tailor, Alberto Beltran trained in the 1940s as a graphic designer for advertising at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, then, some years later, as an engraver, at the same academy. In ...
(b Mexico City, Mar 22, 1923; d Mexico City, Apr 20, 2002).
Mexican painter, printmaker, and illustrator. He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas and with Carlos Alvarado Lang. Although he painted some murals and a good number of easel pictures, he was active primarily as a printmaker and as an illustrator of books, magazines, and journals. He founded the satirical newspapers Ahí va el golpe (1958) and El coyote emplumado (1960) and from its inception in 1962 acted as art director and illustrator for the newspaper El día. From 1945 to 1959 Beltrán was associated with the Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City, acting as its president for several years and sharing its populist, political, and nationalist principles. Placing his art at the service of social concerns and using protest as his main weapon, he expressed himself with particular force in his prolific production of drawings and in masterful linocuts such as Exodus (...
Argentinian, 20th century, female.
Born 4 March 1901, in Buenos Aires.
Painter, illustrator.
Borges de Torre studied at the school of fine arts in Geneva, then exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 1943 and at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris in ...
Argentinian, 20th century, male.
Born 6 September 1877, in Dolorès.
Painter, illustrator. Religious subjects, mythological subjects, portraits, landscapes.
Brughetti was a student at the Royal Institute in London, the Artistic Association in Rome and the Académie Julian in Paris. He was a writer and he illustrated most of his literary work, including ...
Cuban, 20th century, male.
Active from 1959 active in France.
Born 5 January 1934, in Havana.
Painter, illustrator. Scenes with figures.
Camacho studied classics at Havana University, but the example of Cundo Bermudez and Mario Carreno encouraged him to give it up for painting in 1954. He moved to Paris in 1959 and become involved with the Surrealists in around 1961. In his younger years he was influenced by Pre-Colombian civilisations. As soon as he settled in Paris, de Sade, Oskar Panizza's ...
Costa Rican, 20th century, male.
Active also active in France.
Born 12 June 1891, in Costa Rica.
Painter, engraver, illustrator.
Manuel Cano De Castro was a pupil of François Galli in Barcelona in 1911-1912 and later studied in both Madrid and Italy. He went to Paris in 1916 and exhibited in Barcelona in 1913 and 1919. He founded the ...
Stone sculptures from Mesoamerica representing a supine male figure, approximately life-size, whose backbone is bent in an anatomically impossible position. His feet are flat on the ground, knees drawn up, and head turned sharply toward the viewer. The hands grasp a round or rectangular receptacle resting on the abdomen.
The largest number (eighteen) occurs at Chichen Itza, where the first excavated example was discovered in 1875 by the explorer Augustus Le Plongeon. He dubbed the sculpture “chacmool,” which he believed meant “powerful warrior” in Maya, although it is generally translated as “red” or “great” jaguar paw. The inaccurate term has since been applied to all examples, regardless of culture.
Although difficult to date, chacmools first appear between 800 CE and 1000 CE. They are found contemporaneously at Chichen Itza and Tula, where a dozen examples are known. The sculptures occur in the Tarascan region, and as far afield as Costa Rica and El Salvador. There are several Aztec ...
(b Mexico City, Jun 10, 1940).
Mexican painter, sculptor, illustrator, and stage designer. Coen was self-taught when he took up painting in 1956 with the encouragement of Diego Rivera, but from 1956 to 1960 he studied graphic design with the American publicist Gordon Jones. During those years he worked in an Abstract Expressionist manner, although he soon incorporated figurative elements and, from around 1963 onward, elements of fantasy.
In the 1950s until the early 1970s, he was one of the indispensable creators of the collective exhibitions organized by the Juan Martín Gallery, the most important platform for vanguard art in Mexico City at that time. This gallery also dedicated four individual exhibitions to the work of Coen. In 1967 he went to Paris on a French government grant. In the following year he was a founder-member of the Salón Independiente, where he began to exhibit acrylic sculptures of the female torso.
He systematically returned to working the image of the feminine. These were followed between ...
