Search Results

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 ...

(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...

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 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 (...

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 ...

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 ...

Mexican, 20th century, male.

Born 1933 or 1934, in Mexico City.

Watercolourist, draughtsman, engraver, illustrator.

Cuevas was self-taught even though he attended the Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura La Esmeralda for a short time. In New York in 1959, he illustrated The Worlds of Kafka and Cuevas...

Brazilian, 20th century, female.

Born 20 June 1914, in Avaré; died 31 May 1979, in Rio de Janeiro.

Painter, engraver, illustrator. Portraits, local scenes, landscapes with figures.

Stricken with tuberculosis, Djanira began to teach herself to paint. From 1939, she lived in Rio de Janeiro, where she was guided by Americ Marcier and Milton Dacosta, then attended evening classes at the lyceum of art and arts and crafts. Between ...

Mexican, 20th century, male.

Born 1911, in Mexico City; died 1986.

Painter, illustrator, engraver. Figure compositions.

Dosamentes studied at the Academia de San Carlos and then at the central school of fine arts in Mexico City. He taught in several Mexican art centres and was made director of the school of painting in Capecha....

(b Valencia, Jun 21, 1926; d Caracas, Nov 26, 2010).

Venezuelan painter and engraver. Guevara Moreno is known as the pioneer of Geometric Abstraction in Venezuela. He studied at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas, Caracas, subsequently becoming an illustrator and cartoonist on various publications in Caracas. He went to Paris in 1949, where he attended André Lhote’s studio and later the Atelier d’Art Abstrait, when it was directed by Jean Dewasne. In Paris he took part in the activities of the groups Los Disidentes and Arte Madí. Guevara Moreno’s work from this period was characterized as Constructivist in nature and attracted considerable critical attention in Paris. In 1954 he returned to Venezuela and subsequently returned to figurative painting, which was influenced by critical realism. Guevara Moreno represented Venezuela in the biennales of São Paulo and Venice and was awarded several important national prizes, including the National Award for Painting and the National Award for Drawing and Graphic Arts.

(b San Juan, 1913; d San Juan, Feb 20, 2004).

Puerto Rican printmaker, painter, illustrator, and teacher. He grew up in New York City and from 1937 to 1942 studied there at the Art Students League and at Pratt Institute before doing four years’ military service. After World War II, he returned to New York as a designer for Cartier, the jewelers where he had been apprenticed as a student, and studied at the Art School of the Brooklyn Museum, where he met Max Beckmann and Rufino Tamayo. In 1950 he returned to Puerto Rico, where he was the principal founding member of the Centro de Arte Puertorriqueño and joined the staff of the Division of Community Education, becoming its Graphic Arts Director in 1951.

Homar is credited as the artist most responsible for promoting printmaking in Puerto Rico. He trained other important artists, such as Antonio Martorell, José Rosa, and Myrna Báez, and ran workshops at Cali in Colombia and in Havana, Cuba, helping to extend his influence further afield in Latin America. While serving as director of the graphic workshop of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, the most important in Puerto Rico, from ...

Argentinian, 20th century, male.

Active in France from 1959.

Born 1926, in Chivilocy; died 10 June 1982, in Villebon-sur-Yvette.

Painter, engraver, sculptor, illustrator.

Rodolfo Krasno studied at the fine arts academy of Buenos Aires from 1942 to 1959. He later became a teacher at the school of visual arts and also organised his first solo exhibitions there. He was given a bursary by the French government that enabled him to go to Paris where he settled in ...

Argentinian, 20th century, male.

Born 1930, in Buenos Aires; died 1971.

Painter (mixed media), engraver, illustrator.

Nueva Figuración.

La Vega began by studying architecture. A self-taught painter, he was also a musician, poet and, in addition, an advertising agent. He travelled to Europe, notably France, lived for two years in the USA and studied at Cornell University....

(Oscar de la Conception)

Cuban, 20th century, male.

Active also in France.

Born 8 December 1902, in Sagua la Grande, Cuba; died 11 September 1982, in Paris.

Painter (gouache, pastels, watercolours), draughtsman, sculptor, engraver, illustrator, lithographer, potter.

Murals.

Surrealist group.

After a brief period at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana from 1918 to 1923, Wifredo Lam went to Spain and remained there from 1924 to 1938, first in Madrid and later Barcelona. By 1938, Spain had been devastated by civil war and Lam was forced to move to Paris. Picasso became very fond of Lam and introduced him to André Breton, Max Ernst, and Victor Brauner, among others. From 1938 to 1941, Lam participated in the activities of the Surrealist group, particularly from 1940 when he found himself in Marseilles with the Surrealists who had been driven out of Paris by the war and the invasion of France. In 1940, Lam illustrated Breton’s ...

(b Santurce, Puerto Rico, 1939).

Puerto Rican printmaker, painter, draftsman, illustrator, and performance artist. He studied in Spain in 1961–1962 under Julio Martín Caro and with Lorenzo Homar at the graphic arts workshop of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (1962–1965). He inherited a social and political commitment from Puerto Rican artists working in the 1950s, but introduced wit and irony to his satirical treatment of political themes in prints, posters, and illustrations. From the late 1960s, for instance, he produced portfolios of woodcuts in which he combined texts and images as a way of commenting on social and political events.

Martorell founded the Taller Alacrán in 1968 with the aim of mass-producing art at affordable prices. In the 1970s he began to experiment with innovative printmaking techniques, for example in a series of cut-out works influenced by Pop art, in which he played on stereotypes of authoritarianism in Latin America. In subsequent prints he explored the painterly qualities of woodcuts on a monumental scale. From the late 1970s, however, he was increasingly concerned with innovative live performances that combined printmaking and painting with the movement of actors. From ...

(b Mexico City, Jun 30, 1902; d Mexico City, Feb 8, 1969).

Mexican printmaker, painter, and illustrator. He studied in Mexico City at the Academia de San Carlos (1917–1919) and at the Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre de Chimalistac (1920–1922). During the 1920s he was associated with Estridentismo (the Stridentist Movement), from 1925 to 1928 working as an illustrator for Stridentist publications such as Horizonte and Norte de Veracruz. After exhibiting his work for the first time in the USA in 1930 he held several exhibitions abroad, and in 1939 he received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to travel in the United States. Méndez was foremost among the political printmakers whose work paralleled that of the Mexican muralists.

In 1934 Méndez was a co-founder of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR), a leftist artists’ organization. Méndez was on the editorial board of LEAR’s journal Frente a Frente (Face to Face), published between 1934 and ...

(b Guadalajara, Feb 19, 1887; d Mexico City, Oct 13, 1968).

Mexican mural and easel painter, printmaker, illustrator, and stage designer. In 1903 he began studying painting in Guadalajara under Félix Bernardelli, an Italian who had established a school of painting and music there. He produced his first illustrations for Revista moderna, a magazine that promoted the Latin American modernist movement and to which his cousin, the poet Amado Nervo, also contributed poetry. In 1905 he enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Mexico City; his teachers included Antonio Fabrés, Julio Ruelas, Leandro Izaguirre (1867–1941), and Germán Gedovius. Some of his fellow students were Diego Rivera, Francisco de la Torre, Saturnino Herrán, Angel Zárraga, and Jorge Enciso. In 1905 Montenegro won a grant to travel to Europe, first studying at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. In 1907 Montenegro moved to Paris, where he continued his studies and immersed himself in the world of contemporary art, meeting Cocteau, Picasso, Braque, and Gris, among others....

(b Quito, Aug 18, 1842; d Quito, June 24, 1906).

Ecuadorean painter, illustrator, draughtsman, engraver, and teacher. He attended the first Escuela de Bellas Artes in Quito (1872–5) and was one of the most prolific and versatile Romantic artists in 19th-century Ecuador, working in several genres. His portraits of important figures included that of the historian Federico González Suárez (1883; Quito, Mus. A. Mod.). He illustrated González Suárez’s archaeological work Estudio histórico sobre los Cañaris (Quito, 1878), among others, and contributed illustrations of snails and molluscs for the French naturalist Auguste Cousin’s Faune malacologique de la République de l’Equateur (c. 1893–7; Quito, Archv Nat. Hist. Banco Cent. del Ecuador). In connection with the nationalist movement, Pinto tirelessly explored costumbrista and indigenist themes in dozens of drawings, watercolours, and engravings, many of them inspired by Cantares del pueblo ecuatoriano (1892) by the Romantic poet Juan León Mera. He painted such landscapes as El Chimborazo...

Mexican, 19th–20th century, male.

Born 1852, in Aguascalientes; died 20 January 1913, in Mexico.

Engraver, lithographer, draughtsman, illustrator.

José Posada was a teacher in Leon, Guanajuato, in 1873. He gave up teaching in 1878, moving to Mexico City to work as an engraver, though it is not known where he acquired his training. In the beginning, he worked for a publisher, illustrating almanacs, liturgies, legends, tales, prayers, and even the texts of announcements, engraving on zinc, lead, and steel. He espoused progressive ideas, and drew caricatures and satirical drawings for the opposition press. His work was devoted to chronicling Mexican life of the time, and the difficulties of people under the control of large property owners. The compilation Coridos, Ejemplos e Calaveras achieved a profound emotion through its polemic acuity. In his style and repertoire of images, he gave a graphic form to Mexico’s mixed cultural heritage with its confrontations between the vestiges of Pre-Columbian civilisation and the macabre, Baroque funeral cults inherited from Spain, fusing these with highly amplified colours and visions of Mexican daily life....

Colombian, 20th century, male.

Born 1928, in Roldanillo.

Painter, engraver, illustrator.

Op Art.

Omar Rayo began his working life in Bogotá as a magazine illustrator, then travelled widely to study in different parts of South America. He had several exhibitions in Colombia between 1948 and ...