| Very early, Anguiano demostrated a talent for drawing, an interest in modern painting, and a preference for figure work. His art studies were begun in 1923 at the Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre supported by the Museum of Guadalajara. Raúl was born in Guadalajara in 1915. His pictures were exhibited in 1928, in a group show. During next four years he founded a group called the Young Painters of Jalisco. In 1934 Anguiano moved to Mexico City and worked with other young painters-among them Galván and Pacheco-and learned mural technique. painting the wall decorations for several school buildings. A show of his drawings and watercolors was the first exhibition of his work in the capital. He exhibited also in 1949 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Member of the Taller de la Gráfica Popular worked with this group in lithography. Anguiano was supervisor of drawing teachers in public schools of Mexico City, and 1940-41, taught drawing at "La Esmeralda". He spent some months in the United States, where he studied briefly at the Art Students' League in New York. In 1938 the Ministry of Public Education sent him and Xavier Guerrero to Cuba with an exhibition of Mexican paintings. He was sponsored by Inés Amor in her Galería de Arte Mexicano. Rarely do Anguiano´s paintings fail to convey a sense of irony. Seriously planned and executed with professional fullness of knowledge, they consist of painter's subject matter, carefully sifted from the obviously dramatic. He is at his best in portraits-portraits of women dressed in city or country clothes-and still lifes in large planes of clean color fortified with an impasto that does not hide the use of palette knife. In landscapes, Anguiano prefers to show at least the marks of the passage and workings of man-the soothing straight lines of a house or a scaffold in opposition to nature's ungeometric hills. Anguiano writes My forms of expression are based in realism, but not on naturalism. Mu conception of realism begins with the direct, fresh interpretation of the object....I am not satisfied to make pure geometry in painting.... In 1949, as a member of the Intituto Nacional de Bellas Artes expedition, Anguiano saw and copied in color the magnifiscent frescoes of the temple of Bonampak and sketched the classic faces and draped figures of the primitive Lacandons who workship in Bonampak and live in this almost accesible jungle region of Chiapas. |
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Raúl Anguiano
, 1915 - 2006
