José Raúl Anguiano Valadez (February 26, 1915 – January 13, 2006) was a notable Mexican painter of the 20th century, part of the “second generation” of Mexican muralists which continued the tradition of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros but experimented with it as well. Anguiano was born during the height of the Mexican Revolution, which would inspire a majority of his mural painting. He studied painting in his hometown of Guadalajara before moving to Mexico City to begin his career. His first major exhibition was held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, at age 20. His works include over 100 individual and collective exhibitions with 50 murals, mostly in Mexico and the United States. As he continued his artistry with aspects of the Mexican muralism movement, he also experimented with other styles such as Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism, with themes such as clowns and prostitutes. However, his most famous painting is “La espina” (The thorn) which depicts a Mayan woman digging a thorn out of her foot with a knife. His later works concentrated on depicting Mexico in vivid colors and traditional imagery.
Life
Raúl Anguiano was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, on February 26, 1915, at the height of the Mexican Revolution. He was the eldest of ten children, whose father was a cobbler.
He began drawing at age five using images of movie stars and other famous people as models, including Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, Charlie Chaplin, Álvaro Obregón, Venustiano Carranza and bullfighter Rodolfo Gaona. Anguiano states that one of his very early artistic influences was a painting of the Holy Family by Rafael Sanzio. At age 12, he left his school to attend Guadalajara’s former Escuela Libre de Pintura, where he learned basic artistic techniques and became interested in pre-Hispanic and popular art. He studied with Ixca Farias, José Vizcarar and José Salomé Piña before leaving the school in 1933 to organize a group of painters called Jóvenes Pintores Jaliscienses.
During his studies and early career, Anguiano worked with various models such as workmen, laborers and a few notable people such as Pita Amor. In 1934, he moved to Mexico City, where he met Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco and studied their work. He painted his first mural in the same year while in a school and joined the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios.
During Anguiano’s long career, almost eight decades, his main studio was in Coyoacán, Mexico City but he had a second home in Huntington Beach, California.
Anguiano died on January 13, 2006, at the Hospital Central Militar in Mexico City after becoming ill with heart problems while in Los Angeles. He was buried at the family crypt at the Panteón Jardín.
Career
His first major show was in 1935, when he was only twenty. He was the youngest painter to be featured at an exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The work at this exhibition was featured with Máximo Pacheco, with themes of industry, factories, smelting and the workers’ movement. Since then he has exhibited individually and collectively over one hundred times in museums, galleries and other institutions in countries such as Cuba, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, United States, France, Italy, the former Soviet Union, Israel, Germany and Japan. Some of his exhibitions before he died included a retrospective in Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, a presentation of a series of four color lithographs, held at the Hall of Graphic Arts SAGA 88, from 1989 to 1990, in Paris; and the retrospective look at Anguiano's work in graphics (1938-1940), held at the Museo de la Estampa in Mexico City in 1990. His creations remain in permanent collections in the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, as well as museums in Mexico City, Beijing and the Vatican .
In 1936, when he was only twenty one, he was commissioned to paint his first mural called La educación socialista, a seventy meter wide piece at the Carlos A. Carrillo School in Mexico City. During this career, he painted about fifty murals mostly in Mexico and the United States but murals can also be found in Jamaica and even the Vatican, which houses his mural La Crucifixión.