Object Notes

In 1938, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, José Antonio Fernández Muro and his family fled Madrid for Argentina, where he began training under celebrated Catalan painter Vicente Puig. Fernández Muro’s individual style took time to evolve; his first decade of painting produced works closely resembling his instructor’s figural, realist images.

The title of this drawing comes from Hesiod’s Theogony, a poem detailing the origins, genealogies, and descendants of the Greek gods, composed around 700 BCE.

A proud member of the Generación de la Ruptura—a group of Mexican artists who sought to rupture, or break away from, the then wildly popular muralism movement—José Luis Cuevas remains staunchly opposed to the expression of political or social themes in art.

In 1936, Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros relocated to New York City to found the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, a collective enterprise aimed at raising the caliber of the avant-garde through modern techniques. While in New York, Siqueiros began painting with Duco, a brand of nitrocellulose paint then used almost exclusively in the commercial automotive industry.

Likely one of Rufino Tamayo’s first Mixografia prints, this chromolithographic still life is anything but static. A technique Tamayo developed in the late 1930s when he found traditional methods of etching and lithography boring, Mixografia abandoned the usual metal plates or smoothed stones on which printmakers drew their designs.