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Manuel Felguérez Barra (born December 12, 1928) is a prominent abstract artist of Mexico, part of the Generación de la Ruptura which broke with the muralist movement of Diego Rivera and others in the mid 20th century. Felguérez was born in Zacatecas in 1928, but political instability caused his family to lose their land there and move to Mexico City. In 1947, he had the chance to travel to Europe and impressed with the art there, decided to dedicate himself to the vocation. Unhappy with the education at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico, he did most of his studies in France, where he specialized in abstract art, something that was not accepted in Mexico at the time. His exhibitions were initially limited to galleries and the production of “sculpted murals” using materials such as scrap metals, stones and sand. As attitudes in Mexico changed towards art, Felguérez found acceptance for his work and remains active at over eighty years of age. ==Life== Manuel Felguérez was born on his family’s San Agustín del Vergel hacienda near Valparaíso, Zacatecas in 1928. It was a turbulent time as Zacatecas was involved in the Cristero uprising and while the fighting initially began over religion, it quickly become about land as well. His father owned the family hacienda, the great great grandson of landholders, but by the early 20th century, these landowners were despised by the general populace. Various of the hacienda’s workers demanded control of the land by force, with battles between loyalists and the insurgents on the property.〔 In the 1930s, there were land expropriations under Lázaro Cárdenas, which took away most of the family’s holdings. The family decided to flee and later completely abandon the hacienda in 1934 for Mexico City. Felguérez’s father hoped for compensation for the lost lands from the federal government, but he died after a year when Felguérez was only eight years old.〔〔 Felguérez’s mother never returned to Zacatecas, warning her son that if he ever returned to Valparaíso, they would kill him, and she also preferred to be with her parents in the capital city. Felguérez would return about six decades later to Zacatecas for the first time to open an art museum named after him.〔〔 Felguérez grew up with his mother and her family, which owned the Ideal Theater on Dolores Street in Mexico City. The change from rural farm life to city life was essential to his development. The family had a number of financial downturns, first losing the theatre then losing a grocery store they opened after only two years, making the family poor. There was pressure to join gangs and rob, he liked to box and see lucha libre at the Arena México and tried marijuana in his youth (he favors its legalization today.〔〔 However, he received his primary, secondary and high school education through the Marists and was a Boy Scout from age eight to age twenty three with his best friend Jorge Ibargüengoitia .〔〔 The Scouts encouraged him to read authors such as Dostoyevsky and G. K. Chesterton and took hiking trips including one to Iztaccíhuatl .〔 Scouting also gave him the opportunity to travel to Europe in 1947 just after the end of World War II when the cultural scene was recovering. His intention was to go with Ibargengoitia for a jamboree, but the trip cost 5000 pesos which he could not pay. The two found a way for cheaper passage and got the France on their own, angering the Mexican Scout leadership, who expelled them. They then decided to hitchhike around various countries including Italy, Switzerland, France and England, staying at houses of Scouting contacts and visiting museums.〔 Although his mother wanted him to be a doctor, he was impressed by the European art he saw, especially that of English painter William Turner and announced to Ibargengoitia that he would become an artist. Although Ibargengoitia laughed at the time, he later write that he felt that this is when Felguérez’s vocation began.〔 He entered the Academy of San Carlos in 1948, but lasted only four months as he did not like its conformity with the dominant artistic movement in Mexico called the Escuela Mexicana de Pintura .〔〔 He decided to go back to Europe along with his friend Jorge Wilmot. To get the money, they went to the La Huasteca and other areas to find archeological pieces to sell. At that time, there was not the consciousness that they were part of Mexico’s heritage.〔 He studied at the Grande Chaumière Academy in Paris, under French-Russian Cubist artist Ossip Zadkine, who became his mentor.〔 He returned to Mexico in 1950 for family reasons and between then and 1954, he studied for a bachelors in anthropology and history as well as taking classes in modern art at Mascarones and studying the craft of terracotta at La Esmeralda with Francisco Zúñiga. He met his first wife, Ruth Rohde in 1951. Their families would not let them marry so they eloped. Later to appease the families, they married again in the Catholic Church. He tried to sell sculptures made in his workshop, without success, but did make some money making designing lamps for Enrique Anhalt. He and his first wife moved to Puerto Escondido and had a store selling handcrafts .〔〔 In 1952, he obtained a scholarship from the French government to study again in Paris at the Colarossi Academy .〔〔 He returned to France which his wife and daughter, with a large studio in the Casa de Mexico, where he met Lilia Carrillo, who was then married to Ricardo Guerra. He divorced his first wife in 1959, with two children and soon afterwards married Carrillo. They remained married until Carrillo died in 1974, five years after a ruptured aneurism in her back left her paralyzed. He married his current wife Mercedes Oteyza shortly after that.〔 Over his lifetime he has done a variety of work in addition to art, sometimes out of necessity. It includes taxidermist, anthropologist, artisan, researcher and teacher. He was a university professor, retiring after thirty years, and never depended in art sales to live.〔 As a teacher, his most important focus is to teach students to be original. He states that it is hard for him to sell his work and sometimes large quantities of pieces can accumulate without sale.〔 The artist is still activity working, and has no plans to retire except in the case of physical disability. He has homes in Colorado and the Olivar de los Padres neighborhood of Mexico City,〔〔 as well as a workshop at the Abstract Art Museum in Zacatecas. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Manuel Felguérez」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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