Santos BALMORI PICAZO

Born:1899, September 26, Mexico City. Died: March 5, 1992, Mexico City, Mexico

Education: He lived in Spain, Argentina, and Chile, where he studied high school at the Barros Arana Institute. He entered the School of Fine Arts of Santiago de Chile and during his studies he returned to Spain and entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where he had as teachers Moreno Carbonero, Joaquín Sorolla and Julio Romero de Torres, studied together with Salvador Dalí, Remedios Varo and Alberti.

Experience: He won the first drawing prize at the San Fernando Academy. He went to Paris and entered the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he worked under the direction of the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, made textile design, advertising posters, engraving, painting and posters against fascism, for which he won international awards. He met Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck, Tsuguharu Foujita, the Hindu Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi -who posed for a portrait. He collaborated with the journalist and editor Henri Barbusse in what is now the newspaper Le Monde, where Balmori made the illustrations and the texts were by Miguel de Unamuno, Máximo Gorki, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Einstein and Upton Sinclair, among others.

He traveled to Sweden, where he also made successful exhibitions; He also lived in Mallorca and in North Africa. He returned to Mexico in the 1930s, where he was received with an exhibition of more than two hundred works at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. He decided to teach, work that he developed for thirty years, being one of the teachers responsible for forming, in total aesthetic and thought freedom, the so-called generation of rupture.

He was director of the Academy of Dance, collaborating directly with Miguel Covarrubias, in creating what was called the golden age of dance in Mexico. He never stopped drawing, but he only resumed painting when he retired as a teacher; At the age of seventy he exhibited on multiple occasions, being an important aesthetic researcher and generating unpublished works that incorporated new proposals, investigating about chance, the golden section and using new materials. Within his work as an investigating artist he wrote several books.

At the age of ninety, the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts honored him; In the same way, he was honored by the Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias, in Oviedo, Spain, where a large retrospective exhibition was held and some of his most important pieces were acquired. In both cases, catalogs of his work were made.

Collection: Museum of Modern Art of Toluca, University Museum of Arts and Sciences (MUCA), Museum of the Estampa, Museum of Modern Art in Madrid and the Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias.