Ángel Zárraga

ANGEL ZÁRRAGA ARGÜELLES (Mexico,1886-1946).
"Woman with shawl".1906.
Mixed media on paper adhered to board.
Signed, dated and located in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 46 x 53 cm; 68 x 75 cm (frame).

Ángel Zárraga Argüelles, a Mexican painter who lived more than half of his life in Europe, was born in Durango on August 16, 1886 and died in Cuernavaca on September 22, 1946. Throughout his career he dabbled in cubism and muralism, although he is mainly identified with symbolic realism, and was a founding member of the cultural organization El Ateneo de la Juventud.

Zárraga was born into a well-to-do family; his father, Fernando Zárraga, was a doctor, and his mother was Guadalupe Argüelles. He attended elementary school in Mexico City, where the whole family settled without returning to Durango. He attended high school at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria de San Ildefonso, also in Mexico City. From a young age he cultivated drawing, portraiture, caricature and poetry, publishing his verses and drawings for the first time in the Revista Moderna between 1902 and 1903. He began studying art at the National School of Fine Arts (ENBA), where he became friends with Diego Rivera.

In 1904 he left for France and entered the School of Fine Arts in Paris. In the Old Continent he encountered impressionism, which, although he respected, went against the traditional education he had received in Mexico. Not agreeing with what was taught at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, he decided to study at the Royal Academy in Brussels, and later settled in Spain (Toledo, Segovia, Zamarramala and Illescas), which for him presented a less aggressive modernity. In 1906 he exhibited for the first time in a group show at the Prado Museum in Madrid. That same year, Justo Sierra, then Secretary of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, obtained a pension of 350 francs a month for him to continue his training in Europe.

On November 6, 1907 he held his first exhibition in Mexico, at the ENBA, which included 20 paintings made in Spain and five made in Mexico. Upon his return to Europe in January 1908, he wrote chronicles for the newspaper El Liberal de Madrid, and continued to exhibit his work in various European cities such as Paris, Nantes, Venice and Liege, between 1909 and 1910. At the end of that same year, his second exhibition in Mexico was inaugurated by his father, Justo Sierra and Antonio Rivas Mercado. After this, he returned to the Old Continent and settled permanently in Paris for 35 years. In 1911, he participated in the Salon d'Automne by presenting his works Exvoto (San Sebastian) and El don (donut). In 1919, at the age of 28, he was selected as a qualifying juror by the board of directors of the Salon d'Automne in the French capital. In 1917, he was in charge of the sets for William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris, this being his only incursion as a set designer as far as is known.

Between 1914 and 1917, he ventured into cubism, to move away from this style between 1918 and 1919 and return to the more realistic type of portraiture. However, in 1921 his cubist stage was the subject of a successful solo exhibition. Despite his achievements in different styles, the artist himself said in his writings that his financial and spiritual "salvation" was the work dedicated to religious and sports themes, especially soccer, of which he was a fanatic. The plasticity of sports eventually led him to muralism. In this discipline, we can highlight the work he did, in fresco and encaustic, between 1921 and 1926 at the Château de Vert-Cœur in Chevreuse, near Versailles, and at the Cité Internationale Universitaire in Paris. He also decorated the Mexican embassy in Paris, where he was also exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, as well as in New York.

During World War II, he returned to Mexico in 1941, where he painted murals at the Bankers Club and the Monterrey Cathedral. He died after suffering from pneumonia. Today, a contemporary art museum in the city of Durango bears his name.