Angel Zarraga

Angel Zarraga (1886-1946)

Ángel Zárraga y Argüelles is a Mexican painter , born in Victoria from Durango on August 16 , 1886 and dead the September 22 , 1946.

He is known as a painter of easels as well as a painter of mural frescoes .

Born into a well-to-do family, Ángel Zárraga moved to France in 1904, after studying fine arts in Mexico City at the Academia de San Carlos. Subsequently, he made several trips, mainly to Belgium , Italy and Spain .

Zárraga is interested in avant-garde movements such as cubism , but anxious to preserve his freedom, he does not adhere to any current. His works reflect a strong attachment to a form of mysticism deeply rooted in Mexican folklore, which he will retain throughout his work. 20 works of Cubist discipline, 1914-1917, and 20 recent paintings, 1920-1921, will be exhibited in the Bernheim-Jeune gallery between October 26 and November 5, 1921. René Delange and Félix Fénéon will dialogue in the form of a preface to the catalog of the exposure. This cult of a human figure imprint of religiosity will lead him to realize his first murals for private homes (1922, Castle of Vert-Coeur near Versailles ) and for a church where, in 1924, he tries for the first time the encaustic (crypt of Notre - Dame - de - la - Salette in Suresnes , suburbs of Paris).

His major work is undoubtedly his commission for the Mexican Legation in Paris between 1926 and 1927. Zárraga, who did not live the Mexican Revolution , is imbued with the Paris of the Roaring Twenties which preaches all liberties. He has great affinities with Symbolism and Art Deco . The frescoes he performs, of an ambition at the same time modernist and didactic, have as their goal to inscribe Mexico in the concert of the universal progress. His conception of allegory , which he uses as an illustration, has nothing to do with that of the Mexican muralists, who were politically engaged in a movement in which mural art must be at the service of an ideology, the class struggle, People. The allegories of Zárraga are rather decorative, related to the times (independent woman who wears shortened clothes and a haircut "boyish" elements of exotic vegetation), but they are also imbued with a certain patriotism where friendship with France occupies a privileged place.

He painted frescoes in the crypt of Notre - Dame de la Salette church ( Suresnes ) but was removed after the Second World War .

The oil paintings commissioned by the architect Alberto J. Pani , then Minister Plenipotentiary of Mexico, will be distributed initially in several rooms of the residence and legation, before being repatriated to Mexico.

After returning to Mexico, Zárraga died there in 1946.