Jose' Luis Cuevas Biography
Jose Luis Cuevas was born on February 26, 1934 in Mexico City, on top of the "El Lápiz del Águila" factory, owned by his grandfather Adalberto Cuevas. He studied at the Benito Juárez elementary school, in Colonia Roma. In 1941 he won a children's drawing competition with his self-portrait of a working child. From that moment on they called him “the güerito painter”. He entered the La Esmeralda National School of Painting and Sculpture, which he left shortly after when he fell ill with rheumatic fever, leaving him bedridden for two years. During this time he drew characters that he watched from his window. Self-taught, considered one of the representatives of neofigurativism, he was the founder of the Rupture Generation. He created illustrations for The News and taught art history at Coronet Hall Institute. His brother Alberto took him to the La Castañeda psychiatric hospital, where he had mental patients as models.
In 1953, at the age of nineteen, he exhibited at the Prisse Gallery in Mexico City, where he was discovered by the artistic director of the Pan-American Union, José Gómez-Sicre, who a year later organized an exhibition of his work in the United States. In the 1950s he exhibited in Caracas, Lima, Havana and Buenos Aires, where he became friends with Jorge Luis Borges. Other exhibitions followed in New York and Paris. He participated in art festivals around the world such as the São Paulo Biennial, in 1959. A year later he held his second solo exhibition in New York. He remained for two years at the Tamarind lithographic laboratory in Los Angeles, where he produced a series of lithographs based on the Marquis de Sade. In 1961 he exhibited two of his works, The Funeral of a Dictator and the triptych The Fall of Franco, at the Galleria L'Obelisco in Rome, causing a diplomatic conflict between Spain and Italy. Spain has called for the withdrawal of work on the dictator. In 1962 he exhibited a series of works based on the sculpture La Magdalena Pilosa by Tilman Riemenschneider. In the 1970s he exhibited dozens of self-portraits at the Cultural Center of UNAM University and organized exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Museum of 'Phoenix art. and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. His lithograph La Maga was awarded at the III San Juan Biennial of Latin American Engraving.
Feeling unappreciated in his work in Mexico, he went into self-exile in France. In 1976 the Museum of Modern Art in Paris dedicated a major retrospective of his work to him. In 1982 he held the exhibition "March. Month of José Luis Cuevas" which can be seen simultaneously in the galleries of Paris, Mexico City and Barcelona. From 1984 to 1988, a series of drawings titled Intolerance toured universities and museums in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Europe. The José Luis Cuevas Museum was inaugurated in 1992, in the ancient monastery of Santa Inés in the historic center of Mexico City. A year later he was designated Creator Emeritus by Mexico's National Creator System.
In 1998 the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía dedicated a “Retrospective of drawing and sculpture” to him, to which he added a series of small sculptures called Impure Animals. In 1999 the Pablo Picasso Foundation (with which he interacted on several occasions) presented the exhibition “José Luis Cuevas. Graphic work". He collaborated on the México en la Cultura supplement of the Novedades newspaper, with a series of articles known as La cortina del nopal, on the El Universal newspaper, with the Cuevario column, on the Sunday supplement of Excelsior and El Búho. He has published several autobiographical books: Cuevas por Cuevas, Cuevario, Cuevas contra Cuevas and Gato macho, (a nickname that derives from his reputation as a womanizer. He died on July 3, 2017, at the age of 83, due to colon cancer with metastasis). to the lungs, in Mexico City.
