Career
Balmori Picazo began his career in Paris, where he met Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck, Tsuguharu Foujita, Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, doing a portrait of Gandhi. He collaborated with Henri Barbusse on the weekly Monde, illustrating texts by writers such as Miguel de Unamuno, Maxim Gorki, Albert Einstein and Upton Sinclair. He also designed textiles, flyers and created engravings and paintings as well as posters against fascism, which earned him international awards. However, his anti-fascist activism along with collaboration with Federico García Lorca, Unamuno and León Felipe got him into trouble with the Spanish government.
His first exhibitions were also in Europe, first at the Duncan Gallery in Paris. He traveled to Sweden for various successful exhibitions, then to Brussels and Madrid before he returned to Mexico, exhibiting in Mexico City. However, Mexico from the 1930s to 1950s was highly nationalistic with the painters from the Mexican muralism movement dominating, making Balmori’s more international style less appealing. He became a professor for about thirty years at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas and was also the head of the Academia de la Danza Mexicana with Miguel Covarrubias. During this time (1950s) he actively promoted new dance movements in Mexico, including the production of posters, wardrobes and librettos. His art students included Rodolfo Nieto, Pedro Coronel, Carlos Olachea and Juan Soriano. He was also an important fine arts researcher and writer, publishing articles books and essays on the topic as well as poetry. Two books, Aurea Mesura and Técnica de la expression plástica, were published by UNAM.
In his later career, he taught drawing, painting and composition at La Esmeralda and at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, both in Mexico City.In 1973, he held an exhbition called "Espacios y tensiones" at the Museo Tecnológico de la Comisión Federal de Electricidad. This consisted of a series of paintings that demonstrated yet new ideas in his artistic conceptions. This and the later "Lunar Route" exhibitions were among his most important shows.
Although he never stopped drawing, he returned to painting professionally after he retired from teaching at age seventy, exhibiting several times. His drawings include those of dancers such as Raquel Gutierrez, Rosa Reina and his wife Helena, as well as sketches of the Ballet Antigona which was headed by José Limón. His work can be found at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Toluca, the Museo de Universitario de Artes y Ciencias at UNAM, the Museo de la Estampa, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Madrid, the National Gallery in Prague and the Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias .
When he was ninety, the Palacio de Bellas Artes held a homage for him along with the Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias in Oviedo, Spain, both with large retrospectives of his work. Other retrospectives of his work have been held after his death such as the 1996 event at the Casa Lamm Cultural Center in Mexico City and the Mexican Cultural Center in Paris in 1998.
Read more about this topic: Santos Balmori
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