Latin American Art

Velazquez, El Greco The origins of painting in Spain can be traced back to illuminate manuscripts and mural decorations.  During the 16th and 17th centuries, considered Spain's Golden Age, many famous Spanish painters emerged including artists like Velazquez, El Greco.

Salvador Dali Spanish artist and Surrealist icon Salvador Dalí is perhaps best known for his painting of melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Frida Kahlo Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form. Life experience is a common theme in Kahlo's approximately 200 paintings, sketches and drawings. Her physical and emotional pain are depicted starkly on canvases, as is her turbulent relationship with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, who she married twice. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits.

Diego Rivera Diego Rivera was born in 1886, in Mexico; when his career began, the main focal point behind his works was the depict the lives of Mexico and its people. In 1921, working with the government, he began work on a series of murals, that were located in public buildings. Some of his work was quite controversial; in fact, the Man at the Crossroads, which went up in NYC, was destroyed by the Rockefeller Family. He is today known as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, and began working and drawing at the age of 10.

Fernando Botero Born in Medellin, Colombia, on April 19, 1932, Fernando Botero attended a matador school for several years in his youth, and then left the bull ring behind to pursue an artistic career. Botero's paintings were first exhibited in 1948, when he was 16 years old, and he had his first one-man show two years later in Bogota. The inflated proportions of his figures, including those in Presidential Family (1967), suggest an element of political satire, and are depicted using flat, bright color and prominently outlined forms—a nod to Latin-American folk art. And while his work includes still-lifes and landscapes, Botero has typically concentrated on his emblematic situational portraiture.

Joaquín Torres-García Joaquín Torres-García,  (born July 28, 1874, Montevideo, Uruguay—died Aug. 8, 1949, Montevideo), Uruguayan painter who introduced Constructivism to South America. In 1934 Torres-García returned to Montevideo. He arrived determined to introduce Modernist and Constructivist aesthetics to Uruguayan artists. The following year he founded the Association of Constructivist Art in Montevideo and gave a seminal lecture, “The School of the South,” which argued for the importance of both South American and North American schools of modern art.

Santiago Martinez Delgado Santiago Martínez Delgado (1906– 1954) was a Colombian painter, sculptor, art historian and writer. He established a reputation as a prominent muralist during the 1940s and is also known for his watercolors, oil paintings, illustrations and woodcarvings. Martinez's ancestry profoundly influenced his art choices and books. Born into an aristocratic family in Bogotá, his father was the Conservative party leader Luis Martinez and his mother Mercedes Delgado Mallarino. It was a difficult childhood due to his father's expulsion from Colombia as a result of an indictment for his involvement in an earlier Coup d'état.