This outstanding and very rare etching by Nieto is in pristine condition. It appears to have never been framed. The actual image size is 14.5 x 18.7". It is signed in pencil, and numbered 7/40, from a very small edition. Published by Galerie Berggruen, San Francisco, CA.
Outstanding Mexican painter Rodolfo Nieto was born in Oaxaca July 14, 1936, and spent the first dozen years of his life there, until his family moved to Mexico City in 1949. His artistic vocation led him to enter the Esmeralda School of Art in 1953 at the age of 17. During the 1950s, painter Juan Soriano became his artistic mentor and introduced him to various painting media. More importantly, he instilled in the young artist an appreciation for European art.
Nieto was particularly drawn to German expressionism, according to author Alberto Blanco, and although they were not formally his teachers, Jesus Reyes Ferreira and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano guided Nieto during his formative years in the direction his art would eventually take when he matured. His first oneman show was in 1959 at the San Carlos Academy and was called "Steel, Blood and Killing," reflecting one of the brief occasions when Nieto's socio-political themes took precedence over his whimsey.
After that first exhibition, Nieto went to Europe and settled in Paris in 1959 to join the search for his particular path in modern art and to enter the ranks of great artistic searchers, from Picasso to Jean Debuffet and Paul Klee, whom he greatly admired. He made friends with authors, including Octavio Paz, and many painters, and travelled all over Europe absorbing the latest artistic trends while studying the great old masters in museums. He attended the lithograph workshop of Michel Casse and studied metal engraving with William Hayter.
By 1961, Nieto was exhibiting his works at the Modern Museum of Art in Oslo, Norway, home of the great expressionist, Munch, whose "The Scream" is one of the world's best-known works of expressionist art. At that exhibition, he shared the walls with another painter from Oaxaca who was just starting to be known, Francisco Toledo. Another great Oaxacan painter, Rodolfo Morales, a master of magic mytho-realism, was also just beginning his career. In 1963 and 1968, Nieto won top prizes at the Paris Biennial. He spent the entire decade of the 1960s in Europe, producing what would become the major and most important part of his prolific lifetime of works.
By the time he returned to Mexico and Oaxaca in 1972, he was famous. He began experimenting in various new media and techniques, including collages and lacquers, and began creating his bestiary, a series of playful, brilliant works of animals both real and mythological, which are among the most successful of his works. They contain a great sense of ironic humor, which he considered essential to artistic creation. He had many more exhibitions and won many more awards before his death in 1985 at 49 in Oaxaca.
This tribute to a fine Mexican artist, sponsored by the National Institute of Fine Arts and the National Council for Culture and the Arts, and curated and coordinated by Marina Vázquez Ramos, is presented chronologically, starting with pencil drawings from 1954 in which Nieto's originality and imagination are already evident.
There are crude figurative and abstract drawings with crayons, inks and gouaches on paper and lots of odd faces in which the beginning of a painterly style can be seen emerging. The first figurative drawings in pencil and ink on paper such as "El Carmen" are amusing, ugly little cartoons, while his little black cats in ink on paper are full of the artist's striking sense of observation. So are his untitled representational vultures, turkeys and birds, that we can see evolving into totally abstract versions of them.
His series of animals are especially good. "Horse" (1958) is full of bright blues, yellows and shocking pinks that show the influence of Picasso's horse in the "Guernica" mural, but that does not fall into typical Mexican folkloricism. On the contrary, it both expresses and makes fun of it. His colored inks on paper are particularly vivid with demented visions that raise all sorts of questions as to what Nieto was trying to express in his painterly trances. One suspects that tequila or mezcal may have been instrumental to his inspiration, although his intuition and subconscious are always under artistic control.
His 1966 "Spirographs," all in colored pencil, his 1967 series of "Serpents" and his frog-like "Basileo" use geometric forms bent to serve his purposes, and his mandrills, giraffes, cobras and endlessly fascinating and fabulous invented abstract creatures are dynamic and unleash subconscious reactions in viewers. They become rather like Rorschach tests that one must take to convince oneself that it's not one, but the painter, who was mad.
Controlled madness, as Kafka, Joyce and Nabokov proved in literature, has its own logic. But there is nothing wrong with being rather mad, especially via artistic creation, in this insane world, is there? Most people hide their madness; hugely talented and courageous Nieto just let it all hang out as he tread the tightrope between sanity and insanity. Walking through this exciting exhibition is a bit exhausting, because Nieto takes us on a tour of his tormented inner life. It's like walking through a minefield. Explosions occur.
His richly hued and elegantly drawn camels, elephants, toucans and zebras are really gorgeous, clever and compelling works in serigraphs, collages and mixed media techniques that show the artist's never-ending ability to reinvent himself. He even used a bit of Jackson Pollock's drip-drop-slop technique with great restraint and enjoyment, but it's so cleanly integrated into certain works that it's almost impossible to notice. The joy and the drama they contain are universal and contagious, because his painterly language speaks directly to each of us in different ways. He gets us at the gut reaction level.
At La Esmeralda, Rodolfo Nieto became friends with his colleagues Francisco Corzas, Luis Lopez Loza, Tomas Parra and Fernando Ramos Prida. He became boyfriend of a painting student, Marta Guillermoprieto, who later left for several years to reside in Los Angeles, California. They maintained their relation by letter and on her return to Mexico in 1958 they decided to marry.
Rodolfo Nieto had participated in group exhibitions, but it was until 1959 when he exhibited individually for the first time and almost simultaneously at the Academia de San Carlos and in the Galerias Chapultepec. In the last one, an important portrait exhibition was mounted, which included works by Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, Siqueiros, Dr. Atl, Roberto Montenegro, among others. Nieto's exhibition was in an adjoining room, so it was highly visited. One of the visitors, the collector Bernard Siemiatycki, owner of the magazine Artes de Mexico, became interested in his work and repeatedly came to buy paintings. Shortly thereafter, Siemiatycki left for Paris carrying 15 Nieto canvases that he wanted to show to his friends, owners of different art galleries. The response was positive. Galerie de France proposed that if Nieto went to France, they would take care of its development.
Rodolfo Nieto and his wife Marta left by boat for Paris where they stayed in the 1960s. For two years they received Siemiatycki's help. A year and a half after his arrival in Paris, Rodolfo Nieto was already working with Galerie de France. They lived in their first year in the University City of Paris, first in the Greek House and then in the Mexican House. Then they lived in different apartments, either in the L'Etoile area, in Montmartre; on Boulevard Pasteur or near the Denfert-Rochereau station.
Shortly after their arrival they became friends with Francisco Toledo. In 1961, Rufino Tamayo introduced Francisco Toledo with a Norwegian curator, with the purpose of preparing an exhibition of the young artist. Toledo in turn proposed Rodolfo Nieto. The exhibition that presented the work of both Oaxacan artists was held with great success at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, Norway, in 1962.
During his stay in Paris, he became acquainted with various writers and poets such as Octavio Paz, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar; and Jorge Luis Borges, who commissioned him to illustrate the French translation of his work Manual of Fantastic Zoology for the publisher Maurice Nadeau in 1963. Although the publication contained few drawings because it was a pocketbook, the notebook where he made them came to contain around 80 versions of fantastic animals. That year Rodolfo Nieto received the painting award from the Paris Biennale.
In Paris his work was influenced by the study he made of Dubuffet's art brut, and the works of the artists of the CoBrA group, which was formed in Paris in 1948 by artists from the Netherlands and Scandinavia, its main representatives were Karel Appel, Asger Jorn and Pierre Corneille, to which were added: Jean Atlan, Pierre Alechinsky, Constant, Noiret and Dotremont, inventor of the group's name (acronym for the cities of its main representatives COpenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam). The cause was clear; they set themselves the goal of taking advantage of the free expression of the unconscious without interference or control of the intellect. In Rodolfo Nieto's work from 1960 to 1965, faces are a fusion between man and animal, characters with animal features, finally the internal and cerebral fusion, forming his series Mental Zoology.
Rodolfo Nieto's work appeared in group exhibitions alongside Hans Hartung, Pignon, Picasso, Alfred Menessier, Zao Wou Ki, Poliakoff, Pierre Soulages, Dubuffet, Burri, among others. In 1964, he presented the first of several solo exhibitions at the Galerie de France, where the entire Paris School frequently exhibited. Octavio Paz wrote the presentation for the catalog of said exhibition. Precisely through Galerie de France, Rodolfo Nieto established a relationship with painters Pierre Soulanges, Pierre Alechinsky, Alfred Manessier, Zao Wou Ki and Mario Prassinos.
He made engravings in Mourlot's workshop, and in the famous Atelier 17 by William Hayter, the graphic engraver who trained so many graphic artists in France and New York. Juan Soriano claimed to have seen Rodolfo Nieto also work in Peter Bramsen's workshop on Vielle du Temple street, in the Le Marais neighborhood. In 1966 he made lithography in Michael Cassé's workshop and investigated other painting techniques. He carried out a group of works where he used automotive lacquers, which he later combined with oil. Then he made a series of collages, paper on paper on a wooden support. In that year he also presented his first solo exhibition at the Galerie La Balance in Brussels, Belgium. Followed by another solo exhibition at the Galerie de France in 1967. That year he also did a series of pencil drawings of animals at the Basel Zoo. They are the starting point of a new figurative trend that borders on the one hand with the Mexican baroque and on the other with art brut.
In 1968, he obtained for the second time the painting prize of the Paris Biennale, and returned to Mexico at Marta's insistence. Soon they separated. He returned to Paris, where he made new friends, among them the Argentine writer Jose Bianco. In 1969, he presented solo exhibitions at the Galerie de France, the Galerie La Balance and his first solo exhibition in a museum, named "Rodolfo Nieto: Laboratory on paper" at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City. He returned to Mexico for short periods. In 1970, he exhibited individually at the Galerie Michel Casse in Paris.
He returned definitively to Mexico in 1972. He spent most of his time in Mexico City, and traveled frequently to Oaxaca. Nieto did not stop painting animals in those years. Goats, bulls, dromedaries, camels, rhinos, ostriches, full of rhythm and color, which are joined by turkeys, rabbits, frogs, parakeets that come from Mexican folk art. Also a result of his reunion with Oaxaca is the important series of monolithic characters he painted from 1972, in these works the reference to pre-Hispanic sculpture is obvious. It evokes the memory of the Tlaloc monolith that was transported to Mexico City a decade earlier, but is more accurately linked to Zapotec ceramics. During those years Rodolfo Nieto toured Monte Alban, Mitla and Zaachila. In 1973, he presented his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.
In 1976, he married Nancy Glenn, an American model who had been Miss California, and establishes their residence in an apartment in Coyoacan. His relationship with Rufino and Olga Tamayo is strengthened. That year he presented his first exhibition at the Estela Shapiro Gallery. From that year on, Rodolfo Nieto took a turn towards another language. His work revolves around the human being, in an almost musical sense, a man with a parakeet, the violinist, the cellist, the marimber, the woman with bonsai, the man with television, the acrobat, the fire eater, the evening, the astronomer, the contortionist, the gramophone, etc.
He was frequently asked if he was an abstract painter. He always defended himself against this idea, and did not understand how it could be confused, since he had never stopped making figuration, although it was certainly not realistic. His brother Carlos says that he laughed: "If I did abstract painting and wanted to send a message, I would have better have written a novel.”
When Rodolfo Nieto separated from his second wife, he went to live in his studio in Tacubaya. His alcoholism was already very serious. He entered clinics to detoxify. His work La femme de l’absinthe is an image of the addiction that destroyed him. He died at the London Clinic in Mexico City, on June 24, 1985, almost at the age of 50.
