User:Dtnguyen9/sandbox/Oswaldo Guayasamín

Oswaldo Guayasamín (July 6, 1919 – March 10, 1999) was an Ecuadorian master painter and sculptor of Quechua and Mestizo heritage.

Biography

Early life

Guayasamín was born in Quito, Ecuador, to a native father and a Mestiza mother, both of Quechua descent. Guayasamín grew up in a relatively poor and impoverished household. For the majority of Guayasamín's father's life, he worked as a carpenter. However, when his carpentry skills began declining significantly, he later took on a job as a taxi and truck driver. He did not consider his relationship with his father a close one due to the physical abuse to which his father subjected him.

He was the first-born of ten other children in his family. When he was young, he enjoyed drawing caricatures of his teachers and the children that he played with. At age 6, Guayasamín began to gain an interest towards watercolors. When he turned 10 years old, Guayasamín was already starting to experiment with oil-based paints in his artworks. Reading and writing were never areas that Guayasamín's excelled in during the early years of his schooling. While everyone else was learning in school, Guayasamin invested time toward his art-works in class which hampered his opportunity to improve his literacy skills. However, he did show an early love for art, which was nurtured by his mother. She also supported him during the early stages of his career.His mother passed away at an early age, however, but the loss of her and growing up in poverty had a big impact on his life and artwork. He created a Pan-American art of human and social inequalities which achieved international recognition. In his free time at an early age, Guayasamín would paint pictures of tourists while earning a little money doing so.

He began to attend the School of Fine Arts in Quito when he was 13 years old. During his time at this institution, he displayed highly adept skills and easily became considered one among the select few gifted students. In college, Guayasamín witnessed the accidental death of his best friend via a stray bullet on the fourth day of Ecuador's civil war in 1932. This experience, along with his early exposure to racism and discrimination, heavily influenced his style in later works. After the loss of his best friend, Guayasamín abandoned religion and became politically motivated towards devoting his artworks to the purpose of exposing the injustices of society, especially on the local level. Many of Guayasamín's pieces involved raising explicit awareness regarding contemporary issues and exploiting the corruption and oppression that seemingly permeated society. This incident would later inspire one of his paintings, "Los Niños Muertos" (The Dead Children), which features piles of dead bodies lying on a street. This event also helped him to form his vision of the people and the society that he lived in. In addition, these life experiences lead him to become a political activist involved with humanitarian concerns. Before Guayasamín graduated in 1941, he was expelled for his rebellious art but was granted back into the school just a year later because his talent level was so high. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Quito as a painter and sculptor. He also studied architecture there. Another thing that Guayasamín discovered while in school was that he believed art should play a social role. Because of this, Guayasamin tried to show what it meant to be a Latin American. He did this by showing all the cultural roots that Latin Americans share and connecting the works to their politics.

In 1940, at just 20-years-old, he married another artist, Maruja Monteverde. They had four children during their marriage. In 1941, Guayasamin finished at the top of his class in art school. He held his first exhibition when he was 23, in 1942.

Career

Guayasamín started painting from the time he was six years old. Starting from watercolors and transforming all the way through to his signature humanity pieces, his art career had many highlights. Although tragedy molded Guayasamín's work, it was his friend's death that inspired him to paint powerful symbols of truth in society and injustices around him. While his interest was seldom with his school work, he began selling his art before the time that he could even read. After his attendance at the School of Fine Arts in Quito, his career took off.

La Galería Caspicara, an art gallery opened by Eduardo Kingman in 1940 was one of the first places that Guayasamín was featured. His themes of oppression in the lower social classes allowed him to stand out and gain more recognition. "El Silencio" in particular, was a painting from this showcase that stood out. It marks a shift in Guayasamín's work from story-telling to focusing on his subjects symbolizing all human suffering.

Guayasamín met Jose Clemente Orozco while traveling in the United States of America and Mexico from 1942 to 1943. They traveled together to many of the diverse countries in South America. They visited Peru, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and other countries. Through these travels, he observed more of the indigenous lifestyle and poverty that appeared in his paintings.

While Guayasamin is known for expressing his political and social views pertaining to Latin America through his canvases, the Ecuadorian also took stances on international issues. In one of Guayasmin's collections, "The Age of Anger", he included over 250 different works that expressed suffering through the major tragedies of the 20th century, some of these including concentration camps facilitated by Nazi Germany and the Hitler Regime, the death toll of World War II, and atomic bombs dropped on innocent people. Aside from the international themes presented in "The Age of Anger", he still placed emphasis on the sufferings of his native land in Latin America. These sufferings included the violent acts placed on people by the dictatorships among Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Guayasamin believed in the integration of Latin America and incorporated this belief into his work by empathizing with the people of these nations.

In 1988 the Congress of Ecuador asked Guayasamín to paint a mural depicting the history of Ecuador. Due to its controversial nature, the United States Government criticized him because one of the figures in the painting shows a man in a Nazi helmet with the lettering "CIA" on it.

Guayasamín won first prize at the Ecuadorian Salón Nacional de Acuarelistas y Dibujantes in 1948. He also won the first prize at the Third Hispano-American Biennial of Art in Barcelona, Spain, in 1955. In 1957, at the Fourth Biennial of São Paulo, he was named the best South American painter.

The artist's last exhibits were inaugurated by him personally in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, and in the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires in 1995. In Quito, Guayasamín built a museum that features his work. Guayasamín's images capture the political oppression, racism, poverty, Latin America lifestyle, and class division found in much of South America.

La Capilla del Hombre in Quito

Guayasamín dedicated his life to painting, sculpting, collecting; however, he was an ardent supporter of the communist Cuban Revolution in general and Fidel Castro in particular. He was given a prize for "an entire life of work for peace" by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. His death on March 10, 1999, was marked by a day of national strikes by the indigenous people (whom he spent his life supporting) and other sectors of society. Moreover, Guayasamín was considered a great loss to Ecuador and is still lauded as a national treasure.

La Capilla del Hombre in Quito

In 2002, three years after his death, Guayasamín's masterwork, La Capilla del Hombre ("The Chapel of Man"), was completed and opened to the public. The Chapel is meant to document not only man's cruelty to man but also the potential for greatness within humanity. It is co-located with Guayasamín's home in the hills overlooking Quito. His most famous mural, "Ecuador", is exhibited here and both stand to honor the legacy that Oswaldo Guayasamín left behind- social equality and a voice for the voiceless.

Until his death in 1999, Oswaldo Guayasamín's mission of peace and goodness to humanity was evident. His artwork continually reflected this mission of loving his neighbor's and making the world into a better place. Upon being asked if he believes that there is brotherhood among Latin American peoples, Guayasamín replied in a way that summarizes everything that his artwork shows: he said, "With the borders in place, they teach us from childhood on to hate those on the other side, but that is a new and superficial lesson compared with teaching us to love our neighbors. It's virtually the same throughout the continent-... in the end, everyone has some artificially provoked grievance, and the armies of Latin America bear much of the blame for this disunity".