Background
Alberto Gironella was born on September 26, 1929 in Mexico City, Mexico, to a mother from Yucatn who spoke Maya and an immigrant father who took him regularly to bullfights, the family root of one of his later obsessions.
Alberto Gironella was born on September 26, 1929 in Mexico City, Mexico, to a mother from Yucatn who spoke Maya and an immigrant father who took him regularly to bullfights, the family root of one of his later obsessions.
In 1949 Alberto graduated from the National Autonomous University, where he studied literature.
After his graduation, Alberto founded a small literary magazine, Clavileno, and two years later created Segrel, another equally fleeting journal. When his poetry and a full-length novel, "Tiburcio Esquila", failed to find publication, Gironella became an artist, at which he was instantly successful.
He spent four years in Montmartre, like so many Mexican painters before him, and continued to be a serious Francophile all his life. Gironella was a regular at the famous lithography workshop Atelier Clot in Paris and his prints were especially well-regarded, illustrating a range of books such as Carlos Fuentes' "Terra Nostra", Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" and works by Cervantes, Cortzar, Flaubert and Nietzsche. One of his most important influences was the Velzquez retrospective in Madrid that he had seen during his European travels of 1961 - 1964. Gironella later did his own, almost equally revered interpretation of "Las Meninas" as well as of famous works by Goya.
Following a tumultuous 1958 exhibition at the Union Panamerica in Washington he won a prize at the 1960 Biennale des Jeunes in Paris, where he also had a successful solo show presented by Edouard Jaguer and entitled "Mort et transfiguration de la Reine Mariana." Gironella was always more than just a painter, he was a social and cultural catalyst, becoming the close friend and collaborator of everyone from Fernando Arrabal and Octavio Paz to such Surrealist mainstays as Andre Breton and the poetess Joyce Mansour. His best, lifelong friend was probably Luis Bunuel, even though Gironella admitted to a singular dislike of any form of cinema and only spoke of poetry with his compadre.
In Paris in 1963 Gironella organised a large exhibition on Jose Guadalupe Posada, the first serious critical retrospective on this popular artist, for he was as committed to promoting culture in general as his own work. Indeed he dedicated a series of his exhibitions to other artists, such as Bunuel or the matador Manolo Martnez. Gironella was also involved in several collaborations, notably with Pierre Alechinsky, with whom he exhibited at "L'ecart absolu", the last official exhibition of the Surrealist movement, held in Paris in 1966. The previous year they had engaged in a pictorial duel, producing etchings in competition with each other.
In 1980 Alechinsky came to stay with Gironella in Mexico and they embarked on a large series of collaborative works about bullfighting which resulted in an exhibition which toured Paris, Madrid and Jutland, before being given as a joint donation to the Musee Reattu in Arles in 1996. This work also resulted in a book, "Deux pinceaux dans le sable", written in 1996. In 1980 the two artists appeared, along with Octavio Paz, on one of Mexico's most popular television programmes, 14.15 on Canal 2.
Gironella may have been an avant-garde rebel in his youth but he soon received official approval, a Guggenheim grant in 1968 and an even larger one from the Fundacin Cultural Televisa in 1977. He made his permanent home at the mountainous lake resort of Valle del Bravo and demonstrated an active interest in his country's public life. During the press crackdown of 1984 he donated several paintings to help found the left-wing paper La Jornada, which became one of Mexico's leading dailies.
La Jornada itself reported Gironella's death with an elegant full-page cover photograph but no accompanying story, in keeping with his ferociously reclusive, if not testy legend. Though it is known he died after a long battle against bone cancer and that his body was immediately cremated, any further details concerning his demise or the number of his wives, girlfriends and children, legitimate or otherwise, are still suitably oblique.
Carmen
No passaran
Potlash - homenaje a Octavio Paz
Francisco Lezcano en su taller
Edna la famosa
Madonna con esqueleto
Sanda as Carmen
Carmen
Terra Nostra
Don Ramon María del Valle Inclan
Bajo el volcán
Zapata con balazos
La Reina de los yugos
Pudridero
Madonna
Valle-Inclan
El sueno de Dona Marina 2
Ultramarinos
M. Degas visita a Sonia
Festin a Bunuel
Madre Patria
Alberto was a Mexican nationalist.
Alberto challenged the dogma of ruling muralists such as Diego Rivera, proposing a personal, subversive aesthetic instead of the Communist Party-led social realism of their elders.