activist artist Stage designer
Roberto Nervo was born on February 19, 1885, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, into the family of Colone Ignacio L. Montenegro and Maria Nervo de Montenegro. Montenegro had four sisters: Rosaura, Ana, Eva and María Eugenia and one brother, Arturo. The family was one of the beneficiaries of the Porfirio Díaz regime, leaving for the United States when the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910. They returned in the mid 1920s.
In 1904 - 1905 Roberto began to study painting seriously in Guadalajara, attending the classes of the Brazilian artist Felix Bernardelli. In 1905, Montenegro moved to the capital and in the following year entered the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, where he studied with Diego Rivera, Angel Zarraga and Francisco Goitia. In 1907 Montenegro continued his studies in Europe, moving to France. Montenegro studied painting at the School of Fine Arts in Paris for two years.
At the age of sixteen, Montenegro already drew illustrations for the modernist art journal Revista Moderna, which was managed by modernist Jesús Valenzuela. Then he exhibited in the famous Parisian Salon of French artists and participated in exhibitions of the Autumn Salon. And at the Autumn Salon his painting "Las Flores" was subjected to hursh criticism. Despite that, Montenegro published an album with twenty of its drawings and a foreword by Henri de Regnier and performed several drawings for the magazine "Le Temoin." During his stay in France, the artist made trips to London and Italy.
In 1910 Montenegro returned to Mexico. There he held two exhibitions - in 1911 and 1912, which were held with great success, but in 1913 the artist returned to Europe, where he remained to live for six years. During that time he acquired new skills of the modern school of cubism, preached by Picasso and Gris. After the war, the artist returned to Mexico.
In 1922, Montenegro decorated the Mexican pavilion in Rio de Janeiro at the exhibition dedicated to the centennial of Brazil's independence. In the same year, the artist began one of his most famous works of this period - the fresco "Fiesta de la Santa Cruz" for the monastery of San Pedro and San Pablo, which he finished the following year. The artist performed a mural "The Story and the Tale" (better known as the "Aladdin Lamp") for the Lincoln Center Library, the scenery for the Teatro de Ulises, the two side frescoes for the stairwell of the San Pedro and San Pablo Monastery, released the album Mexican Masks. Moreover, with the submission of Vasconcelos, the artist made several paintings in the Ministry of Education, Benito Juárez School, and the National Pedagogical School. For the Commercial Bank, the artist performed a fresco "Allegory of Industry, Trade and Labor." In 1934 Montenegro became the first director of Mexico's Museo de Arte Popular, and he spent his life championing Mexican folk art.
Despite the fact that Montenegro created paintings, murals and book illustrations, performed lithographs and stained glass windows, he received true fame for portraits. In 1965, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Mexico City hosted a large exhibition of the artist, perhaps the largest in the career of Montenegro, as it covered five decades of the creation of the "Maestro de Pintura." Montenegro died in 1968 as a result of an accident during a trip to Mexico, in the resort town of Patzcuaro.
During his career, Roberto felt torn between the classics and the modern in painting and tended to oscillate between the two, which prompted a certain amount of criticism of his art. Montenegro claimed to be a "subrealist" rather than a Surrealist, and his paintings often mixed two fundamental elements, folklore and fantasy. In his later work Montenegro evolved an abstract style, although he never lost his interest in popular, pre-Hispanic and colonial art.
