Antonio Rodríguez Luna

Antonio Rodríguez Luna (July 22, 1910 – 1985) was a Spanish painter who developed most of his career while in exile in Mexico during the Spanish Civil War. He began his career young, while still studying in Madrid and before the war had already exhibited in various places in Europe. His opposition to Francisco Franco, forced him into exile, with intellectuals and artists in the country arranging his asylum. His career here included a Guggenheim Fellowship with major exhibitions in Washington DC and New York along with exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico. Despite his success, he never forgot his Spanish roots, with an exhibition in Madrid in 1971 and a return to his hometown of Montoro in 1981, after the death of Franco.

Life Rodríguez Luna was born in the town of Montoro in the Córdoba province of Spain. He began his art studies when he was thirteen, first at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Seville. In 1927, he moved to Madrid to study at the Escuela de Bellas Artes there, meeting José Planes, Enrique Climent, Arturo Souto and Francisco Mateos, with whom he formed the Artistas Independientes group. Lázaro Cárdenas and a list of artists and intellectuals worked to bring him as an exile to Mexico City in 1939. In the 1960s, Spanish cinematographers petitioned to let him back in the country to see his aging parents, but by the time he could do so, his father had died and his mother did not recognize him. He returned again in 1975 to exhibit at the Juana Mordó Gallery. The Museo de Arte Moderno held the first retrospective of his work in 1959, when the institution was still at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and held another in 1980. In 1984, the Palacio itself held a retrospective. In 1985, shortly before his death, his hometown in Spain opened a museum named after him in the former chapel of San Jacinto. Since then, there have been two major exhibitions and tributes to the artists, one in 1997 at the Franz Mayer Museum and another in 2008 at the Museo-Taller Nishizawa.

Artistry Rodríguez Luna is one of the most important painters from Córdoba in the 20th century. Luis Cardoza y Aragón stated that the “… carries the model inside himself and he transcends it sin such a way that it takes form as a fiction which is more real than reality itself.” He was one of the first artists in Spain to embrace the European trends of the 1920s, with his early work influenced by Surrealism and Expressionism. During his career, his work would evolve from this to forms of abstractionism in his later career with phases in social realism and neo-Cubism. Social realism was most prominent during the Spanish Civil War and early exile in Mexico. In Spain still, he used it to denounce what was happening in the country. After arriving to Mexico, he first worked on themes consistent with the then-dominant Mexican muralism movement, but soon returned to themes from before the war.

Works from the height of his career in the 1940s and 1950s show a lyrical sense, with colors such as grays, blacks, blues and whites dominant. Dark areas predominate and stand out, with areas of nothing but a single color. The artist himself stated that “To paint is to search for the depth and density of emotion which and object may have.”