Cantú, Mural, 1960, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bernard and Edith Lewin
Collection of Mexican Art, © Estate of Federico Cantú
A Mexican Mural Study by Federico Cantú
Latin American art
In 1928, the Mexican artist Federico Cantú (1907–1989) arrived in Los
Angeles. Cantú had previously attended the Open Air School of Painting in
Coyoacán, Mexico City, directed by Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871–1946)
(who also spent time in Los Angeles), assisted Diego Rivera (1886–1957)
on his murals at the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City, and studied
sculpture in Paris with the Spanish artist José de Creeft (1884–1982). In
February 1930, James Tarbotton Armstrong, curator of the University of Southern
California Museum, arranged Cantú’s first exhibition of drawings and paintings
at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art in Exposition
Park—LACMA’s parent institution. Though Cantú soon left for New York and Paris,
and finally a return to Mexico, over the years he continued to visit Los
Angeles, exhibiting his work at the Stendahl Galleries (late 1930s and early
1940s) and Lorser Feitelson’s Gallery of Mid-20th-Century Art (1948).
When Cantú returned to Mexico, he primarily devoted himself to painting neoclassical
and religious scenes. In the 1950s, he began painting murals in private homes
in Mexico City, which soon led to a number of public commissions. In several of
these murals, Cantú explored pre-Columbian themes, absent from his earlier
work, a good example of which is Enseñanzas de Quetzalcóatl (Quetzalcóatl’s
Teachings), painted for the home of Benito Coquet (1913–1993).
