OSWALDO GUAYASAMÍN A FONDO - EDICIÓN COMPLETA y RESTAURADA - 2022

OSWALDO GUAYASAMÍN IN DEPTH - COMPLETE AND RESTORED EDITION - February 27, 1976 - 53'41" Oswaldo Guayasamín (Quito, July 6, 1919 - Baltimore, March 10, 1999) was a prominent Ecuadorian painter, draftsman, sculptor, graphic artist, and muralist. Excerpts from his biography on Oswaldo Guayasamín's official website. "He was the eldest of 10 siblings, children of a humble family. His father, of Indigenous descent, worked first as a tractor driver and later as a chauffeur. His mother, of mestizo descent, was always dedicated to her home and her children. At seven years old, Oswaldo already revealed his artistic calling and painted his first works, using milk given to him by his mother, which fed his newborn brother, to dissolve watercolor tablets. His academic life was complicated. He was expelled from six schools for "lack of talent." His father forced him to be a normal boy, like his brothers, who were studying a profession. His first encounter with the cruelty of life is captured in the painting "The Dead Children," which depicts the brutal scene of a group of corpses piled up on a street in Quito, including a boy from his neighborhood, his best friend, surnamed Manjarrés, killed by a stray bullet. His name and indigenous ancestry, the limitations of his childhood, the murder of his friend, the overwhelming crisis of the 1930s, the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and everything that was happening in the world led him to assume an ideological attitude that was reflected in his artistic conception and his political stance. In 1940, at the age of 21, he graduated as a painter and sculptor from the School of Fine Arts. In 1942, he won his first two prizes, one at the Mariano Aguilera Salon. And the second, in 1956, his painting "The White Coffin" won the Grand Prize for Painting at the Third Hispano-American Art Biennial. Nelson Rockefeller, then in charge of Inter-American Affairs for the United States Department of State, attended his first exhibition. Impressed by Guayasamín's work, he bought five of his paintings, and shortly afterward arranged for an invitation for the painter to visit and exhibit in the United States. With the money he had saved, Oswaldo traveled to Mexico to meet Orozco, whom he deeply admired. During his visit, he also met Diego Rivera and learned the technique of fresco painting from both of them. In 1945, he embarked on a journey from Mexico to Patagonia, making notes and drawings for what would become his first series of 103 paintings, called "HUACAYÑAN," which in Quechua (one of Ecuador's indigenous languages) means "The Road of Weeping." In 1961, he began his second series, "The Age of Wrath," with which he sought to depict the places and events that became slaughterhouses of humanity during the 20th century, such as the Nazi concentration camps, the Spanish Civil War, dictatorships in Latin America, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1976, together with his children, he created the Guayasamín Foundation, and through it, donated his entire artistic heritage to Ecuador, with which he organized three museums. In the 1980s, he began a new series, known as "The Age of Tenderness," in homage to his mother. He held monumental exhibitions—more than 200 solo exhibitions—in the most important museums in France, Spain, Italy, the former USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Argentina, etc. He painted great contemporary figures: writers, artists, politicians, and statesmen. Among them are Juan Ramón Jiménez, Pablo Neruda, Juan Rulfo, Gabriela Mistral, Fidel Castro, Gabriel García Márquez, Ernesto Cardenal, and many others, enough to fill a book. This book, indeed, exists. In 1996, he began his most important work in Quito, the architectural space called "The Chapel of Man," as a tribute to humanity, especially to the people. Oswaldo Guayasamín died on March 10, 1999, still without seeing his greatest work completed. His ashes rest under the so-called "Tree of Life," a pine tree planted by Guayasamín himself in the house where he lived his last 20 years, inside a clay vessel.