Xavier Gonzalez
Xavier Gonzalez (AskArt) |
Mural Painter, Sculpture
Notes:
• "Xavier Gonzalez (1898 - 1993) was a Spanish American artist. He was born in Almeria, Spain. He lived in Argentina and Mexico for some time, planning to become an engineer in a gold mine. In 1925, he immigrated to the United States.
Gonzalez began his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1921 to 1923, and his uncle, José Arpa, studied with him there. He also studied at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, as well as in Paris and the Far East. In 1931, Gonzalez became a US citizen, and in 1935 he married fellow artist Ethel Edwards (1915-1999) who was a student of Gonzales at Newcomb College. Gonzales commandeered the canteen wall at Newcomb for the use of his art students.
Gonzalez died of leukemia in 1993, at the age of 94, at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, New York City." - Wikipedia
• "Xavier Gonzalez was born in Almeria, Spain, and lived in Argentina and Mexico before immigrating to the United States in 1925. He became a United States citizen in 1931, and married artist Ethel Edwards in 1935. Gonzalez traveled extensively, including in France (where he met and discussed art with Picasso), Italy, Spain, Egypt, Japan, Hong Kong, and Greece. Gonzalez studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, the San Antonio Art School, and in Paris and the Far East. His works have been displayed throughout the United States including at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in Paris, Venice, Brussels and Tokyo. He taught art at the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College Art School and was the director of the art school at Sul Ros State Teachers College." - USBR
• Born in the coastal city of Almeria, Spain, Gonzalez moved with his family at age eight to Seville, then shortly thereafter to Mexico, where they settled in Puebla in the state of the same name. At age thirteen, he studied art at the San Carlos Academy, Mexico City. His early training is reflected in a painting of a rural Texas scene executed when he was seventeen, probably painted on a visit with his uncle Jose Arpa, a former resident of Puebla who lived alternately in San Antonio and Mexico.
In 1916 Gonzalez studied mechanics by correspondence while working days in a draftsman's office in Mexico and afterward for the Inter-Oceanic Railway and the Oro Mining Railroad Company. He traveled in Central America and Europe following World War I and in 1922 came to the United States to work for a railroad in Iowa, then as a window dresser for a department store in Chicago. Gonzalez returned to Mexico to teach briefly in public schools.
In 1925 Gonzalez came again to San Antonio to assist Arpa in his art school, which opened the following year. From 1927 through 1929, Gonzalez taught art classes at the Witte Memorial Museum. He studied several summers in New York and became a citizen of the United States in 1930. During the 1930s, he taught in Texas periodically at summer artists camps held at Glen Rose and Christoval, and from 1933 through 1939 he served as director of the Summer School of Art, Sul Ross State Teachers College, Alpine. In 1931 he accepted a teaching position at Sophie Newcomb College, New Orleans, where he married a student, Ethel Edwards of New Orleans, and in 1941 executed four murals for the U.S. Post Office in Kilgore, having previously painted murals in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and San Antonio. After an international competition his design was selected for the decoration of the Los Angeles Museum of Art (1933).
During World War II, Gonzalez worked in the War Department as an art director and executed a series of posters and special maps for the U.S. Navy. After the war, he lived on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for ten years, where he founded a summer painting school in Wellfleet, then divided his time between Cape Cod and New York City. He painted, lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and taught in the art school of the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Students League of New York, and the painting school of Wellfleet. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. Gonzalez was artist in residence at Western Reserve University, Cleveland (1953 - 1954), and at the El Paso Museum of Art (1965). He authored Notes about Painting (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1955) and in 1956 he was commissioned by Life to research and paint various monuments in Egypt; the oil paintings that resulted are now part of the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In connection with the American Bicentennial in 1976, he received commissions from the city of New York for a monument, which he executed in wood, polyester, and bronze, and from the U.S. Department of the Interior for a series of paintings. In 1987 Gonzalez received the Florence Brevoort-Eickmeyer Prize, awarded by Columbia University to an artist selected by the National Academy of Design. He died in New York City of Leukemia.
Collections: Museum of the Big Bend, Sul Ross State University, Alpine; School of Architecture, University of Texas, Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Kendall Art Gallery, San Angelo; Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum and Witte Museum, San Antonio; San Antonio Art League; Corcoran Gallery of Art and U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C.; stone bas relief, library, Tulane University, New Orleans; Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Wellesley (Massachusetts) College; Brooklyn (New York) Museum; Bicentennial monument, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Philadelphia Museum of Arts; Seattle Art Museum. - David Dike
• GONZALEZ, XAVIER (1898-1993). Xavier Gonzalez, painter and sculptor, was born on February 15, 1898, in Almería, Spain, the son of Emilio González Díaz de Paredes and Gracia Arpa Perea. When he was eight, his family moved to Seville, and subsequently to Puebla, Mexico, where he studied art at the San Carlos Academy. The elder Gonzalez was an agricultural expert who traveled widely throughout Latin America teaching improved agricultural methods; Xavier left school at thirteen to accompany his father on these journeys. During his late teens and early twenties Xavier taught for a time in the public schools in Mexico City and studied mechanical engineering, working briefly for a mining company. In 1922 he moved to the United States and took a job as a draftsman at a railroad in Iowa. Later he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, supporting himself by designing display signs at the Carson Pirie Scott department store and working at other odd jobs. After completing his studies in 1925, Gonzalez moved to San Antonio, where he taught in the school of his uncle José Arpa and at the Witte Museum. Though he left San Antonio in 1931 after being invited to teach at the Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, Gonzalez continued to maintain a relationship with the Witte, where he had solo exhibitions in 1928, 1947, 1955, and 1968. In 1951 he was a guest instructor at the San Antonio Art Institute. He also taught at the Sul Ross State Teacher's College in Alpine in the late 1930s.
Known for his unusual versatility, Gonzalez made paintings and sculptures in a variety of styles, both figurative and abstract. But he was perhaps best known as a muralist, a technique he evidently acquired during his years in Mexico. Among his most notable Texas works were his murals for the Municipal Auditorium in San Antonio in 1933. Gonzalez painted the murals for the Civil Work Administration, assisted by Rudolf Staffel and John Griffith. The paintings, however, which included an upraised fist and a palm with a bleeding wounds, drew numerous complaints from the public for, as one critic put it, their "insignia and symbols of an insidious nature." In 1935, bowing to pressure, Mayor Charles K. Quin ordered the murals removed and returned to the federal government. During World War II Gonzalez made a series of posters for the Department of the Navy and also worked as a cartographer. In the mid-1940s he moved to New York, where he lived most of the rest of his life. In his later years Gonzalez opened a summer art school in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, and taught for several years at the Art Students League in New York, as well as at the Brooklyn Museum. His work is in the collections of many museums, including the Witte Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1935, during his tenure at Newcomb College in New Orleans, he married one of his students, Ethel Edwards, who became a distinguished artist in her own right. Gonzalez died of leukemia in the Bronx on January 9, 1993. - Long
• "Tennessee Valley Authority," Xavier Gonzalez, 1937.
The Huntsville mural was the largest and most expensive panel commissioned in Alabama and the only one placed in a federal courthouse rather than a post office. Gonzales received the invitation for the panel based on designs he had submitted for a competition in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1936. He originally proposed a rather odd allegorical panel that the Washington office criticized for both its style and its lack of meaning for the people in Huntsville. Instead of making allegorical allusions it was suggested that Gonzalez place emphasis on the realities of life. Using a realistic style and basing his new theme on the work then being done by TVA in northern Alabama, he redesigned the panel several times. It was ultimately put in place in October of 1937 and described by Gonzales: "Huntsville, Alabama is situated in the lower angle of the Tennessee River and has profited immensely by the benefits derived from the Muscle Shoals Project. Before this undertaking was begun, the country, being unprotected, was at the mercy of floods and calamities. The benefits of electricity were a privilege of the few who could afford the exorbitant price, the soil of the country was being washed away by the floods, and industry and agriculture were underdeveloped due to the uncertainty of land conditions. Since the completion of this project tremendous benefits have been received . . . the control and proper use of water resources; . . . conservation and preservation of land resources; . . . [and] the disposition of surplus electric energy created as a by-product of the irrigation and flood control." - AlabamaMoments
• Darnell tells about Mr. Xavier Gonzalez, a man commissioned to paint murals in Huntsville's Courtroom as a part of the Federal Public Works of Art Project. - HHR
• Xavier Gonzalez, 94, Painter and Sculptor
"Xavier Gonzalez, a painter and sculptor who taught at the Art Students League for several years, died on Saturday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 94 and lived in Manhattan and Wellfleet, Mass.
He died of leukemia, said his wife, Ethel Edwards, a painter.
Mr. Gonzalez was born in Almeria, Spain. When he was 8, his family moved to Mexico, where he studied art and mechanical engineering. After moving to the United States as a young man, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, supporting himself by designing display signs at the Carson Pirie Scott department store.
Known for his versatility, Mr. Gonzalez painted and made sculpture in several styles, both figurative and abstract. He also executed a number of painted murals and a few carved stone reliefs as public commissions. Among them was "The History of Man," an abstract relief executed in 1963 for the lobby of David B. Steinman Hall on the uptown campus of City College.
Before going to the Art Students League in 1976, Mr. Gonzalez taught at Tulane University, the Brooklyn Museum and Case Western Reserve University. He had his first one-man show in New York City at the Grand Central Galleries in the late 1950's. His sculpture was shown at the Century Association last fall. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sisters, Concha Gonzalez Navarro of Mexico City and Encarnacion Gonzalez Arpa of California." - NYT
Related Links:
The Following Pages Link to this Page:
• HHR
| Born: | 1898, Almeria, Spain |
| Died: | 1993, Bronx, New York |
Notes:
• "Xavier Gonzalez (1898 - 1993) was a Spanish American artist. He was born in Almeria, Spain. He lived in Argentina and Mexico for some time, planning to become an engineer in a gold mine. In 1925, he immigrated to the United States.
Gonzalez began his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1921 to 1923, and his uncle, José Arpa, studied with him there. He also studied at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, as well as in Paris and the Far East. In 1931, Gonzalez became a US citizen, and in 1935 he married fellow artist Ethel Edwards (1915-1999) who was a student of Gonzales at Newcomb College. Gonzales commandeered the canteen wall at Newcomb for the use of his art students.
Gonzalez died of leukemia in 1993, at the age of 94, at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, New York City." - Wikipedia
• "Xavier Gonzalez was born in Almeria, Spain, and lived in Argentina and Mexico before immigrating to the United States in 1925. He became a United States citizen in 1931, and married artist Ethel Edwards in 1935. Gonzalez traveled extensively, including in France (where he met and discussed art with Picasso), Italy, Spain, Egypt, Japan, Hong Kong, and Greece. Gonzalez studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, the San Antonio Art School, and in Paris and the Far East. His works have been displayed throughout the United States including at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in Paris, Venice, Brussels and Tokyo. He taught art at the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College Art School and was the director of the art school at Sul Ros State Teachers College." - USBR
• Born in the coastal city of Almeria, Spain, Gonzalez moved with his family at age eight to Seville, then shortly thereafter to Mexico, where they settled in Puebla in the state of the same name. At age thirteen, he studied art at the San Carlos Academy, Mexico City. His early training is reflected in a painting of a rural Texas scene executed when he was seventeen, probably painted on a visit with his uncle Jose Arpa, a former resident of Puebla who lived alternately in San Antonio and Mexico.
In 1916 Gonzalez studied mechanics by correspondence while working days in a draftsman's office in Mexico and afterward for the Inter-Oceanic Railway and the Oro Mining Railroad Company. He traveled in Central America and Europe following World War I and in 1922 came to the United States to work for a railroad in Iowa, then as a window dresser for a department store in Chicago. Gonzalez returned to Mexico to teach briefly in public schools.
In 1925 Gonzalez came again to San Antonio to assist Arpa in his art school, which opened the following year. From 1927 through 1929, Gonzalez taught art classes at the Witte Memorial Museum. He studied several summers in New York and became a citizen of the United States in 1930. During the 1930s, he taught in Texas periodically at summer artists camps held at Glen Rose and Christoval, and from 1933 through 1939 he served as director of the Summer School of Art, Sul Ross State Teachers College, Alpine. In 1931 he accepted a teaching position at Sophie Newcomb College, New Orleans, where he married a student, Ethel Edwards of New Orleans, and in 1941 executed four murals for the U.S. Post Office in Kilgore, having previously painted murals in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and San Antonio. After an international competition his design was selected for the decoration of the Los Angeles Museum of Art (1933).
During World War II, Gonzalez worked in the War Department as an art director and executed a series of posters and special maps for the U.S. Navy. After the war, he lived on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for ten years, where he founded a summer painting school in Wellfleet, then divided his time between Cape Cod and New York City. He painted, lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and taught in the art school of the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Students League of New York, and the painting school of Wellfleet. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. Gonzalez was artist in residence at Western Reserve University, Cleveland (1953 - 1954), and at the El Paso Museum of Art (1965). He authored Notes about Painting (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1955) and in 1956 he was commissioned by Life to research and paint various monuments in Egypt; the oil paintings that resulted are now part of the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In connection with the American Bicentennial in 1976, he received commissions from the city of New York for a monument, which he executed in wood, polyester, and bronze, and from the U.S. Department of the Interior for a series of paintings. In 1987 Gonzalez received the Florence Brevoort-Eickmeyer Prize, awarded by Columbia University to an artist selected by the National Academy of Design. He died in New York City of Leukemia.
Collections: Museum of the Big Bend, Sul Ross State University, Alpine; School of Architecture, University of Texas, Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Kendall Art Gallery, San Angelo; Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum and Witte Museum, San Antonio; San Antonio Art League; Corcoran Gallery of Art and U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C.; stone bas relief, library, Tulane University, New Orleans; Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Wellesley (Massachusetts) College; Brooklyn (New York) Museum; Bicentennial monument, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Philadelphia Museum of Arts; Seattle Art Museum. - David Dike
• GONZALEZ, XAVIER (1898-1993). Xavier Gonzalez, painter and sculptor, was born on February 15, 1898, in Almería, Spain, the son of Emilio González Díaz de Paredes and Gracia Arpa Perea. When he was eight, his family moved to Seville, and subsequently to Puebla, Mexico, where he studied art at the San Carlos Academy. The elder Gonzalez was an agricultural expert who traveled widely throughout Latin America teaching improved agricultural methods; Xavier left school at thirteen to accompany his father on these journeys. During his late teens and early twenties Xavier taught for a time in the public schools in Mexico City and studied mechanical engineering, working briefly for a mining company. In 1922 he moved to the United States and took a job as a draftsman at a railroad in Iowa. Later he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, supporting himself by designing display signs at the Carson Pirie Scott department store and working at other odd jobs. After completing his studies in 1925, Gonzalez moved to San Antonio, where he taught in the school of his uncle José Arpa and at the Witte Museum. Though he left San Antonio in 1931 after being invited to teach at the Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, Gonzalez continued to maintain a relationship with the Witte, where he had solo exhibitions in 1928, 1947, 1955, and 1968. In 1951 he was a guest instructor at the San Antonio Art Institute. He also taught at the Sul Ross State Teacher's College in Alpine in the late 1930s.
Known for his unusual versatility, Gonzalez made paintings and sculptures in a variety of styles, both figurative and abstract. But he was perhaps best known as a muralist, a technique he evidently acquired during his years in Mexico. Among his most notable Texas works were his murals for the Municipal Auditorium in San Antonio in 1933. Gonzalez painted the murals for the Civil Work Administration, assisted by Rudolf Staffel and John Griffith. The paintings, however, which included an upraised fist and a palm with a bleeding wounds, drew numerous complaints from the public for, as one critic put it, their "insignia and symbols of an insidious nature." In 1935, bowing to pressure, Mayor Charles K. Quin ordered the murals removed and returned to the federal government. During World War II Gonzalez made a series of posters for the Department of the Navy and also worked as a cartographer. In the mid-1940s he moved to New York, where he lived most of the rest of his life. In his later years Gonzalez opened a summer art school in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, and taught for several years at the Art Students League in New York, as well as at the Brooklyn Museum. His work is in the collections of many museums, including the Witte Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1935, during his tenure at Newcomb College in New Orleans, he married one of his students, Ethel Edwards, who became a distinguished artist in her own right. Gonzalez died of leukemia in the Bronx on January 9, 1993. - Long
• "Tennessee Valley Authority," Xavier Gonzalez, 1937.
The Huntsville mural was the largest and most expensive panel commissioned in Alabama and the only one placed in a federal courthouse rather than a post office. Gonzales received the invitation for the panel based on designs he had submitted for a competition in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1936. He originally proposed a rather odd allegorical panel that the Washington office criticized for both its style and its lack of meaning for the people in Huntsville. Instead of making allegorical allusions it was suggested that Gonzalez place emphasis on the realities of life. Using a realistic style and basing his new theme on the work then being done by TVA in northern Alabama, he redesigned the panel several times. It was ultimately put in place in October of 1937 and described by Gonzales: "Huntsville, Alabama is situated in the lower angle of the Tennessee River and has profited immensely by the benefits derived from the Muscle Shoals Project. Before this undertaking was begun, the country, being unprotected, was at the mercy of floods and calamities. The benefits of electricity were a privilege of the few who could afford the exorbitant price, the soil of the country was being washed away by the floods, and industry and agriculture were underdeveloped due to the uncertainty of land conditions. Since the completion of this project tremendous benefits have been received . . . the control and proper use of water resources; . . . conservation and preservation of land resources; . . . [and] the disposition of surplus electric energy created as a by-product of the irrigation and flood control." - AlabamaMoments
• Darnell tells about Mr. Xavier Gonzalez, a man commissioned to paint murals in Huntsville's Courtroom as a part of the Federal Public Works of Art Project. - HHR
• Xavier Gonzalez, 94, Painter and Sculptor
"Xavier Gonzalez, a painter and sculptor who taught at the Art Students League for several years, died on Saturday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 94 and lived in Manhattan and Wellfleet, Mass.
He died of leukemia, said his wife, Ethel Edwards, a painter.
Mr. Gonzalez was born in Almeria, Spain. When he was 8, his family moved to Mexico, where he studied art and mechanical engineering. After moving to the United States as a young man, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, supporting himself by designing display signs at the Carson Pirie Scott department store.
Known for his versatility, Mr. Gonzalez painted and made sculpture in several styles, both figurative and abstract. He also executed a number of painted murals and a few carved stone reliefs as public commissions. Among them was "The History of Man," an abstract relief executed in 1963 for the lobby of David B. Steinman Hall on the uptown campus of City College.
Before going to the Art Students League in 1976, Mr. Gonzalez taught at Tulane University, the Brooklyn Museum and Case Western Reserve University. He had his first one-man show in New York City at the Grand Central Galleries in the late 1950's. His sculpture was shown at the Century Association last fall. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sisters, Concha Gonzalez Navarro of Mexico City and Encarnacion Gonzalez Arpa of California." - NYT
Related Links:
• AlabamaMoments - Alabama Department of Archives and History website, with list of New Deal Art in Alabama (Originally found at http://www.alabamamoments.alabama.gov/sec49det.html.)
• Archives of American Art - Collection of his papers.
• Art Net - Samples of his work
• AskArt - Short bio and photo
• David Dike - Webpage for David Dike with nice bio. (Originally found at http://www.daviddikefineart.com/artists/181-gonzalez-xavier.html.)
• HHR - Article titled "Tennessee Valley Authority: The Survival of a True New Deal" by Freeda B. Darnell for Huntsville Historical Review, Volume 14, #1 & #2, 1984, Huntsville-Madison County Historical Society.
• Katayama - A Master's thesis by Erika Katayama (Originally found at http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04152009-161334/unrestricted/xavierversion3.pdf.)
• Living New Deal - Article titled "Federal Courthouse 'Tennessee Valley Authority' Mural - Huntsville AL" in The Living New Deal
• Long - Christopher Long, "GONZALEZ, XAVIER," Handbook of Texas Online
• Megraw - Article titled "Xavier Gonzalez" by Richard Megraw published in KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, edited by David Johnson. Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2010. (Originally found at http://www.knowla.org/entry/598/.)
• NYT - New York Times Obituary, January 15, 1993
• USBR - U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Managing Water, Artists
• USBR, painting - Photo of the painting he did for the USBR project.
• Wikipedia - Biography
The Following Pages Link to this Page:
• HHR