Las Haciendas del condado de San Mateo Valparaiso

Christopher,

With respect to your question about the hacendado families of the Revolution and Cristeros era, I add the material below which is no longer available on the Internet where I first found it. It references a Felguerez family member, Manuel Felguerez. The Felguerez Art Museum is located in Zacatecas, Zactecas, see http://www.travelbymexico.com/zacatecas/atractivos/index2.php?nom=kzacf…

"Manuel Felguérez was born in the Hacienda de San Agustín del Vergel in Valparaíso, Zacatecas. Times were difficult in 1928; the armed revolution had ended a few years earlier but land ownership was uncertain and agrarian claims spread throughout the country.
“My father had men to defend the hacienda, since the peasants tried to obtain land by violent means. One of my first memories is of a gunfight between the forces loyal to the hacienda and the agrarian supporters.”
His family emigrated to the capital for safety and his father tried to sell the Agrarian Debt bonds but died the following year. “I was seven years old, my mother didn’t want to go back and so she gave up the hacienda. I went back to Valparaíso sixty years later because they made me a favorite son and the Municipal Arts Center was named after me. I didn’t go back because my mother always used to say, “Don’t go to Valparaíso because they’ll kill you.”
He completed primary, secondary and high school with the Marian brothers. In 1947, he attended an international boy scouts’ meeting in France. “During that stay, we visited several countries and at the end of the trip, I decided to devote myself to art as a way of life.”
On his return to Mexico, he was admitted to the Academia de San Carlos, but he disliked the teaching methods and returned to Paris to study at the Grande Chaumière where the Cubist sculptor Zadquine accepted him as a pupil. It was there that he met the painter Lilia Carrillo, whom he subsequently married.
Taxidermist, anthropologist out of necessity, artisan, traveler, researcher and teacher, Felguérez is still primarily a child who discovers the world every day and, eager for sensations, plays with matter, adding and removing parts, assembling them and then taking them apart, searching for the secret of the beauty of forms. His stay in Europe led him to abstractionism and subsequently to geometrism in its basic forms: the circle, the triangle, the rectangle and the quadrangle and through a combination of these he developed his own idiom.
During the 1960s, Felguérez produced approximately thirty murals based on reliefs with scrap iron, stone, sand and shells. Two of the most outstanding murals include the one in the Cine Diana and in the Bahía bathing place. “It was my way of promoting myself and getting myself known. I charged the minimum, just what I needed to live on. I eventually shut down the workshop and went back to my easel, but by that time I was known both nationally and internationally and things were quite different.”
I never tried to make a living from art; I supported myself by giving classes. I taught at the University and now I’m retired. I never liked to depend on the sale of my work. Selling your work is traumatic; I used to paint and paint and my paintings would pile up.”
This led Felguérez to talk about the Museum of Abstract Art named after him and inaugurated in 1998 in the city of Zacatecas. “At that time, I had too many paintings, if anything, and in the case of my sculptures, I had nowhere to put them. In 1997, Felguérez and his wife Mercedes decided to donate a significant proportion of his work in order to create a museum. With the participation of the government of the state of Zacatecas, which provided a building that was originally a seminary and subsequently a prison and state penitentiary, work began on remodeling the building to adapt it to its new role as an art museum.
The collection consists of 100 works by the artist covering various stages in his lengthy career, as well as works by over 110 Mexican and foreign abstract artists. This museum is one of a kind because of its subject matter and the careful selection of the works on display.
The jewel in the museum’s crown is the hall with murals from Osaka. “When we did the restoration work, we discovered a large space, a hall of approximately 900 square meters, which we thought would be perfect for the eleven monumental murals produced at the request of Fernando Gamboa for the Mexican Pavilion in the Osaka ‘70 World Exhibition.”
Thirty-one years after they were painted, these murals were brought together and displayed together for the first time in a museum hall that has come to be known as the “Sistine Chapel of Mexican Abstract Art.”"

Ed