Arnold Belkin
Arnold Belkin ( born December 9, 1930 in Calgary, Alberta, † July 3, 1992 in Mexico City) was a born, later living in Canada in Mexico painter and graphic artist, who also designed costumes for the theater and ballet.
Biography
Belkin's father was Russian, his mother an Englishwoman, both of Jewish faith. As a teenager, he attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver.
Inspired by the Mexican murals artists, he went in 1948 to Mexico City to where Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros know personally. Here he attended the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado " La Esmeralda" ( ENPEG ), where he met among others, Agustín Lazo and Carlos Orozco. In 1950 he painted at the Instituto Nacional Politécnico his first mural! " El Pueblo no quiere la Guerra " (Spanish for " The people want the war is not "), which was later destroyed. He learned Alfaro Siqueiros, with whom he was friends on cooperation " Patricios y Patricidas " on its wall paintings ( " patrician and patrician ") and " Cuauhtémoc " (in the Palacio de Bellas Artes) addition. 1952 held his first solo exhibition. When Lola Cueto, he learned the metal engraving and at the Escuela de Artes del graphics Libro the art of printing, and also worked with Guillermo Silva Sanz de Santa María. In 1956 he painted at the Continental Hilton Hotel the picture " La Bahía de Acapulco " ( " The bay of Acapulco "), which was also destroyed in an earthquake. Also in 1956 he became professor of Wandmaltechniken at the Universidad de las Américas. In 1957, in Cuernavaca " Escenas de Don Quijote " ( "Scenes of Don Quixote " ), 1959 to be portable mural to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and from 1960 to 1961 he completed " Todos somos Culpables " ( " All are guilty " ) in the prison of the Mexican capital. Together with Francisco Icaza, Francisco Corzas, José Luis Cuevas, Rafael Coronel, Leonel Góngora and Nacho López, he founded the artists' group Nueva Presencia ". In 1963 he exhibited at the Zora Gallery in Los Angeles and included, as well Siqueiros, Icaza, and Tamayo to the Mexican representative to the International Award Exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Then he painted, the more figurative painting until then, mostly abstract. In 1966 he painted " Las festividades judias " ("The Jewish festivals " ) in the synagogue Keilah Ashkenazi de México, Mexico City. Two years later he went to Europe and dealt there with the fresco of European old masters.
He then lived for a time in New York, painted there with other Latin American artists painted and then again figurative. At the Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, he painted in 1971 with " Las Humanidades " ("The Humanities "), his first mural in the United States, then from 1972 to 1973 originated in the Hell's Kitchen the image "Against Domestic Colonialism " and the Dumont high School in New jersey " Epimeteo ".
From 1974, he dealt with picturesque historical themes, exhibited his paintings in the United States and several Latin American countries, and gave courses at the ENPEG in Mexico City. In the Centro Social Monte Sinaí ( Social Center Mount Sinai ), one can see today ( " The Sephardic Migration in Mexico " ) by Belkin that emerged in the years 1978/1979 mural entitled " La migración Sefardí en México " and in the branch office Iztapalapa Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana is to be finished in 1983, the largest mural.