Marius de Zayas
Marius de Zayas Enriquez y Calmet ( born March 13, 1880 in Veracruz, Mexico, † January 10, 1961 in Stamford, Connecticut) was a Mexican cartoonist, painter, writer and gallerist. He was in the 1910s and 1920s, the most influential people in the New York art world.
Life
De Zayas was born into a wealthy aristocratic family from Veracruz, Mexico. His father, Rafael de Zayas (1848-1932), was a renowned poet, lawyer, playwright and journalist. He founded and moved two newspapers in Veracruz, which the two sons and the younger Marius George (1898-1967) was an opportunity to put their artistic talent in newspaper illustrations.
1906, the brothers contributed cartoons for El Diario, one of the then leading newspapers in Mexico City, which was founded by the American journalist Benjamin De Casseres ( 1873-1945 ). When the papers of de Zayas had taken a critical stance against the incumbent president Porfirio Díaz, the family came under pressure and had to leave Mexico to New York.
In New York, de Zayas began cartoons for the New York Evening World to draw. His witty parodies of celebrities quickly found popularity. He was known about the contact to the New York art world with the gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, who in his gallery presented 1909 291 cartoons from de Zayas. Soon acted de Zayas as "right hand" of the gallery. In whose behalf he traveled in October to Paris in 1910, where he was looking round after new artists and art forms. He joined the group around Apollinaire, where he met with Pablo Picasso, whom he for an exhibition at Stieglitz's gallery - won - Picasso's first exhibition in the United States. Since both spoke Spanish, Zayas could lead one of the first extensive interview with the artist. De Zayas ' subsequent articles described in detail for the first time Picasso's own thoughts about his work.
1911 de Zayas returned back to New York. He began to abstract his caricatures and delivered so that the " mechanomorphischen portraits " of his friend Francis Picabia a template. The work was presented in 1913 at the Galerie 291. In the spring of 1914, de Zayas traveled again to Paris to act again as a curator for Stieglitz. So he organized African art objects, which led to the first exhibition of African artifacts in the context of an art gallery in New York in 1914.
With the outbreak of the First World War, de Zayas returned to the United States. Together with photographer and art critic Paul Haviland, the patron of the arts and journalist Agnes E. Meyer and Picabia in 1915 he brought the art gallery named after the magazine 291 out, which served the New York avant-garde as a forum. Moreover, de Zayas wrote contributions for Stieglitz's magazine Camera Work. In the same year he opened with Haviland and Meyer, the Modern Gallery in the 500 Fifth Avenue, the. Than " release" of Stieglitz's 291, more should use the commercial aspect of the rapidly growing New York art market Stieglitz saw it soon became a competition, what cooperation and friendship with de Zayas broke. 1916 brought de Zayas Haviland with the book A Study of the Modern Evolution of Plastic Expression out. 1919 de Zayas changed the name of his gallery in De Zayas Gallery. The gallery lasted until 1921. Following the closure de Zayas went to Europe, where he spent the next twenty years. In 1930, he married Virginia Harrison, a descendant of railroad magnate Charles Crocker.
At the request of Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, de Zayas wrote in 1940 the story down to the emergence of modern art in America. De Zayas collected for numerous contemporary documents, photographs, manuscripts and notes. However, the publication did not experience de Zayas, the book was not published until 1996.
After the Second World War, de Zayas returned to the U.S., where he first lived in Stamford, then in Greenwich, Connecticut, settled. Marius de Zayas died in 1961 at the age of 81 years at Stamford Hospital.