- Also known as
-
Emilio Amero
-
primary name: Amero, Emilio
- Details
- individual; painter/draughtsman; printmaker; Mexican; Male
- Life dates
- 1901-1976
- Biography
- Mexican printmaker. Amero was one of the first artists to receive a mural commission (1922) from José Vasconcelos. Amero also painted other frescoes in Mexico City and New York City (Bellevue Hospital). With Jean Charlot he tried unsuccessfully to revive the medium of lithography in Mexico in 1923, but succeeded in 1930 after returning from the United States where he had worked with such master lithographers as George Miller. Spent much of the 1930s in the USA, and was employed by the WPA.
Text from Dawn Adès and Alison McClean, 'Revolution on Paper, Mexican Prints 1910-1960', with the assistance of Laura Campbell, BMP, 2009.
Emilio Amero was born in the town of Ixtlahuaca in the north-west of Mexico. When he was around eight years old his family moved to Mexico City. By 1915 he had started to attend art classes at the Open Air School in the village of Santa Anna, south of Mexico City, and two years later he went to the Open Air School in Coyoacán. He moved to the Academy of San Carlos in 1918 where he remained until 1921, an exact contemporary of Rufino Tamayo.
During the 1920s Amero began his career drawing pre-Hispanic artefacts at the Department of Ethnographic Drawing, an institution then run by Tamayo. In 1923-4 he started to paint murals after learning the techniques required from Fermín Revueltas and Ramón Alva de la Canal. He worked on murals at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory School) in Mexico City as assistant to José Clemente Orozco, one of the artists with whom he had come into contact by joining the Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos, Pintores, y Escultores (Union of Painters, Sculptors and Technical Workers). In 1923 Amero and his colleague Jean Charlot tried unsuccessfully to revive lithography as an alternative to woodcut. At this time Amero was also associated with the Estridentistas (Stridentists), the group of artists who followed the Italian Futurist movement and believed in non-elitist forms of art.
In 1925 he left Mexico for Cuba and then the United States, where he remained until 1930, working for various publications including 'The New Yorker' and 'Life Magazine'. In New York he began to experiment with lithography and met the printer George C. Miller. When he returned to Mexico in 1930, he opened a lithography workshop at the Academy of San Carlos (which had been renamed Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes [ENBA] - the National Fine Arts School). Among his students were Julio Castellanos, Francisco Díaz de León, Francisco Dosamantes, Carlos Mérida, Isidoro Ocampo, Carlos Orozco Romero and Alfredo Zalce.
Amero continued to teach throughout his career, mainly organizing classes on drawing, lithography and fresco painting at institutions in the United States. From 1933 the United States became his permanent home, apart from a brief period in Mexico in 1938-40. Alongside his teaching duties, he contributed prints to exhibitions in the United States and painted several murals, of which his most notable was at the Bellevue Hospital in New York; this was destroyed shortly after completion in 1938 because its content was apparently unsuitable for a psychiatric hospital.
- Bibliography
- Mexican Prints. From the collection of Reba and Dave Williams (Cm 5 14)
