Francisco Goitia

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Francisco Bollaín y Goitia García (1882-1960) was a Mexican realist painter born in the state of Zacatecas. He studied art first at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City (1898) and then in Barcelona (1904) under the tutelage of the Spanish Pre-Raphaelite Francisco Galí. He returned to Mexico in 1912 and during the Mexican Revolution worked as the official painter for General Angel of Pancho Villa's army. His work during that period comprises gritty and realistic depictions of debauchery and brutality. For example Goitia claims to have disinterred executed soldiers and to have hung them on cactuses as models for his Ahorcado paintings.

Goitia matured as an artist during the era of Diego Rivera and José Orozco, but he avoided monumental art along with its typical depictions of Indians derived from folk art. Goitia painted canvases and did so with his own blend of realism and impressionism. His canvases were based on hours long observation of his subjects during which he tried to glean the essence of what made them compelling subjects. He describes painting his masterwork Tata Jesuchristo by observing Oaxacan peasants on the Day of the Dead for hours until one grieving peasant stretched while crying and pointed her foot up. That gesture became the center of the composition.

Goitia lived most of his life as a hermit in self-imposed poverty in a shack in Xochimilco. He died in 1960 of pneumonia there. Goitia was never as famous as Rivera or Orozco, but recently, as the great muralists have come under criticism for the superficiality of their depictions of the indigenous, Goitia has been rediscovered to some extent. He has always been a very popular artist within Mexico. In Anita Brenner's groundbreaking 1929 study of Mexican Art Idols Behind Altars Goitia is given a full chapter and is described as the most Mexican of Mexican artists and as the mystic of Mexican art. His lack of US connections and his chosen medium of oil on canvas kept him out of the limelight of internationally recognized artists. The bulk of Goitia's work is viewable in the Mexican National Art Museum (MUNAL) and in the Goitia Museum in Zacatecas.