Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The painter Gerardo Murillo (1875-1963), who renamed
himself 'Dr Atl', having by turns also called himself 'Dr Fox'
and 'Dr Orange', had a rich first-hand experience of volcanoes
in his native Mexico. 'Dr Atl' was a political as well as an artistic
revolutionary, and a volcanologist, social theorist and restless
nationalist, art critic, poet and painter.¹³ He studied art at the
San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, and with a gift from the
president of Mexico travelled in about 1900 to Rome, where he
was overwhelmed by the power of Italian Renaissance fresco
painting, and in particular by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel
ceiling. This trip encouraged him to recognize the political and
educational power of public art, and on his return home he
galvanized fellow artists including Diego Riviera, José Orozco
and David Siqueiros to paint frescoes in Mexico, with the result
that Mexican art took a new and powerful direction.
A hugely important figure in Mexican art, Atl was equally
fascinated by volcanoes. Abandoning his interest in political
painting in the late 1920s, he took on the twin peaks of Mexican
symbolism, the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl, as his
driving pictorial subject-matter: 'I abandoned pictorial pedantry
and with fury I began to paint landscapes under realistic criteria',
Renato Guttuso,
The Flight from Etna
,
1940, oil on canvas.
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