01 de Sep 1984 - 31 de Oct 1984
Painter Roberto Montenegro was an important figure in the gestation of the mural movement and was also one of the distinguished representatives of easel painting of the Escuela Mexicana. He was a man of great sensitivity, attracted by the main contemporary poetics, whose beginning, at the turn of the century, was signified by the assimilation of symbolism as it is manifested in French painting and Yellow Book illustrations.
In the Revista Moderna, he had points of convergence with Julio Ruelas without there being formal similarities between one and another. Montenegro left the country during the Revolution in 1910 and came back in 1919, year in which he devoted himself to making a great revaluation of popular art, a quest he shared with Jorge Enciso. His interest in this artistic modality allows certain motifs taken from the craft, masks and popular toys to find a place in his unusual compositions that reflect a special disposition to combine discordant elements.
After Roberto Montenegro’s death, which occurred in 1968, the National Institute of Fine Arts organized a small retrospective of his work at the Museo de Arte Moderno, and a year later the Academia de Artes, to which Montenegro belonged as a member founder, organized a tribute exhibition. From then until October 1984, a significant group of works by this painter had not been gathered. Hence the importance of the exhibition that was presented at the Museo Regional de Guadalajara of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia with the sponsorship and coordination of Fomento Cultural Banamex and finally in the Museo Nacional de Arte where the exhibition was titled with the same name of the artist: Roberto Montenegro, 1887-1968 and was exhibited in the museum from September to October 1984.