Luis Arenal Bastar

Luis Arenal Bastar
Luis Arenal, 1936
Born	1908 or 1909 Teapa
Died	May 7, 1985 Mexico City
Nationality	Mexican
Known for	painting, engraving, sculpture
Movement	Mexican muralism

Luis Arenal Bastar (born Teapa, 1908 or 1909 – died Mexico City, May 7, 1985) was a Mexican painter, engraver and sculptor. He was a founding member of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios, the Taller de Gráfica Popular and the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. In addition, he created murals and other monumental works in Mexico City and Guerrero.

Arenal was born in 1909 in Teapa, Tabasco in southern Mexico. His family moved to Aguascalientes but when His father died fighting in the Mexican Revolution, he and his mother moved to Mexico City.

He attended a parochial school until age 13, when he was expelled for reading gay literature. Arenal then studied mechanical engineering for two years, and then emigrated to Los Angeles in 1924 where he studied architecture while washing gasoline cans to get by. In 1926 he returned to Mexico and worked as a translator in an advertising office.

From 1927 to 1928 he studied law as well as sculpture at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. In 1929, he returned to the U.S. studying in California and working in restaurants. He began his art career exhibiting and painting murals in California then again returned to Mexico.

Arenal was politically active promoting leftist causes and Communism. He went with Roberto Berdecio as a delegate to the first American Artists' Congress in New York in 1936. From 1940 to 1943 he traveled in South America . In 1946, he married Macrina Rabadan, a teacher, political leader and feminist, with whom he had two children. In 1940, he participated in Siqueiros' attack on Leon Trotsky's house in Coyoacán, which forced him to flee to the United States for a while.

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