Santos Balmori

Santos Balmori Picazo (b. Mexico City, Sept. 26, 1899 – d. Mexico City, March 5, 1992) was a Spanish-Mexican painter whose heavily European style was not appreciated by his contemporaries of the Mexican muralism movement, but he had influence with the succeeding Generación de la Ruptura artists. He trained and began his art career in Europe moving later to Mexico City. He became a professor and researcher at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas training younger artists such as Rodolfo Nieto, Pedro Coronel, Carlos Olachea and Juan Soriano. As a teacher, he did not stop drawing but he did not paint professionally again until after retirement, having a number of exhibitions later in life.

Balmori Picazo was born in Mexico City on September 26, 1899 to Ramón Balmori Galguerra from Asturias, Spain and Everarda Picazo from Mexico.

He spent his first four years of life in a community called Soberrón near Llanes, Asturias with his mother, Everanda Picazo de Cuevas, dying in Spain. The family then moved to Mendoza, Argentina. They then moved by mule across the Andes to live in Santiago de Chile. When he was sixteen, Balmori’s father, Ramón Balmori Galguera, committed suicide.

He entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Santiago but his guardians did not want him to study art. In 1919, he went to Europe to study, starting at the Academy of San Fernando in Spain. His teachers in San Fernando included José Moreno Carbonero, Joaquín Sorolla and Julio Romero de Torres and studied with Salvador Dalí and Remedios Varo. He was offered a chance to immigrate to Rome as a distinguished Spanish student but since the offer required that he renounce his Mexican citizenship, he declined. The Academy of San Fernando believed that the ideal was to reproduce reality without distortions but Balmori rebelled against this idea. For this reason, he gave up studies here for Paris at age twenty two. He lived for the next fourteen years in Paris, at first studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and learning about new movements in art. He struggled economically, but also met a number of famous artists, studying the work of Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque and Matisse along with those of Italian Futurists and German Expressionists. He also had his first professional success as an artist.

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