Arnold Belkin - Biography

Arnold Belkin (b. December 9, 1930 in Calgary, Alberta – July 3, 1992 in Mexico City, Mexico) was a Mexican painter and mural artist. Born in Canada, he moved to Mexico to be closer to the Mexican artists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siquerios. In the '50s he befriended the latter, collaborating with him on two murals in Mexico City. He went from figural to abstract back to figural in his later years. Belkin was most successful in the 1970s showing in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba, and he founded the muralism workshops at La Esmeralda and the National School for Plastic Arts (UNAM University).

Life & Career

Belkin has often been referred as "The Canadian Son of Mexican Muralism." Arnold's father was a Russian Jew and his mother was an English Jew (Greenberg).

Belkin attended the Vancouver School of Art where he developed a profound interest in muralism. Choosing it as his path, he decided to meet and learn personally from the great muralism of the time, the Mexicans Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Arriving in Mexico City at the age of 18, Belkin attended La Esmeralda Art School and the INBA School for Painting and Sculpture. He also learned modern art techniques at the Jose Gutierrez’ Workshop on Materials and Plastics. In 1950, only two years after arriving in Mexico he created his first Mural (!El Pueblo No Quiere La Guerra!) a fresco at the National Polytechnic Institute, which was later destroyed.

In his early artistic period, Belkin’s works reflected Mexican folklore especially relating to festivities and death. Belkin was deeply impressed by the new culture he was witnessing and responded by drawing figures of Mexican natives, scenes of popular festivities and funeral processions.

In the early 1950s he met Siqueiros and befriended him. He collaborated with him in the making of Patricios y Patricidas a mural at the Customs Office and Cuauhtémoc a mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, both in Mexico City. At Belkin’s first solo exhibition, in November 1952, Siqueiros praised him his catalogue for his themes and innovations.

From very early on and throughout his life, Belkin had immense pleasure in designing costumes for the Mexican theater and ballet. For him body movement and rhythm were intensely related to plastic expression. Belkin also enjoyed traveling to the interior of his adopted country, where he found inspiration for his works.

Belkin rounded out his formative stage by learning metal engraving at the workshop of Lola Cueto and lithography at the Book Arts School. He also collaborated at the workshop of Guillermo Silva Santamaria.

By 1956 Belkin was being highly sought. That year he painted La Bahia de Acapulco at the Continental Hilton Hotel (destroyed in the earthquake of 1985) and was named Professor of Mural Techniques at the Universidad de las Americas. A year later he did Escenas de Don Quijote in the city of Cuernavaca.

His famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a portable mural, was painted in 1959, and in the years 1960 and 1961 he completed Todos Somos Culpables at the Mexico City Penitenciary.

With Francisco Icaza, Francisco Corzas, Jose Luis Cuevas, Rafael Coronel, Leonel Góngora and Nacho López he formed the group "Nueva Presencia," which characterized a style with elements of Expressionism and modern figurative painting; the themes denounced injustice, repression and war.

Belkin won, in 1963, the "Adquisicion INBA" Prize for El Hombre Si Tiene Futuro. That same year he had an exhibit in Los Angeles, California, at the Zora Gallery, and was one of four artists (with Siqueiros, Icaza, and Tamayo) invited to represent Mexico at the International Award Exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

At this point, Belkin’s style transformed into abstraction. This artistic evolution manifests itself by a shift that would be the basis for his personal signature in the works of his later life. Most of his murals, however retain a figurative base as it can be appreciated in his 1966 magnificent mural The Jewish Holidays, painted for the newly built headquarters of the Ashkenazi Jewish Community, at 70 Acapulco Street in Mexico City.

Two years later he moved to Europe where he is influenced by the muralist style of the old masters, and decided to live in New York for a while where he experimented with new styles and exchanged ideas with other Latin American (and U.S.) painters. At this time his abstract period ended, and he returned to figurative painting.

While a resident artist at Lock Haven University, Pennsylvania, he finished his first mural in the US: Las Humanidades (1971). In 1972 and 1973 he painted Against Domestic Colonialism (in New York’s Hell's Kitchen) and Epimeteo (Dumont High School, New Jersey).

As of 1974 and until his death, Belkin’s themes took on historical backgrounds and his style turns easily recognizable as his own. The colors, circles, shadows, body elements, all become identifiable as his.

Belkin’s fame in the seventies lead to exhibitions in the US, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba. He founded the workshops specializing in muralism at La Esmeralda and at the National School for Plastic Arts (UNAM University)

In the years 1978-1979 he painted The Sephardic Migration in Mexico, which can be seen at the Monte Sinai Social Center in Mexico City. His greatest mural is arguably the one he finished at The Metropolitan University at Iztapalapa, Mexico. It consists of four monumental projects (1983).

He married Mexican painter Patricia Quijano Ferrer, who collaborated with his projects.

In the last decade of his life, Belkin’s prolific work was characterized by great dynamism and theme innovation. He completed hundreds of works, not only murals at government buildings and universities, but painted oils, acrylics and other media, as well as sculpture. He died at 62. Belkin is ranked by Artists Trade Union of Russia amongst the world-best artists of the last four centuries.

• Ugalde Gómez, Nadia. Arnold Belkin: la imágen como metáfora. Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Dirección Nacional de Publicaciones. México, 1999.