Artist: Carlos Hermosilla Alvarez.
Dates: (1905-1991).
Carlos Hermosilla Alvarez was born on October 10, 1905, in Cerro Alegre, Valparaíso, Chile. His father Carlos Hermosilla Sanhueza was a master lithographer and his mother Maria Isabel was a homemaker. His earliest years were spent in Valparaiso. The family moved to Concepcion in southern Chile and then to Santiago in 1920 and eventually back to Valpariso in the mid 1920's.
Hermosilla displayed a talent for art at a very young age. However, formal studies were interrupted by illness and he eventually lost his left hand, right leg, and a portion of his nose to surgery because of declassification caused by bone tuberculosis.
He worked as an apprentice in Santiago and studied drawing and printing. His formal academic studies did not commence until 1930, after receiving several awards for his work, when he was accepted into the Escuela de Bellas Artes and then the Escuela de Artes Aplicades at the University of Chile. After graduation he worked as an illustrator.
Hermosilla Alvarez taught art for nearly 34 years until 1973, when a military coup placed Augusto Pinochet in power. Then Hermosilla Alvarez shifted his creative energies to writing poetry. It became an outlet for his opposition to the Pinochet regime. One method of his opposition, was to make print portraits of leading opposition figures.
Hermosilla has been called “the father of realist printmaking” in Chile and is credited with helping create several generations of Chilean printmakers. He left Chile only twice limited to a great extent by his physical limitations. The subjects of his work were his beloved Chile (its ordinary people, its countryside, the hills of Valparaiso where he was born) as well as the intellectual and cultural elite of Chile, like Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda whom he knew personally and whom he drew with many other famous literary and political figures of Chile and other countries, like Beethoven, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln.
Hermosilla received numerous awards during his lifetime for both his art and for his social involvement. He received his first art award in 1926 and numerous others until his death on August 15, 1991. He was named an Honorary Citizen of Valparaiso in 1966, Artist of the People by the University of Chile in Santiago which he was publicly awarded by President Salvador Allende in 1972.
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Title: Old Man Portrait.
Medium: Linocut.
Date: 1973.
Signed: Signed in ink lower right C. Hermosilla.
Dimensions: Linocut Size Approx: 105mm x 105mm, Full Size Including Margins Approx: 230mm x 134mm.
Condition: Light creasing to the margins, but otherwise very good.
Notes: A superb linocut by a major figure in the history of Chilean art. Unframed.
