Xul Solar

Vocation

Argentine painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor of imaginary languages. During the first World War he struck up what was to be a lifelong friendship with Argentine artist Emilio Pettoruti, then a young man living in Italy and associated with the futurists. In 1916, he first signed his work “Xul Solar,” ostensibly for the purposes to simplify the phonetics of his name, but an examination of the adopted name reveals that the first name is the reverse of “lux,” which references the measurement of luminous intensity. Combined with “solar”, the name reads as “the intensity of the sun”, and demonstrates the artist’s affinity for the universal source of light and energy. In 1924, his work was exhibited in Paris in a show of Latin American artists. He also struck up an acquaintance with British Mage Aleister Crowley and his mistress Leah Hirsig who held high hopes for his discipleship, but later that year he returned to Buenos Aires, where he promptly became associated with the avant garde "Florida group" (a.k.a. "Martín Fierro group"), a circle that also included Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he was to keep an association and close friendship. It was in this group that he also met poet and novelist Leopoldo Marechal who would immortalize him as the astrologer Schultze in his famous novel Adán Buenosayres. He began to exhibit frequently in the galleries of Buenos Aires, notably in a 1926 exhibition of modern painters that included Norah Borges (sister of Jorge Luis Borges) and Emilio Pettoruti. Throughout the rest of his life, he would exhibit regularly in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay, but he would not have another major European exhibition until his twilight years: in 1962, a year before his death, he had a major exposition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. On April 9, 1963 he died in his house at Tigre, Buenos Aires. Link to Wikipedia biography