Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Alfonso Rodriguez Castelao spent his childhood and adolescence in Santa Rosa de Toay, in La Pampa, Argentina. In 1900, the Rodríguez Castelao family returned to Rianxo, Spain, his birthplace.

In 1908 he obtained his degree in Medicine from the University of Santiago de Compostela. He passed his doctorate in Madrid in 1909, where he began to gain some popularity as a caricaturist artist. In fact, Alfonso Rodriguez Castelao conceded he only studied medicine to please the desires of his father. His caricatures focused on the day to day life in a humorous way, although after witnessing the Spanish Civil War, his art changed to denounce the cruelties of Fascism in a collection of canvases.

In 1920, he starts publishing the magazine Nós, together with Vicente Risco and Otero Pedrayo. That same year he to France, the Netherlands, and Germany.

From 1930 Rodríguez Castelao's political activism intensifies, and his life and work spun around governmental issues and his Galician nationalist ideas. He became a member of the Royal Galician Academy in 1933, and shortly after that, in 1935, he was forced into exile by the Spanish government to the Spanish city of Badajoz, in Extremadura, where he worked as a civil servant.

The Spanish civil war began while Alfonso Rodriguez Castelao was in Madrid presenting the results of the referendum for the Galician Statute of Autonomy, which had been endorsed by 98 percent of the population. In 1938, he was sent by the Spanish government to the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the United States to get support for the new Republic. From New York City he traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina where he spent the rest of his life until his death in 1950 at the hospital of the Centro Gallego in Buenos Aires.

Art Movement: Art Nouveau.
He Traveled To Argentina, Portugal, Brazil, USA, Russia, Cuba, France, Netherlands, Germany.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.