Santa Monica Nightscape

Francisco Goitia moved to México City to enroll at the National Fine Arts School, where he studied under José María Velasco, Julio Ruelas, Germán Gedovius and Saturnino Herrán, along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, among other classmates. Having traveled around Europe between 1904 and 1912, on returning to Mexico he joined Pancho Villas revolutionary forces, occupying the position of official painter to General Francisco Angeles. His peculiar personality was out of step with the prevailing spirit of the times and, though he received the same training as his fellows and always supported the Revolutionary cause, he was not a bohemian and did not align himself with any political ideology, being, on the contrary, something of an ascetic. For most of his life, he worked as a rural teacher and promoter among the indigenous peoples, also playing an important role in the major events of his day, such as the Revolution, and working as a draftsman during the excavations of the Teotihuacan archeological site, which were supervised by the anthropologist-cum-archeologist, Manuel Gamio. His scant oeuvre, much of which expresses his personal reactions to the horrors of the Revolution, is characterized by an austere realism tinged with Expressionism, and by deep poetic sensitivity. Underlying The Old Man on the Dunghill -which could well be a self-portrait, given the physical resemblance between Goitia and the old man— is a desire to capture the desolate state of mind of the subject, a totally destitute figure, seated on a mound of garbage and human waste, who symbolizes the age-old sadness of a people subjected to long years of ignominy, filling us with anxiety and sadness. For its part, Santa Monica Nightscape is a work with marked metaphysical leanings that depicts a desolate, lonely scene impregnated with a powerful feeling of solitude. The place portrayed really existed, being one of the artists favorite spots in Zacatecas. In both these works, Goitia succeeds in symbolizing the destitution that is born of war and neglect. In formal terms, in both paintings he depicts wide, burnished skies that fill most of the canvas, using diagonal lines to endose his subjects in pyramid-shaped spaces, and wrapping his figures in a bright light that mutes and isolates them, so as to make the viewer a sharer in his own deep self-absorption. Un til his death in 1960, Francisco Goitia lived in a humble house that he built with his own hands, next to the Xochimilco tram lines. From his first drawings to his last works, he showed himself to be influenced by Realism and Expressionism, which later evolved into a typically Mexican variety of Expressionist Modernism. This work was remitted to the MUNAL by the National Fine Arts Institutes National Center for the Conservation and Registration of Mexicos Artistic Heritage in 1982, forming part of the museum's founding endowment.