Xul Solar

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Xul Solar ( Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari) (1887–1963). Argentinian painter, born at San Fernando, near Buenos Aires. He was the son of German-Italian immigrants, hence his rather jumbled name, which he compressed to Xul Solar. From 1912 to 1924 he travelled widely in Europe (in Italy he was a friend of his fellow-countryman Pettoruti), then returned to Buenos Aires. Although he had absorbed features from European movements such as Cubism and Dada, he was self-taught as an artist and his work has a highly personal sense of fantasy and humour befitting his visionary and mystic outlook. He worked on a small scale, chiefly in tempera and watercolour, rarely exhibited, and sought no honours. His work has been divided ino three phases. The first runs from 1917 to 1930, when his paintings featured colourful forms of geometric tendency, stylized emblems and signs, sometimes with numerals, letters, and words spelling out the subject of the picture. Many pictures of this period also feature double or multiple transparent images. The second phase runs from 1930 to 1960, when he often treated architectural and topographical themes, featuring sparse modelling, nearly traditional perspective, and more restrained colour. The third phase runs from 1960 until his death three years later; during this period he returned to the lyrical colour of his early work and focused on the alphabet, his pictures being interwoven with words from two languages he invented—a universal language he called Panlengua and a Pan-American language, Neocriolla. He also invented a very complicated game based on chess, which he called Panjuego (Pangame, i.e. universal game). Xul Solar's friend the writer Jorge Luis Borges referred to his paintings as ‘documents for the ultraterrestrial world, of the metaphysical world in which the gods take on the imaginative forms of dreams'. The works of his ‘alphabetical’ phase have sometimes been compared with Paul Klee's pictographic compositions. Xul Solar was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Belles Artes in Buenos Aires in 1964 and has had a powerful influence on younger Argentinian artists.

Xul Solar ( Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari) (b San Fernando, nr. Buenos Aires, 14 Dec. 1887; d Buenos Aires, 10 May 1963). Argentinian painter. He was the son of German-Italian immigrants, hence his rather jumbled name, which he compressed to Xul Solar. From 1912 to 1924 he travelled widely in Europe. Although he had absorbed features from European movements such as Cubism and Dada, he was self-taught as an artist and his work has a highly personal sense of fantasy and humour befitting his visionary and mystic outlook. He worked on a small scale, chiefly in tempera and watercolour, rarely exhibited, and sought no honours. His friend the writer Jorge Luis Borges referred to his paintings as ‘documents for the ultraterrestrial world, of the metaphysical world in which the gods take on the imaginative forms of dreams’. Xul Solar was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Belles Artes in Buenos Aires in 1964 and has had a powerful influence on younger Argentinian artists.