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STARTING SEPTEMBER 13
MEXICO CITY — He
was often seen on the
streets of Oaxaca city, rec-
ognizable by his disheveled
gray hair and bushy beard,
his white peasant blouse
and leather sandals.
He cut a spectral figure,
hurried, not keen to be
recognized, even as
passersby would exclaim:
“Maestro!”
Francisco Toledo, 79,
slight of frame but a col-
ossus of Mexican culture,
died Thursday, his family
announced, igniting global
tributes for a man whose
singular depictions of ani-
mals and people — includ-
ing self-portraits of his
deeply etched, haunted
visage — won international
acclaim.
Though not a household
name in the United States,
he was regarded in Mexico
as a national treasure.
“Art is in mourning,”
Mexican President Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador
wrote on Twitter. “Oaxacan,
great painter and extraordi-
nary cultural promoter,
authentic defender of na-
ture [and] the customs
and traditions of our peo-
ple.”
The indefatigable Toledo
was a protean figure who,
apart from his vast art-
works, was also a social
activist, cultural conserva-
tionist, environmentalist,
teacher and philanthropist.
He led the fight against
the building of a McDon-
ald’s franchise in the his-
toric center of Oaxaca, his
adopted home, and railed
against sales of genetically
engineered corn. He spear-
headed protests against a
planned convention center
on a Oaxaca mountain and
the conversion of a former
Catholic convent into a
luxury hotel.
In 2014, he joined a group
of children in Oaxaca flying
kites emblazoned with the
photographs of 43 missing
students, all apparently
murdered by drug gangs
working with Mexican au-
thorities in the western
state of Guerrero.
Toledo worked across
many formats — paintings,
ceramics, textiles, prints,
sculpture, photography,
among others, often mixing
media. As “guides,” he cited
some of the immortals:
Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso.
He relished time spent with
pottery makers, weavers
and other artisans in a bid
to master techniques, learn
something new.
“I get easily bored,”
Toledo told The Times in an
2016 interview at the Insti-
tute of Graphic Arts of
Oaxaca, in the city’s historic
center.
It was Toledo who cre-
ated the institute, whichnow houses thousands of
prints and a library with
more than 30,000 art books.
The facility, a haven for
young artists, academics
and others, is among his
numerous educational
endowments in Oaxaca
state.
Despite declining health
in recent years, Toledo
worked until well into his
70s, returning to the theme
of the wave of lawlessness
sweeping across his home-
land.
One of his final exhibits
in Mexico, in 2016, was titled
“Duelo,” or “Mourning.” It
consisted of 95 ceramic
pieces depicting a variety of
figures and objects, includ-
ing dismembered body
parts, shoes without owners
and humanoid beings in the
throes of inconsolable suf-
fering.
Asked about the origins,
Toledo spoke of a sponta-
neous burst of outrage and
of grief.
“With everything that
one hears in the news, in the
newspapers, little by little
this pushed me to do an
exhibit on the theme of
violence,” he told The
Times. “And red [colors]
that I had never used began
to appear, colors of blood.
None of this was planned.”
He saw political corrup-
tion and a lack of opportuni-
ties for Mexico’s youth as
core factors driving the
country’s slide toward the
abyss.
“Many young people say:
‘We can’t enter into politics,
but we canenter into drugs
—in drugs you also can have
everything that the politi-
cians have.’ ”
The message of “Duelo”
was one of indignation and
incomprehension.
“I believe the mourning
will not end,” he told Mexi-
co’s El Universal newspaper.
“It will remain there, con-
suming our souls.”
His work relied on im-
ages and impressions exca-
vated from a youth spent in
the Gulf state of Veracruzand in his parents’ ancestral
homeland of Juchitan de
Zaragoza, in the narrow
isthmus of Tehuantepec,
which separates the Pacific
and the Gulf of Mexico.
An abundance of wildlife
—birds, insects, bats, toads,
iguanas — populate an
oeuvre steeped in his Za-
potec indigenous roots,
remixed in his own imagin-
ings. Some images were
erotic, while others depicted
metamorphoses of cre-
atures and humans — lead-
ing some to note the
“Kafkian” side of his crea-
tions.
Carlos Monsivais, the
late Mexican writer, de-
scribed his friend’s style as
“neither primitive or civi-
lized,” an amalgam of
themes of modernity and
pre-Hispanic Mexico, said
the newspaper Reforma.
Asked where the inspira-
tion came from, Toledo
raised his palms and smiled
askance, indicating it was
mostly a matter of exertion
and repetition, even a grind,
without any guarantee of
satisfactory results.
“One has to work all the
time, and if the inspiration
arrives, then it arrives,” he
told The Times. “It’s too bad
one cannot just sit down
and say, ‘Inspiration, here
you are.’ ”
From humble origins —
one grandfather was a cob-
bler, another sold goods in
Juchitan’s central market —
Toledo had the good fortune
to have his talent recog-
nized at a young age, lead-
ing to opportunities for
study at art schools in Oa-
xaca and Mexico City.
Though proud of his
Zapotec heritage — he
underwrote the translation
of books into the Zapotec
language and the produc-
tion of Zapotec textbooks —
he said DNA tests showed
he also had considerable
African blood, reflecting the
colonial-era slave trade in
Mexico. He boasted of his
“slave” pedigree.
Buoyed by early success,including an exhibit in
Texas, Toledo left Mexico as
a young man to study art in
Paris, becoming a protégé of
a pair of Mexican cultural
icons, Octavio Paz, the
Nobel laureate, and Rufino
Tamayo, the artist and
fellow Oaxacan.
Toledo lived in New York
for much of the 1970s. But he
said a yearning to return
drove him back to Juchitan
and the isthmus, where
market saleswomen still
hawk live iguanas, their
meat served in tacos.
“I’m nostalgic,” Toledo
said. “In my case, nostalgia
has been good because it
made me come back. I was
in Paris in the ’60s, and I
could have stayed there to
live, as a painter I was suc-
cessful.”
Juchitan was always with
him. In 2017, when a major
earthquake left much of the
city destroyed, he led an
international aid effort that
funneled tens of thousands
of dollars to the stricken
town, along with other
donations.
He led a vibrant personal
life — marrying three times
and fathering five children
—and had a reputation as a
vagabond artist without a
permanent base until set-
tling in Oaxaca in the 1980s.
He acknowledged ben-
efiting from “a little bit of
luck,” in his climb out of
rural Mexico, into a world
where his creations gained
cachet with the deep-pock-
ets international art set.
“We painters in a way are
privileged,” Toledo said. “We
always live off the rich. And
if the rich are doing well,
then the painters are doing
well.”
For much of 2001, Toledo
lived in Southern California.
“It surprised me how
much Mexico was like Los
Angeles,” he recalled. “The
presence of so many oax-
aquenos. For example,
sometimes one heard peo-
ple speaking Zapoteco.”
Asked if he feared mor-
tality, Toledo responded:
“No, I have behaved well. I
think I’m going to go to a
good place.”
On Friday, mourners and
well-wishers gathered at his
Oaxaca cultural center,
where a flower-bedecked
shrine featured a photo of
Toledo alongside an ear of
corn and — in a nod to Mexi-
co’s Day of the Dead cus-
toms — a sugar skull. Out-
side, musicians played
traditional music as the
people of Oaxaca left can-
dles and hand-written
notes.
“Maestro,” wrote one
visitor, “the force of your
being remains in the hearts
of all who knew you.”Special correspondents
Liliana Nieto del Rio and
Cecilia Sanchez in Mexico
City contributed to this
report.BACK STORY
A giant of Mexican culture
‘Art is in mourning,’ Lopez Obrador says after Francisco Toledo’s death
By Patrick
J. McDonnellARTISTFrancisco Toledo was also a cultural conser-
vationist, environmentalist and philanthropist.Mig uel TovarLatinContent via Getty Images