It is not possible to separate the content or the pictorial style of Pedro Figari (Montevideo 1861-1938) from other facets that nurture his political actions and creative thinking.
The comprehensive nature of his vocations could never be sufficiently emphasized. This nature shapes, with an extraordinary coherence, his broad intellectual work in the arts, either being literature, painting, aesthetic thinking or artistic-industrial education.
Painting is merely a chapter, brilliant beyond any doubt, in the vast book of his life, whose pages are written with professional successes but also with public failures and puzzlement before the indifference of his peers.
Several decades before the artist stands out with his fiery palette, the young lawyer should address “the crime of Chaná Street” (1895-1899) and in doing so he will placed himself on the side of the accused and against the general public feeling, untying a complicated web of false testimony and political deception.
Moreover, Figari’s performance as a congressman, founder of the newspaper “El Deber” and his refined pen as a columnist, will be the key for the death penalty abolition in 1907.
The extensive philosophical essay “Art, Aesthetics and Ideal” from 1912 and the various educational projects that he carries out, especially as Head of the School of Arts and Crafts (1915-1917) place him at the avant-garde of educational endeavours and aesthetic considerations of the continent.
His relative failure, after the disapproval of the plan of reforms in that institution, will push him to devote himself, almost exclusively, to painting. After turning 60 years old, voluntarily exiled, first in Buenos Aires and later in Paris, he will develop a work that sums up his view of life. In little more than fifteen years, he will have made about 4000 paintings and drawings, in which the gaucho, the African slave and his descendants are key characters in a new expression that reappraises local and American history in the “civilizing” process of modernity.
In all his expressions and actions lies a deep sense of humanism, which will also mark his prose fiction (several short stories and his fictional utopia Historia Kiria, 1930) and his poetry (El Arquitecto, 1928).
