Photo courtesy of Bruce Edwards, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Xavier Gonzalez's 1933 mural for the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium, removed in 1935. The offending clenched fist and bleeding palm
are at the bottom of the picture.
XAVIER GONZALEZ
MURALIST IN THE BIG BEND
by Lonn Taylor
X
avier Gonzalez liked to tell
his friends that he slid into
art. The Spanish-born artist,
who was trained as a mechanical engi-
neer in Mexico before immigrating to
the United States in 1922, would
explain his comment this way:
Shortly after his arrival in this coun-
try he worked as director of publicity for
a Chicago manufacturing company. In
order to amuse himself he made sketch-
es and caricatures of his co-workers,
then, fearful that they would see his
10
drawings and take offense, would toss
them into a chute that led to the ship-
ping room in the basement of the build-
ing. One day a friend dared him to slide
down the chute. When he did and
bounced out onto a table, he looked
around and saw his sketches pinned to
the walls. Instead of throwing them
away, the shipping clerks had saved
them. Thrilled by the discovery, at that
moment, he claimed, he decided to pur-
sue art seriously and soon enrolled in
night school at the Chicago Art Institute.
Cenizo
Third Quarter 2010
Gonzalez went on to become one of
the most versatile American artists of
the 20th century. By the time he died in
New York in 1993, his work was in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Whitney Museum of American Art, the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts and half a
dozen other American museums, and
his murals and sculpted friezes were in
buildings across the nation.
Before fame came to him, Xavier
Gonzalez spent his summers from 1932
to 1940 in Alpine as a teacher and some-
time director of the Sul Ross Summer
Art Colony. He left memories and tan-
gible mementos behind him. Today his
4-foot-by-12-foot oil painting of the
Chisos Mountains, done in the summer
of 1934 as a mural for the Sul Ross
library, hangs in the Museum of the Big
Bend, and his portrait of E.E.
Townsend, sheriff, state legislator and
proponent of Big Bend National Park, is
also in the museum’s collection.
Gonzalez’ path to Alpine was a wind-
ing one. In Spain, his father worked as