Born in Mexico City in 1893. As a seventeen-year old chemistry student, Cueto met the sculptor Fidencio Nava and decided to study sculpture at the Academia de San Carlos. By 1922 he was assisting the sculptor Ignacio Asúnsolo in renovations for the Ministry of Education building. In the early 1920s he joined the Estridentista movement. Cueto's colour-saturated cardboard masks, one of them dedicated to Leopoldo Méndez, date from this era. From 1927 to 1932 he lived in Paris, and through his cousin the Cubist painter Marie Blanchard, met Joaquín Torres García, Jacques Lipchitz and Constantin Brancusi, among others. Academically trained yet with a strong affinity for the language of modern art, nurtured first by Estridentismo and then by his European experience, Cueto ranks among the most experimental practitioners of modern Mexican sculpture. His work includes ceramics, enamel on metal, and monumental sculpture like El Corredor, made for the Route of Friendship at the XIX Olympic Games held in Mexico City in 1968. He died in Mexico City in 1975.
