Native of the state of Oaxaca, Francisco Gutiérrez is another of the Mexican artists somewhat neglected by art historians. Like some children in the free art schools of Ramos Martínez, Gutiérrez came from a family of limited means that little to channel the artist´s talents. As a young man he was able to turn art when he entered the lithograph department of a commercial firm and could finance his leanings toward art. In 1929 he began to study in the Central School of Plastic Arts under Germán Gedovius fro painting, Francisco Díaz de León for engraving and perhaps Francisco Goitia. He obtained a very poorly paid job as library assistant in the Academy of Fine Arts. It was from books that Gutiérrez assimilated the great pictorial tradition of the history of western art, particularly the classicist tendencies with which he identified, He also studied sheet metal engraving with Carlos Alvarado Lang and came into contact with the artistic community: Manuel Echauri, Feliciano Peña, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, Angelina Beloff and others. He received support from José Chávez Morado to paint murals with Feliciano Peña in Jalapa, Veracruz. He had his first exhibition in 1932 and repeated it in 1938 in an art gallery of the University. Motivated by his love of reading he studied the theories of Freud and Jung, and as a result his work acquired metaphysical and surrealistic connotations, together with the influences of Picasso and Braque. An intensely painful case of an untreated ear infection and the aftereffects of a childhood accident forced him to lay down his brushes for long periods of time and finally caused his death in 1945.
