Ramón Cano Manilla

The dynamic artistic life in Mexico of the twenties attracted, like a powerful magnet, both Mexicans and foreigners, so the capital of the country found itself full of artists in search of opportunities. From the Port of Veracruz came Ramón Cano Manilla who, like Fernando Castillo and Luis Martínez, came from not well-to-do families. Nevertheless, the young man entered the evening drawing calsses of the National School of Fine Arts, preserved and, in the twenties, we can find him forming part of the artistic fraternity of the Open Air School of Painting of Chimalistac and participating with his works in the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of Madrid in 1926, and at the Fair of Seville, in 1928, where won the gold medal for his work India Oaxaqueña (Indian woman from Oaxaca). Cano Manilla is the prototypical case of an artist who graduated from these centers who did not envolve his own pictorial style and who, on the contrary, continued with the pedagogic spontaneity beyond the decade of the thirties. He shared his experience in other provinces around Mexico, as in Monterrey, Veracruz and Tamaulipas where he painted murals and founded painting schools for children.