Federico Cantú

Cantú was educated close to the Open Air Schools where he had the opportunity to weigh the merit of the formal innovations taught by Ramos Martínez and his followers. But he himself was an artist who held to the academic excellence of his trade, with which he explored different areas such as mural painting and sculpting. The critics and his contemporaries held him in high regard as a magnificent draftsman and engraver, and like Guerrero Galván, he was inclined to study the great masters of the Renaissance, which served as subject references for many of his compositions. Ruth is a work where the aesthetic concerns mentioned above are evident, where the nude is mainly a study of observation of the female body and whose sensuality is projected together with an iconographic feel that the cat has traditionally had in painting; lust contrasted with fidelity. This piece from the Blaisten Collection shows, once again, the marked tendency of Mexican art towards a lyric and introspective vein.