Federico Castellon
Encyclopedia
Federico Castellón was an Spanish-American painter, sculptor, printmaker and illustrator of children's books.

Castellón was born on Isla de Alborán
Isla de Alborán
The Isla de Alborán is a small islet in the Alborán Sea, part of the western Mediterranean, about 50 km north of the Moroccan coast and 90 km south of the province of Almería, Spain. A Spanish possession since 1540, it was taken from the Tunisian pirate Al Borani in the Battle of Alborán. It is...

, Spain, studied in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

 and Paris and settled in Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...

, New York.

Federico Cristencia de Castellón y Martinez, better known as Federico Castellón, was a surrealist printmaker, illustrator, painter, and sculptor. He was born in Almeria, Spain in 1914. With his family, he immigrated in 1921 to the United States. They resided in Brooklyn, New York.

A fundamentally self-taught artist, Castellón began sketching at an early age. He took advantage of his family’s relocation and visited the museums of New York. Consequently, his influences ranged from Old Masters to the modern artists of his day, including Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...

, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

, Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....

, and Georges Rouault
Georges Rouault
Georges Henri Rouault[p] was a French Fauvist and Expressionist painter, and printmaker in lithography and etching.-Childhood and education:Rouault was born in Paris into a poor family...

.

Castellón attended Erasmus High School, where his teachers recognized his draughtsmanship. After graduation, he completed a mural for the school based on the subject of arts and sciences. The mural was informed by Castellón’s interest in the modern European movements, and it attracted critical attention when exhibited at Raymond & Raymond Galleries in New York before it was installed permanently in the school.

About this time, Castellón was introduced to Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo . His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in...

, who had an international reputation and was painting murals for Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering between 48th and 51st streets in New York City, United States. Built by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning the area between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue. It was declared a National...

. The older artist took an interest in the young man’s work and brought Castellón’s drawings to the attention of the director of the Weyhe Gallery in New York, who subsequently gave the eighteen-year old Castellón his first solo exhibition.

In 1934, with Rivera’s help, Castellón was awarded a four-year fellowship, sponsored by the Spanish Government, to travel throughout Europe to study painting and printmaking. During this same period, Castellón began to exhibit his work in museums in France and Spain.

In 1935, Castellón participated in the Paris Exhibition of Spanish Artists that included Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris
Juan Gris
José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived and worked in France most of his life...

, and Joan Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...

.

In 1937, Castellón returned to New York and began experimenting with the medium of lithography, using this medium to create illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

's allegorical tale, "The Masque of Red Death". Over the years, Castellón’s work as an illustrator would eventually include Bulfinch's Mythology
Bulfinch's Mythology
Bulfinch's Mythology is a collection of the works of Thomas Bulfinch, named after him and published after his death. Bulfinch originally published his work as three volumes: The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, published in 1855; The Age of Chivalry, or Legends of King Arthur, published...

, The Story of Marco Polo, and The Little Prince
The Little Prince
The Little Prince , first published in 1943, is a novella and the most famous work of the French aristocrat writer, poet and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ....

.

In 1940, Castellón received the first of two Guggenheim fellowships
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

. His work continued to attract attention as he was included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

, the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...

, and the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...

.

Castellón became an American citizen in 1943. During WW II he was with the OSS and assigned to the Burma theater. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, his work was informed by his travels abroad: to China with the U.S. Army; to Italy on his second Guggenheim fellowship; and to Paris and Madrid, where he moved his family for a brief period during which he undertook commissions from American periodicals, including The Epic of Man series for LIFE magazine.

Although his formal education ended with high school, Castellón taught at Teachers' College of Columbia University, Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...

, and Queens College. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Design
National Academy of Design
The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design – known simply as the "National Academy" – is an honorary association of American artists founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E...

 in New York, was awarded a First Prize from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

, and he was a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists.

Castellón died in 1971. A retrospective of his prints was held at the Allied Artists of America in 1978. In 1982, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at Anderson & Anderson Master Prints (Loveland, Colorado). In 2004, his prints and paintings were exhibited at Emil Nelson Gallery (Denver, Colorado). In early 2010, Castellón’s work was exhibited at the Kalamazoo Institute, along with the graphic work of Francisco Goya
Francisco Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era...

.

Although Castellón worked in virtually every media, he remains best known for his early graphic work, particularly his lithographs and etchings, media in which he became a master. His prints and drawings of the early 1930s are the first examples of Surrealism created by an American; a considerable feat because Castellón produced these highly original works not only before his travels abroad, but before the seminal exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
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