"The boy" in 1926

Blue ink drawing on paper

Hand signed and dated by the artist

Dimensions with frame: 49 x 48 cm.

Ángel Zárraga comes from a wealthy Mexican bourgeois family. He trained at the Beaux-Arts in Mexico before leaving for Brussels, Madrid, Toledo and Florence. He moved to Paris in 1904 and started at the Salon d'Automne in 1911. The painter was interested in the formal contribution of cubism. A fine portrait painter, he represents his wife, and painters, including Pierre Bonnard (Center Pompidou).

His drawing is close to the lesson of Symbolism and Art Deco. He depicts landscapes and bathing scenes, female nudes. Anxious to detach himself from avant-garde movements, he did not join any current of thought at the beginning of the century. Zárraga carries out numerous frescoes for the residences of the notables. The Mexican Embassy in Paris commissioned a cycle of frescoes from him, they would constitute his great work. It allegorically represents the history of Mexico, its friendship for France and its dream of universal brotherhood.

From Mexico, Zarraga retains a sensitivity to the mystic, present in Mexican folklore. The painter is in Paris at the time of the Mexican revolution; he will only know the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, emblem of all freedoms. "La garçonne" illustrates the Paris of this time. Women cut their hair and shorten their dresses while painters dress and color them in decorative style.