Becoming Pablo O’Higgins

Becoming Pablo O’Higgins
Free Public Talk with Author Susan Vogel
at the UMFA


The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) is pleased to host local author Susan Vogel for a free public talk inspired by her new biography, Becoming Pablo O’Higgins (Prince-Nez Press, 2010). Presented in conjunction with the UMFA’s current exhibition,"Pablo O’Higgins: Works on Paper," the event will take place on Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 6:30 pm in the UMFA’s Katherine W. and Ezekiel R. Dumke, Jr. Auditorium. Vogel’s talk will focus on the intriguing life and powerful art of Pablo O’Higgins, a Utah-born artist who moved to Mexico and became one of the Mexico's most celebrated muralists.

Born in Salt Lake City in 1904, Paul Higgins studied under acclaimed local artists James T. Harwood and LeConte Stewart at East High School. By the age of twenty, the gifted art student had moved to Mexico City and secured a position as a mural assistant for the famed Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera. Embracing his new homeland, he eventually changed his name to Pablo Esteban O’Higgins. In 1937, O’Higgins co-founded the "Taller de Grafica Popular" (People’s Graphic Workshop), an anti-Fascist printmaking workshop that promoted the graphic arts and made politically inspired images available to often-illiterate audiences. O’Higgins was the only non-native whose work was included in the New York MoMA’s 1940 exhibition,"Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art." His work was exhibited to wide acclaim in Mexico, the United States, and Europe throughout the remainder of his life. O’Higgins became an official citizen of Mexico in 1961, and when he died in Mexico City in 1983, El Palacio de Bellas Artes held a funeral in his honor.

While many books have been published in Spanish honoring the art of O’Higgins and his love of Mexico, Becoming Pablo O’Higgins is the first English biography to be written. Vogel’s 330-page biography reveals extensive, well-researched information on the artist that has never been published, and marks the first book in any language to make a critical examination of his life and work.

"Exhaustively researched, Becoming Pablo O’Higgins examines the complex personality of Pablo O’Higgins and his participation in the vibrant and often volatile twentieth-century political art movement in Mexico,” said Donna Poulton, associate curator of the art of Utah and the West at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. “Unraveling O’Higgins’ true identity, this fascinating narrative weaves together some of the most powerful personalities in international politics and art.”

Scholar and freelance writer Susan Vogel has been researching the life, art, and influence of Pablo O’Higgins for twenty years. A Salt Lake City native and East High School alumna, Vogel first fell in love with the country and people of Mexico while studying at the National Autonomous University of Mexico City (UNAM). Vogel graduated from San Francisco State University with a bachelor’s degree in English and earned a law degree from the University of California-Hastings College of the Law. It was in 1985, while serving as president of Utah Lawyers for the Arts, that Vogel revisited Mexico City and first learned of Pablo O’Higgins. Fascinated by the artist’s story, his connection to Salt Lake City, and the lack of available information on his life, Vogel resolved, over the next two decades, to bring his story to light. In 1990, Vogel received a Utah Humanities Grant to support her research, now embodied in Becoming Pablo O’Higgins. Vogel was greatly involved with the creation of the UMFA’s current exhibition, "Pablo O’Higgins: Works on Paper," and she graciously credits the museum with its support in the completion of her book.

The exhibition, "Pablo O’Higgins: Works on Paper," is located in the second-floor LDS Galleria at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Organized by Donna Poulton, associate curator of the art of Utah and the West, the exhibition offers a focused look at O’Higgins’ sustained commitment to Mexico’s working and peasant classes. It comprises twenty-six lithographs from local private collections, the majority of which depict the dignity of Mexican workers and their close connection to their environment.

Salvador Jiménez, former Mexican Consul to Utah, said that “With this masterful work, which involved very serious research and a deep understanding of the cultural and political environment that prevailed on both sides of the border in the times of Pablo O’Higgins, Susan Vogel has made a very important contribution for a better under­standing between the U.S. and Mexico.”

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