Partner Xavier Villaurrutia

Queer Places:
Panteón Francés de la Piedad Mexico City, Cuauhtémoc Borough, Distrito Federal, Mexico

Agustin Lazo Adalid - Alchetron, The Free Social EncyclopediaAgustín Lazo Adalid (1896 – January 28, 1971) was a Mexican artist and playwright who is credited with introducing surrealism to Mexico. Although he grew up during the era of the Mexican Revolution, his time in Europe in the 1920s and early 1930s, set his aesthetics towards the avant-garde movements of that continent, rather than towards Mexican muralism, making him a part of the Los Contemporáneos or “Grupo sin grupo.” His work in art and theater influenced each other, with his art having theatrical themes and his theater having emphasis on sets and visual cues. Lazo retired from art in 1950, after the death of his long-time partner poet Xavier Villaurrutia, supposedly never painting or writing again.

Agustín Lazo was born in Mexico City in 1896[1] to a wealthy and well-known family.[2] He did not have economic concerns like many other artists so he could choose what he wanted to study, write, design and paint.[2]

After studying architecture for a year, he dedicated himself to painting.[3] He began his art studies at the Escuela al Aire Libre de Pintura in Santa Anita, founded by Alfredo Ramos Martínez in 1913[1][4] In 1917, he briefly attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, along with Rufino Tamayo, Julio Castellanos and Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, studying under Saturnino Herrán .[4][5]

He began his art career after the Mexican Revolution with Adolfo Best Maugard but then left for Europe living for a while in Paris in 1922.[2][6] He visited Europe again in 1925 then lived there from 1927 to 1931.[7] He spent his time in Europe traveling in France, Italy, Belgium and Germany, visiting museums and the studios of various avant-garde artists meeting artists such as Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico .[4][8] He spent most of his time in Paris, which then was a magnet for international artists of various types, which introduced him to surrealism. He lived and worked as an artist in the city, sharing a studio with Alfonso Michel in Montparnasse .[7] At this time, he also became interested in theater, learning set design and stage machinery with Charles Dullin of Théâtre de l'Atelier. He also began living with his longtime partner poet Xavier Villaurrutia .[2]

Lazo was described as a “gentleman of solitude, tact, and good taste, sobriety and dignity...[8] and having aristocratic manners.[2] He was a discreet person and burned many of his letters and other personal items, so little is known of his personal life.[2][9]

Prior to the 1940s, many same-sex-attracted men found it easier to cohabit abroad. For painters Alfonso Michel and Agustín Lazo Adalid, cohabitation appears to have been too strong a statement to make in Mexico City. Michel lived with a Jewish boyfriend in San Francisco in 1919–20, before reproducing a similar living arrangement with a Norwegian businessman – Thorlaif Imerslund – in Berlin and Nice circa 1922–24, and then with Agustın Lazo in Paris in 1924–26. Similarly, gay Spanish Republican exile Luis Cernuda, who regularly visited Mexico City during the late 1940s and early 1950s before settling there permanently, found it difficult to cohabit with his boyfriend, Salvador Alighieri, a twenty-year old Italo-Mexican bodybuilder. The inspiration for Cernuda’s Poemas para un cuerpo, Aligheri and Cernuda regularly met at the Hotel Geneve until 1955, when Aligheri disappeared and Cernuda moved in with Spanish writers Manuel Altolaguirre and Concha Mendez. For Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, already ostracised for his divorce from Carmen Mondragon in 1921, it was relatively easy to live with his youthful lover Abraham Ángel, as the age difference (and his previous marriage) gave them an alibi. Tragically, the men’s relationship ended when Manuel’s infidelities pushed Angel to a drug overdose suicide.

In contrast to successful professionals such as Elías Nandino, who rented an apartment for himself, gay academics and mid-level bureaucrats from bourgeois families generally stayed alongside their families, negotiating a closeted home life where their fey mannerisms were overlooked; these men, however, remained eternal children denied the maturity of married householders. Men like Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia and Agustín Lazo Adalid led double lives thanks to their rented studios downtown, where they retreated to write, paint, sculpt or love. Even after setting up house for his mother and himself, Novo maintained a studio from the 1930s until the 1950s, making it his love nest and, while he directed the National Theatre, a convenient place to rest or dress for evening events without travelling to his suburban home in Coyoacan. Such studios – often called leoneros when they were exclusively kept for sexual rendezvous – were a long-standing heterosexual male practice euphemistically known as la casa chica. Termed ‘a quasi-marital household on the side’, this little house supplemented the main casa or casa grande, where a man’s legitimate spouse and children lived.

The Mexico City home of Antonio Adalid Pradel and Antonio Dodero welcomed an extensive homophile network. Together since the early 1900s, and forced into exile by Adalid’s gambling, the couple had lived in Alameda, California, between 1907 and 1920. Welcomed back into the family on the condition that he marry a woman, Adalid claimed a small inheritance and taught English at the National Preparatory School. Posing as uncle and nephew, they set up house in a subdivided apartment on 123 Avenida Hidalgo, adjacent to San Fernando Square. The couple decorated and maintained the one-bedroom flat together. In the elegantly furnished living room they entertained guests and dined. The decor echoed their travels together and Adalid’s family wealth, portraits of the couple hung on the walls and a collection of antiques instructed visitors in colonial decorative arts. The home was the centre of an important intergenerational homophile social network that included cabinet ministers Luis Montes de Oca, Genaro Estrada and Jaime Torres Bodet, poets Xavier Villaurrutia and Salvador Novo, painters Agustín Lazo Adalid and Roberto Montenegro, retired police inspector Luis Amieva and a bevy of antique dealers. Older networked friends brought acquaintances, made introductions and established connections for younger men like Novo, Villaurrutia and Lazo, that led to sex, patronage, mentorship, gifts and companionship. They passed along sexual knowledge and the names of trusted physicians to treat their venereal diseases. The forms of care and kinship established in private residences such as Adalid and Dodero’s taught the younger gays who to trust and how to behave, building a sense of community and belonging. In the 1950s, Salvador Novo fondly evoked the moments he shared in their refined company, noting how Adalid and Dodero fixed trays of snacks, laid the table, washed dishes and served Chinese take-away. These evenings represented a model of domesticity and sociability that young gays reproduced as they became established.

Lazo ended his artistic career in 1950, when Villaurrutia suddenly died and according to stories, never wrote or painted again. Salvador Novo wrote that he slowly died over the next twenty years, in part because as the last heir he was overwhelmed by the wealth he was inheriting from his relatives.[2]

He died at age 74 from a cerebral hemorrhage and hypertension on January 28, 1971, at his home in Mexico City. He was buried at the La Piedad French cemetery.[1]

My published books:

Amazon Logo Nero 010.pngSee my published books

BACK TO HOME PAGE