Enrique
Asunsolo (1901-1960) was a poet, painter and lawyer.
Enrique
Asunsolo (1901-1960) was a poet, painter and lawyer.
He studied in Mexico City and graduated as a lawyer in 1923. He was an official of civil courts and head of the legal department of Nacional Financiera. Painter and poet friend of the poet Luis Cernuda.
In the 1930s in Mexico, physicians, teachers, accountants, journalists and other professionals stood to lose more than their clientele if exposed as homosexual in the press, as such exposure would result in banishment to the Islas Marıas Penal colony. Poet Salvador Novo and playwright Xavier Villaurrutia sought to join other Mexican sexiles in the United States or Europe, including artists José Mojica, Ramón Novarro, Roberto Montenegro, Agustın J. Fink and Enrique Asunsolo, or scientists studying abroad, like Elías Nandino and Raoul Fournier. Seeking ‘to avoid a fate as a cook, waiter, or dishwasher in New York’, Villaurrutia accepted a one-year fellowship at Yale in 1935–36, while a frantic Novo wrote to Federico García Lorca, asking him to procure him lodgings in Madrid.
Close to the group of Contemporaries, Asunsolo made a portrait of Pita Amor in 1949, a premonitory portrait, an oil on canvas with flowers of thoughts on the head and on thecoil, in front of some steps and an arch open to nothingness. Among his poetry stands out: Absence in Rome (1935), Hundred of Heartbreak (1935) Sixteen exercises (1936), Elegy of the Little Angel (1940) In theater he wrote: Antisthenes or the return of the prodigal son (1945) among other works.
After his death, Luis Cernuda would write the poem: "Amigos: Enrique Asúnsolo" from Desolación de la Quimera.
My published books:
