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Julio De Diego (1900 - 1979)
Born in Madrid, Julio De Diego studied there and in Paris and Rome before moving to the United States in 1924 where he began working in magazine illustration. His facility for depiction and for working on a large scale soon won him commissions for public murals such as one for the Hotel Sherman in Chicago, the city where De Diego lived during the 1930s. He began to exhibit widely, including at the various annuals at the Art Institute of Chicago where he won a prize in the 1935 Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture. During the 1930s his works featured boldly colored, hard-edged figures, often in fantastical symbolic settings. De Diego first traveled to Mexico in 1939 where he began a lifelong friendship with artist Carlos Merida. His works were also exhibited in the 1939 New York World's Fair, the Golden Gate Exposition of 1939 and the exhibition Artists for Victory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1942.

Frustrated by his medical rejection from military service in World War II, De Diego painted a remarkable series of twenty-nine works in two months in 1943. This war series was shown at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York in a widely praised exhibition entitled Desastres del Alma, after Goya's famous group of etchings, and was singled out by Art News as one of the earliest and most important responses to the war by an American artist.
De Diego abandoned his earlier hard-edged style in this series, which shows the influence of Surrealist work by artists such as Andre Masson, Max Ernst and Oscar Dominguez. In The bullets were coming kind of close... and The Dictators Go By, De Diego applied many layers of paint which he then scratched into with the end of his brush.

Works by De Diego were acquired by the leading corporate collections of the 1940s including IBM, Abbott Laboratories and Encyclopedia Britannica and are currently in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Phillips Gallery, Walker Art Center and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

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