Philip Seade

Felipe Seade (Antofagasta, Chile, August 23, 1912-Montevideo, Uruguay, January 18, 1969), Uruguayan painter and teacher of Chilean origin.

Biography

He was born in Antofagasta, Chile, on August 23, 1912. He was the eldest son of a family of Lebanese immigrants. At the age of eleven the family settled in Montevideo and at the age of 12 he began to work as an assistant to the muralist Enrique Albertazzi and the painter Guillermo Rodríguez, who encouraged him to take painting courses at the Círculo de Bellas Artes school. At the age of 13 he had his first exhibition in Cerrillos. Between 1931 and the mid-50s, Seade participated in numerous national and municipal salons.

From the age of 22 onwards, Seade added teaching tasks to his intense artistic activity; first as a drawing teacher at the Liceo de Colonia, where he managed to paint the mural Alegoría al Trabajo (1936), and then as a professor at the School of Fine Arts in Montevideo, where he taught for 25 years, and finally at the Institute of Artigas Teachers.

Seade's artistic life cannot be understood apart from his political life as a communist militant. Seade wanted to paint for the people, not "for the canteens of the burghers". Her ideal was to paint murals, the way her generation reached the masses, but the only ones she came to execute were the one in Colonia and & # 34; The People's March to the High Stone & # 34; (1939) in the Assembly Hall of the Florida High School. However, a very significant part of Seade's work is made up of sketches of murals, sketches of sketches, sketches and notes.

Another of the most significant veins of Seade's work was the representation of characters from Uruguayan life. Gauchos, soccer fans, washerwomen, children, women. Not from the distant or "touristy" of traditional painting, but with the passion of a convinced social realist.

In addition to being a painter, Seade was a prolific draftsman. Part of his cartoonist's work is public, mainly the long series of illustrations that he developed for the magazine Mundo Uruguayo, part of it are notes for paintings or individual pieces.

Although he visibly participated in salons and was in life one of the most visible artistic figures in Uruguay, Seade eluded, when he did not fight, the world of galleries and critics. That is probably one of the reasons why her painting did not achieve the presence that naturally corresponded to it during the years after her death in 1969. Important critics of different generations such as Gabriel Peluffo Linari, Fernando García Esteban and Atahualpa del Cioppo (who was an art critic before being a theater man) recognized the importance of Seade.

In 2013, the mural Allegory of Work that Seade had painted with his students in the building that in 1936 was the Colonia Departmental High School was restored.