“The art of Federico Castellon has a baffling yet fascinating quality. ...The artist sojourns in a world of free imagination, untrammeled by a logic of literal fact. He brings report of strange realms, uncharted seas of symbolism in the unconscious. The emblems and images which he brings back to us are clothed with the most minute and convincing verisimilitude and kind of superrealism."
—Carl Zigrosser, Federico Castellon, His Graphic Works, 1936-1971, August L. Freundlich, Syracuse University, New York, 1978.
Federico Castellon was only seven years old when his family immigrated from Almería, Spain, to Brooklyn, New York. He began sketching at an early age, as imaginative drawings provided an outlet for expression, which was particularly useful for Castellon, given his limited English at the time. Although his teachers recognized his talents as a draftsman, he remained largely self-taught. As a teenager, Castellon regularly visited museums in New York to study the Old Masters. After gaining mastery of realistic rendering, he became inspired by the work of the great modern artists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, Diego Rivera, and Giorgio de Chirico.
Shortly after graduating from Erasmus High School, he completed an arts and sciences mural for the school. The mural, informed by his interest in European modernism, attracted critical attention and was exhibited in New York at Raymond and Raymond Galleries before being permanently installed in the school. At about this time, Castellon was introduced to Diego Rivera at a lecture the artist gave on his murals for Rockefeller Center. The older artist took an interest in the young man’s work and brought Castellon’s drawings to the attention of Carl Zigrosser, the Director of the Weyhe Gallery in New York, who gave the eighteen-year-old Castellon his first solo exhibition.
In 1934, with Rivera’s help, Castellon was awarded a four-year fellowship sponsored by the Spanish Government to study art and travel throughout Europe. During this time, he studied painting and printmaking, exhibiting his work at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid and in the 1935 Paris Exhibition of Spanish and American Artists, which featured Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Joan Miró.
In 1937, Castellon returned to New York and made his first lithograph with master lithographer George Miller. He exhibited in the Whitney Museum Annual in 1937 and 1938. In 1940, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts awarded him the Eyre Medal for his lithograph Rendez-vous in a Landscape. He also exhibited at the Weyhe Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago. In the same year, he received the first of two Guggenheim fellowships. In 1942, he participated in an exhibition at Carnegie Institute.
Although his formal education ended with high school, Castellon remained an avid reader with interests in psychology and philosophy. He became a United States citizen in 1943, and throughout the 1940s and 1950s, his work was informed by his travels abroad, including to China with the U.S. Army, Italy on his second Guggenheim fellowship, and Paris and Madrid, where he relocated his family for a brief period during the late 1950s. He also began teaching during this time, holding successive positions at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, the New School for Social Research, the National Academy of Design, and Queens College. He also took on commissions from American periodicals, most notably LIFE magazine.
In 1947, Castellon exhibited at the Philadelphia Art Alliance and again at the Carnegie Institute. In 1949, he was awarded a National Institute Arts and Letters Grant. He was elected to the National Academy and held solo exhibitions in Paris, Bombay, and New York at Associated American Artists.
Life magazine commissioned Castellon to create a series of paintings illustrating “Memorable Victories in the Fight of Justice” in 1951. He spent 1954 traveling with solo exhibitions of his paintings and graphics throughout South America. Life magazine published his work again in 1955, ‘56, and ‘57. From 1958 to 1960, he began working in sculpture, and from 1961 to 1963, he traveled with his family to France, Spain, and Italy. In 1963, he executed a series of lithographs at the renowned L’Atelier de Jacques Desjobert, Paris, and was elected to the National Academy of Design. Returning to the U.S. in 1964, Castellon held a solo exhibition at Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York, exhibited at the New York World’s Fair, and received awards from the Philadelphia Print Club and the Society of American Graphic Artists. In 1966, he held a solo exhibition of graphic work at Associated American Artists, and in 1968, he was elected a Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1971, the last year of his life, he exhibited at the Biennale Internationale de l'Estampe d'Épinal in Paris.
Castellón's prints and drawings from the 1930s represent some of the earliest examples of surrealism created in the United States. These highly original works predate his travels abroad and the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition, 'Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism,' in July 1937.
Castellon's work is held in numerous museum collections in America and abroad, including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, The Butler Institute of American Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Instituto de Estudios Almerienses (Spain), The Isreal Museum (Jerusalem), Library of Congress, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Spain), New Orleans Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Princeton University Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Springfield Museum of Art, Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
