| Xul Solar was the adopted name of Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari (born December 14, 1887 April 9, 1963), Argentine painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor of imaginary languages.He was born in San Fernando, Buenos Aires Province, in the bosom of a cosmopolitan family. His father, Emilio Schulz Riga, was born in the Latvian city of Riga, at that time part of Imperial Russia.He was educated in Buenos Aires, first as a musician, then as an architect (although he never completed his architectural studies). After working as a schoolteacher and holding a series of minor jobs in the municipal bureaucracy, on April 5, 1912, he set out on the ship "England Carrier", supposedly to work his passage to Hong Kong, but he disembarked in London and made his way to Turin. He returned to London to meet up with his mother and aunt, with whom he travelled to Paris, Turin (again), Genoa, and his mother's native Zoagli. Over the following few years, despite the onset of World War I, he would move among these cities, as well as Tours, Marseille, and Florence; towards the end of the war he served at the Argentine consulate in Milan. During the years of the war, he struck up what was to be a lifelong friendship with Argentine artist Emilio Pettoruti, then a young man living in Italy and associated with the futurists. Also around that time, he began to pay more attention to painting, first with watercolor (which would always remain his main medium as a painter), although he gradually began ... |
