Arturo Garcia Bustos (born 1926), is a famous Mexican painter.

Biography

Arturo Garcia Bustos was born in Mexico City. He showed great interest in arts as a youngster, and he was able to attend an art school. It was there that he met with many of Latin America's most respected artists, such as Diego Rivera, Alvaro Siqueiros , José Clemente Orozco and his teacher, Frida Kahlo. Garcia Bustos also studied painting at the UNAM and the INBA .

Those four painters became his friends, specially Clemente Orozco. But he also had a meaningful friendship with Kahlo, for whom he felt a lot of respect.

In 1954, Garcia Bustos went to Guatemala, to reconstruct a workshop at the Escuela de Bellas Artes there.

A few years later, when his dear friend Kahlo passed away after a long illness, Garcia Bustos threw a communist flag over her coffin. During that era, Garcia Bustos was a backer of the communism ideals, and he knew that he and Kahlo shared that political idea, as he had seen a self-portrait of Kahlo with a communist symbol drawn across her heart. Although Diego Rivera at first accepted Garcia Bustos' gesture, he apparently did not like it, and supposedly threw the flag away a few minutes after it was put on Kahlo's coffin. Kahlo was cremated.

Arturo Garcia Bustos believed that, in order for Latin America to progress, communism was neccessary. He was also an admirer of Fidel Castro at the time, because of Castro's promises to the Cuban public of a prosperous future.

Garcia Bustos' hundreds of works have been exhibited in Argentina, Austria, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, the United States and many other countries around the world. Currently, he describes himself as a believer ofdemocracy.

He has been a member of the World Peace Council, the Mexican Platic Arts Hall and the Mexican Academy of Arts , among other organizations.

On March 29, 2005, a collection consisting of eleven of his paintings will be exposed at the "Museo Mural Diego Rivera" of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes , in Mexico City.