Artist Directory

Painter, architect, engineer and educator. Martínez began his art studies under Luis Pío Toro and Spanish painter Santiago Meana. He also studied engineering at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez and architecture by correspondence. Martínez and his wife, writer and artist María Cadilla, established an art academy in Santurce. In Arecibo he worked as an engineer, architect, and painter. He was an innovator, a precursor of the Surrealists, and he became one of the few Puerto Rican painters of the early twentieth century to take up the contemporary idioms of his time. A tireless promoter of art, he exhibited in New York and was a member of such important societies as the American Artists Professional League, Audubon Artists, and the Society of Independent Artists. In 1998 the south lobby of the Capitol of Puerto Rico was named the Julio Tomás Martínez y Mirabal Gallery in his honor. His work, rarely of a local-color type, has been associated with Surrealism and Art Naïf, and is filled with symbols, allegories, parodies, and social critique, often in allusion to European Fascism and the local political scene.