Jesús Martí Martín

Jesús Martí Martín (1899–1975) was a Spanish architect and painter. His first love was painting, but he trained as an architect and was successful in this profession in Madrid in the years before the Spanish Civil War. During the civil war he helped preserve national artistic treasures from the destruction of Madrid, and also designed bomb shelters. After the fall of the Second Spanish Republic in 1939 he fled to France, where he was interned for two months, then made his way to Paris and on to exile in Mexico. He resumed his career as an architect in Mexico, but gradually abandoned architecture in favour of painting. He chose not to exhibit his work and was little known until he was finally persuaded to put on a show in Mexico City at the age of 70, when he was acclaimed as a master of modern Mexican art.