Xavier Martínez, 1869-1943, Xavier Martinez self-portrait
Xavier Martínez (1869–1943) was a Californian artist active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is a prominent bohemian from San Francisco, the East Bay, and the Monterey Peninsula, and is one of the co-founders of two artists organizations and an art gallery in California.
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His original name was Javier Timoteo Martínez y Orozco, and later he called himself Xavier Tizoc Martinez, with the middle name acknowledging his Pulépecha ancestry. His friends called him "Marty." Martinez's father was Mexican and his mother was Spanish.
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He learned to write poetry in French and admired the poems of Goethe and Schiller and various French poets. In his later autobiography, he recalls how his mother taught him about celestial motion when he was ten years old.
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Martinez is one of the contracted artists of the Monterey Del Monte Art Gallery, where he went from substitute teacher to painting professor at the California Academy of Arts and Crafts (CSAC) in Berkeley.
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In 1912, he helped found the California Etching Society. In 1913, he went on a painting trip to the Arizona Desert with the painter Francis McCormas. In 1914, the Impressionists Childe Hassam and Edward Simmons viewed Martinez's desert paintings.
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The following year, he exhibited at the Panama Pacific International Exhibition and the Golden Gate Park Museum in San Francisco. During this time, he has held exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Notable paintings of this period are The Girl's Head, The Storm, Foothills and Lake Merritt.
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Between 1916 and 1920, he exhibited several exhibitions, including at the Palace of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Art Association, and the Oakland Hotel. Martinez became a member of the American Arts Federation in 1921.
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Martinez was elected in 1940 as one of three people to represent California into the Hall of Fame of the 1940 New York World's Fair (along with Father Junipero Serra and William Keith).