Xul Solar was the adopted name of Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari (14 December 1887 – 9 April 1963), an Argentine painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor of imaginary languages.
Biography Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari was born in San Fernando, Buenos Aires Province, to a cosmopolitan family. His father, Elmo Schulz Riga, of Baltic German origin, was born in the Latvian city of Riga, at that time part of Imperial Russia. His mother, originally from Italy, was named Agustina Solari. 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 5 April 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 traveled 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 working in tempera and – very occasionally — oils. He also adopted the pen name of Xul Solar. The first major exhibition of his art was in 1920 in Milan, together with sculptor Arturo Martini. In 1916, Schulz Solari first signed his work "Xul Solar", ostensibly for the purposes to simplify the phonetics of his name, but an examination of the adopted name reveals that the first name is the reverse of "lux," which means "light" in Latin. Combined with "solar", the name reads as "the light of the sun", and demonstrates the artist's affinity for the universal source of light and energy. His father's name "Schulz" and "Xul" are pronounced the same in Spanish.
[H]e gave himself an extraterrestrial identity by modifying his parents' surnames and becoming Xul Solar. The first name reflected light, or lux, spelled backwards; the last, his maternal surname without the 'i,' was the sun itself. During the years that followed he continued his travels, extending his orbit to Munich and Hamburg. In 1924, his work was exhibited in Paris in a show of Latin American artists. He also struck up an acquaintance with British occultist Aleister Crowley and his mistress Leah Hirsig who held high hopes for his discipleship, but later that year he returned to Buenos Aires, where he promptly became associated with the avant garde "Florida group" (a.k.a. "Martín Fierro group"), a circle that also included Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he was to keep an association and close friendship. It was in this group that he also met poet and novelist Leopoldo Marechal who would immortalize him as the astrologer Schultze in his famous novel Adam Buenosayres. He began to exhibit frequently in the galleries of Buenos Aires, notably in a 1926 exhibition of modern painters that included Norah Borges (sister of Jorge Luis Borges) and Emilio Pettoruti. Throughout the rest of his life, he exhibited regularly in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay, but he would not have another major European exhibition until his twilight years. In 1962, a year before his death, he had a major exposition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. He died at his house in Tigre on 9 April 1963. Pettoruti published his biography five years later.
Work and interests Solar's paintings are mainly sculptures, often using striking contrasts and bright colours, typically in relatively small formats. His visual style seems equidistant between Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee on the one hand and Marc Chagall on the other. He also worked in some extremely unorthodox artistic media, such as modifying pianos, including a version with three rows of keys. The poet Fernando Demaría in an essay "Xul Solar y Paul Klee" (published in the Argentine magazine Lyra, 1971), wrote, "It is not easy for the human spirit to elevate itself from astrology to astronomy, but we would be making a mistake if we forget that an authentic astrologer, like Xul Solar, is close to the source of the stars... The primitivism of Xul Solar is anterior to the appearance of the Gods. The Gods correspond to a more evolved form of energy." Solar had a strong interest in astrology; at least as early as 1939 he began to draw astrological charts. He also had an interest in Buddhism and believed strongly in reincarnation. He also developed his own set of tarot cards. His paintings reflect his religious beliefs, featuring objects such as stairs, roads and the representation of God. He invented two fully elaborated imaginary languages, symbols from which figure in his paintings, and was also an exponent of duodecimal mathematics. He said of himself "I am maestro of a writing no one reads yet." One of his invented languages was called "Neo Criollo", a poetic fusion of Portuguese and Spanish, which he reportedly would frequently use as a spoken language in talking to people. He also invented a "Pan Lingua", which aspired to be a world language linking mathematics, music, astrology and the visual arts, an idea reminiscent of Hermann Hesse's "glass bead game". Indeed, games were a particular interest of his, including his own invented version of chess, or more precisely "non-chess". Outside of Argentina, Solar may best be known for his association with Borges. In 1940, he figured as a minor character in Borges's semi-fictional "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"; in 1944, he illustrated a limited edition (300 copies) of Un modelo para la muerte, written by Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, writing together under the pseudonym B. Suárez Lynch. He and Borges had common interests in German expressionistic poetry, the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Blake, and Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism and the I Ching.
Discussion of Entierro and Fiordo
Entierro, 1914, watercolor on paper
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