Antonio Ruiz

Antonio Ruiz was born in Texcoco, Mexico. Published sources disagree on his exact birth year, variously reported as 1892, 1895, or 1897, and no primary civil record has been located to resolve the conflict, so no single birth year is asserted here. He studied architecture and painting at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, later reorganized as the National School of Fine Arts, entering in 1914.

In 1926 he traveled to Hollywood to study set design, and worked on murals for Pacific House in San Francisco. He later assisted Miguel Covarrubias on Treasure Island at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Back in Mexico, he served as professor of set design and perspective at the National School of Plastic Arts and directed the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda" from 1942. In 1940 two of his paintings, "El orador" and "El sueno de la Malinche," were shown in the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Galeria de Arte Mexicano, organized by Wolfgang Paalen, Andre Breton, and Cesar Moro.

According to Wikipedia's biographical account, Ruiz suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1961. He died on 9 October 1964 in Mexico City; this date and location are corroborated by the Getty Research Institute's archival finding aid and by other biographical references.

Ruiz's critical reputation rests on his early and sustained inclusion in major institutional programming rather than on a single defining review. His participation in the 1940 International Exhibition of Surrealism placed him among a circle that included Wolfgang Paalen, Andre Breton, and Cesar Moro, and his intimate, meticulously worked style is often described as related to magical realism, distinguishing it from the large-format muralism dominant in Mexican painting of the period. The Museum of Modern Art has included his work in multiple group exhibitions surveying Mexican and modern art, and he showed widely in group exhibitions across the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Spain, though exact dates for many of these shows are not specified in the sources available.

Ruiz's commercial market is comparatively thin and unevenly documented compared with his institutional standing. Artprice records 56 public auction appearances for the artist, but a specific, verifiable all-time auction record, meaning a confirmed work, price, currency, auction house, location, and sale date, could not be established from publicly accessible sources at the time of writing. No published catalogue raisonne exists, and no current gallery or estate representation could be identified; his work is handled almost entirely on the secondary market and is otherwise documented through institutional holdings such as the Museum of Modern Art and the archival papers held by the Getty Research Institute.

Several basic facts about Ruiz remain unsettled in the public record and should temper confidence in any single data point: his exact birth year is disputed across major reference sources, and no all-time auction record, meaning a specific work, price, house, and date, could be confirmed from publicly accessible sources. There is no catalogue raisonne and no identifiable current gallery or estate representation, so provenance research and institutional cross-referencing, rather than a dealer network, are the practical paths to verification. His presence in the Museum of Modern Art's collection, the Museum of Finance and Public Credit in Mexico City, and the Getty Research Institute's archive are the strongest available signals of his historical standing, and collectors should treat any auction-market claim about him with the caveat that the underlying sales data is sparse and only partially public.