Bio
Florencio de los Ángeles Molina Campos was born in Buenos Aires in 1891, into an aristocratic family. Since early childhood his time was spent alternately between General Madariaga, in the province of Buenos Aires, and Chajarí, in Entre Ríos. He studied at the La Salle, El Salvador and Nacional de Buenos Aires schools, and while still very young he began to draw as a self-taught artist, describing the gaucho world he was part of and knew intimately. On more than one occasion he admitted that he felt like a gaucho. He married María Hortensia Palacios Avellaneda in 1920; one year later his only daughter was born and he separated shortly afterward. In 1927, while exhibiting his work at the Witcomb gallery in Mar del Plata, he met María Elvira Ponce Aguirre, who would become his second wife and accompany him until his death. He worked as an illustrator for the evening paper La Razón, where he used to publish humoristic drawings about current events by way of prehistoric scenes. He was a great landscape artist and as such he illustrated El Fausto criollo (The Creole Faust, 1942, re-edited in 1950), a poetic work written by Estanislao del Campo; he was also acclaimed as a portraitist and many of the characters for his almanacs were taken from the city of Carmen de Areco, including the true Don Segundo Sombra Ramírez, who would inspire Ricardo Güiraldes to create the work by the same name. Molina Campos’ gaucho scenes are naïve, with touches of humor and a sense of caricature. His first show was in the Galpón de Palermo at the Sociedad Rural Argentina in 1926. Marcelo T. de Alvear, the president of Argentina at the time, passed through. Alvear was very impressed by the artist’s talent. In 1931, Molina Campos made his first trip to Europe, as tradition at the time dictated, and secured a show of his work in Paris. This was the first in a series of trips, always invited by the government of a foreign country as a representative of Argentinean culture. Meanwhile, he earned his living by teaching at the Colegio Nacional Nicolás Avellaneda and at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. During this period he signed a contract with the Alpargatas company to illustrate their almanacs, edited between 1931 and 1936, between 1940 and 1945, and in 1961 and 1962. These almanacs were what brought Molina Campos to fame, since no home, no matter how humble, went without an almanac with the artist’s images on the wall. In 1942, Walt Disney invited Molina Campos to be an advisor to his team of artists for some short films the studio planned to create on gaucho themes. For various reasons the artist was unable to undertake the project, and when he finally did join in, it was already well under way. Molina Campos felt that the films were unreal and full of stereotypes. As such, he felt that his presence did not contribute to the work proposed and decided to return. In 1944, the artist signed a ten-year contract with the American firm Minneapolis-Moline, for whom he produced illustrations between 1944 and 1958 for a series of almanacs similar to those he had done for Alpargatas, but that included the firm’s farming equipment. In addition, posters, stamps and decks of cards were produced, and the paintings were reproduced in newspapers and magazines. In 1951, prints of the 12 original paintings from that year were edited. Florencio Molina Campos died in Buenos Aires in 1959. In 1969 the Fundación Molina Campos was established, and in 1979 Mrs. María Elvira Aguirre de Molina Campos inaugurated a museum dedicated to the artist’s memory in the city of Moreno.
