César Moro

César Moro (August 31, 1903 – January 10, 1956) is the pseudonym of Alfredo Quíspez-Asín Mas, a Peruvian poet and painter. Most of his poetic works are written in French; he was the only Latin American poet included in the 1920s and '30s surrealist journals of André Breton and the first Latin American artist to join the surrealist group on his own initiative, as opposed to being recruited by Breton.

Life and career

Moro moved to Paris on August 30, 1925, initially to pursue ballet dancing, but shortly after focused his artistic efforts on creating art and poetry. He participated in his first group exhibition at the Cabinet Maldoror in Brussels alongside Santos Balmori, Jaime Colson, and Isaías de Santiago. He contributed to the Surrealist artistic and literary movement while in France, becoming fully integrated into the group by the 1930s. He openly criticized the politics of the time by contributing writings to La mobilisation contre la guerre n'est pas la paix (Mobilization Against the War is Not Peace), an anti-war manifesto. Moro embraced the Surrealist's critiques of bourgeois social values and cultural hierarchies. He used Surrealist art and literature to "articulate his own marginality or sense of invisibility as a homosexual man negotiating his place in the international art world."

Around 1926, Moro briefly adopted a more cubist style of painting and shifted away from depicting Peruvian scenes. This likely came as a "response to expectations of primitivism and nationally specific subject matter in Paris."

Moro returned to Lima in 1933 and attempted to establish himself as a leader of Surrealism in South America, following in the footsteps of César Vallejo and José Carlos Mariátegui who had both published analyses of Surrealism. He produced art and literature while in Peru, established a museum, and taught art classes for the mentally ill at Hospital Larco Herrera.