Federico Castellón enjoyed a successful career as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and illustrator in mid-20th-century New York. His achievements were recognized with two Guggenheim Fellowships and membership in the National Academy of Design, where he was elected an associate Academician in 1947 and a full Academician in 1963. In addition to his studio work, Castellón was a revered teacher. In the 1950s, he toured and lectured in Latin America with a State Department-sponsored art exhibition.
Federico Cristencia de Castellón y Martinez was born in Almeria, Spain, where his father owned a small leather factory. The fifth of five brothers with two younger sisters, he arrived with his parents in America when he was seven years old. The family settled in the then distant neighborhood of Flatbush, Brooklyn. Seven-year-old Federico, speaking no English, was held back in school. In an oral interview with the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (available online), the artist described himself as a lonely child, whose immigrant parents did not understand America and never learned to speak English. An outsider, marked by his foreign accent, he found solace in drawing.
My life was miserable as I remember it as a child here in this country, because I was always known as the little Spanish kid...the implication wasn’t pleasant.... I’d go out in the street and just hang around and watch the other kids play...and back in the house and drawing again. It seemed the only activity that I could pursue and save my sanity, somehow.
At Erasmus Hall High School, Castellón finally found encouragement from an art teacher who recognized his talent. Through a friend of a friend of the family, Castellón met Diego Rivera and showed the Mexican muralist his work. Rivera recommended him to Carl Zigrosser, the managing director of the Weyhe Gallery in Manhattan. By the time he was 18 years old Castellón was launched on his professional career.
In 1934, with Rivera’s support, the government of the Spanish Republic awarded Castellón a four-year fellowship that supported him to travel to Europe to study painting and printmaking. He exhibited his work there, notably in a 1935 show in Paris of Spanish artists that included Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Joan Miró among others. After a close call with the Spanish military draft (he was still a Spanish citizen), Castellón returned to the United States in 1937. In 1938, he continued his study of lithography and printmaking in New York with master printmaker, George C. Miller (1894–1965). In 1939, Castellón won a residency at the Yaddo Artists’ Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. The early 1940s were years of major personal and professional landmarks for the young artist. In 1940, he married fellow artist Hilda Greenfield (1916–2000). In 1941, he won his first Guggenheim Fellowship. In the course of the next few years, he was invited to participate in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Castellón became an American citizen in 1943. During World War II he served with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) in Burma.
In 1950, a second Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Castellón to return to Europe. Though his formal education had ended with high school, and did not include art school, in the postwar years Castellón held teaching positions in New York at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Queens College of the City University of New York, and at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. (There is an endowed scholarship in Graphic Arts in Castellón’s name at Pratt Institute.) Castellón remains best known for his graphic work—a body of prints, lithographs, and illustrations. (A complete library of Castellon’s prints, numbering 665 images, is in the collection of the Syracuse University Art Galleries, New York.) Influenced by his exposure to modern European art at Erasmus Hall High School, Castellón was among the earliest Americans to embrace surrealism, and though he worked over the course of his career in a variety of styles, his name is often associated with that distinctive movement.
