Atl, Doctor

Doctor Atl, pseudonym of Gerardo Murillo, (born October 3, 1875, Guadalajara, Mexico—died August 15, 1964, Mexico City), painter and writer who was one of the pioneers of the Mexican movement for artistic nationalism.

Educated in Mexico City, Rome, and Peru, he founded the journal Action d’Art in Paris in 1913 and edited it for three years. The paintings he created during that period generally imitated popular European trends such as Post-Impressionism. Returning to Mexico when the revolution broke, he founded the radical journal Acción Mundiale in 1916 and became its editor. During that period he became active in the muralist movement along with politically active figures such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He was appointed head of Mexico’s Department of Archaeological Monuments in 1923 and director of the Department of Fine Arts in 1930.

Murillo is most commonly known by his Aztec name, Atl (the Náhuatl word for “water”), which he adopted as a repudiation of his Spanish heritage and as a demonstration of his pride in his Mexican Indian ancestors and their culture. He was passionately interested in the native art of Mexico, the creation of an indigenous modern artistic style of expression, and the depiction of the Mexican landscape. His most famous paintings and drawings are of the Valley of Mexico and the volcanoes of Popocatépetl and Ixtacihuatl. In these and other works, Atl combined traditional landscape painting with contemporary experiments with distortion of line and shape to create a unique, nationalistic form of expression.