New Exhibition Features Work of Legendary Argentinian Illustrator

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Issue Jul 01-31 2025: After scouring archives for over ten years, Cristina Santa Cruz and Jorman Gutiérrez, the curators of the new exhibition at Buenos Aires’ National Bicentennial House, have managed to gather roughly 200 original works by legendary artist Alejandro Sirio to showcase his legacy to the public in a first-ever event of this kind. The exhibition, entitled Alejandro Sirio and the Golden Age of Argentinian Graphic Art, traces the evolution of an artist whose work graced the pages of the magazines Caras y Caretas and La Nación, among other notable publications, during the first half of the twentieth century.

As reported by Celina Chatruc in La Nación of Buenos Aires, Sirio, whose real name was Nicanor Balbino Álvarez Díaz, emigrated to Argentina from his native Oviedo, Spain, in 1910. After arriving in the South American nation, he initially worked as a cashier, salesman, songwriter, and mural painter, before being discovered by the poet Julio Castellanos. At Castellanos’ prompting, he was invited to join the staff at the prestigious Caras y Caretas, where he was to publish work under the pseudonym that was to become his trademark. In 1924, he was promoted to the role of artistic director of the Sunday supplement at La Nación. His illustrations in Enrique Larreta’s La gloria de Don Ramiro (1929), for which he returned to Spain to observe firsthand key scenes from the novel, solidified his reputation as “one of the most refined and personal illustrators of the first half of the twentieth century.” 

According to the curators, “this selection of unpublished material reveals the complexity, sensitivity, modernity, and artistic daring of an artist who knew how to combine spirituality, literature, ornamental poetry, and graphic form in one single form of expression and provides a journey through an immense visual universe: from mystical fine lines and calligraphic flourishes to ornamental lettering…”

In 1948, one year after he received the Gold Medal at the First Annual Salon of Illustrators and became president of the Association of Argentinian Illustrators, Sirio published a book entitled From Palermo to Montparnasse, containing over 3,000 drawings, many of which reflected the influence of a trip he made to Paris in the 1930s, where he met such renowned artists as Pablo Picasso and socialized with the intellectual elite there.

Siro’s unrivalled “capacity to synthesize” was revealed in drawings he created to accompany poems in La Nación; such synthesis, Sirio claimed, did not mean drawing less, but rather drawing only what was right and necessary.