Max Aub
1903–1972 · Spanish-Mexican writer, also the creator of the invented painter Jusep Torres Campalans
Max Aub (Paris, 2 June 1903 - Mexico City, 22 July 1972) was a writer of Franco-German origin who grew up in Spain and spent the last decades of his life in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War. Although he is best known as a novelist and playwright, his relationship with painting is a distinctive part of his story and deserves attention.
The son of a German commercial traveller and a French mother of German-Jewish descent, he grew up in Paris in a bilingual household. When the First World War broke out, the family moved to Valencia, where he learnt Spanish quickly and where he later said he could not have written in any other language. He worked as a travelling salesman from 1920, which took him across Catalonia and into contact with the writers and literary circles of Barcelona. In 1928 he joined the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and began publishing avant-garde theatre and novels.
When the Civil War began he served as a diplomat in Paris, where he helped arrange the commission and purchase of Picasso's Guernica for the 1937 International Exhibition. He later worked with André Malraux on the film Sierra de Teruel. After the Republican defeat he went into exile in France, where he was interned in several camps, and in 1942 he reached Mexico, where he became a naturalised citizen and spent the rest of his life.
In Mexico he was intensely active in cultural life and took an unusual interest in painting: he invented the painter Jusep Torres Campalans, to whom he devoted a biography in 1958 and whose works he exhibited, so convincingly that critics took him for a real artist. His major work is El laberinto mágico, a cycle of six novels about the Civil War, including Campo cerrado, Campo de sangre, Campo abierto, Campo del moro, Campo francés and Campo de los almendros, the last of which many critics regard as his finest.
His legacy is kept alive by the Max Aub Foundation, founded in 1997 in Segorbe to study and promote his work, and by productions such as the 1998 staging of his play San Juan. Aub remains an essential reference for understanding the literature of the Republican exile.