He was often seen on the streets of Oaxaca city, recognizable by his disheveled gray hair and bushy beard, his white peasant blouse and leather sandals.MaestroFrancisco Toledo, 79, slight of frame but a colossus of Mexican culture, died Thursday, his family announced, igniting global tributes for a man whose singular depictions of animals and people — including self-portraits of his deeply etched, haunted visage — won international acclaim.
He led the fight against the building of a McDonald’s franchise in the historic center of Oaxaca, his adopted home, and railed against sales of genetically engineered corn. He spearheaded protests against a planned convention center on a Oaxaca mountain and the conversion of a former Catholic convent into a luxury hotel.
Despite declining health in recent years, Toledo worked until well into his 70s, returning to the theme of the wave of lawlessness sweeping across his homeland. Carlos Monsivais, the late Mexican writer, described his friend’s style as “neither primitive or civilized,” an amalgam of themes of modernity and pre-Hispanic Mexico, said the newspaper Reforma.
Buoyed by early success, including an exhibit in Texas, Toledo left Mexico as a young man to study art in Paris, becoming a protégé of a pair of Mexican cultural icons, Octavio Paz, the Nobel laureate, and Rufino Tamayo, the artist and fellow Oaxacan.