Michel was born in the state of Colima to a wealthy and politically powerful family which owned large numbers of coconut palms, and supplied fruit to markets in Jalisco.
He was also associated with painters such as Rufino Tamayo, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Roberto Montenegro and Agustín Lazo, but he considered them “past their prime” and preferred the younger generations of artists.
[3] He was a fanciful and eccentric person, brown from time in the sun, carrying belongings in a bag and a string of pendants around his neck.
[1] His life remained economically and artistically unstable until the mid 1930s because of the lack of money or health issues, especially a tumor on his neck.
[1] Michel’s closest friends among Mexican painters during his lifetime included Juan Soriano, Manuel and Lola Alvarez Bravo, and Rufino and Olga Tamayo.
[6] Long after his death, the Museo de Arte Moderno held a retrospective and tribute to the artist in 1991, assembling the largest collection of his works for a showing.
It was established in 1996 and has a collection of over 1,000 works by artists such as Rafael Coronel, Carlos Mérida, José Luis Cuevas, Sofía Bassi, Alberto Gironella, Federico Cantú, Marcos Huerta and Juan Manuel de la Rosa along with other Colima artists such as Gabriel de la Mora, Rafael Mesina, Gil Garea, Jorge Chávez Carrilo and Gabriel Portillo del Toro.
However, Michel did not participate in this movement and was frequently disparage for being “too European.”[3][4] Nonetheless, his work was defended by art critics such as Jorge Juan Crespo, Margarita Nelken and writer Carlos Monsiváis .
[1] Michel’s artistic ideas came after his return to Mexico from France, studying the work of Diego Rivera, María Izquierdo, Rufino Tamayo, Agustín Lazo, Cézanne, Picasso and Chirico among others.
[1] His unique style for the time made him a forerunner to the Generación de la Ruptura, which reached its peak in the 1960s.