Despite his success, he never forgot his Spanish roots, with an exhibition in Madrid in 1971 and a return to his hometown of Montoro in 1981, after the death of Franco.
[2][3] In 1927, he moved to Madrid to study at the Escuela de Bellas Artes there, meeting José Planes, Enrique Climent, Arturo Souto and Francisco Mateos, with whom he formed the Artistas Independientes group.
[3] With the rise of Franco, he fled Spain, winding up in concentration camps in Argelès-sur-Mer and Brand, experiences represented in the later published Diez aguafuertes.
[4] Lázaro Cárdenas and a list of artists and intellectuals worked to bring him as an exile to Mexico City in 1939.
[5] In the 1960s, Spanish cinematographers petitioned to let him back in the country to see his aging parents, but by the time he could do so, his father had died and his mother did not recognize him.
[4] In 1981, after the death of Franco, Rodríguez Luna was able to return permanently to Spain, settling back in his hometown of Montoro, where he donated paintings to start a museum in his name.
[1] That same year, Rodríguez Luna received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which led to a major exhibitions in Washington and in New York.
[5] Luis Cardoza y Aragón stated that the “… carries the model inside himself and he transcends it sin such a way that it takes form as a fiction which is more real than reality itself.”[1] He was one of the first artists in Spain to embrace the European trends of the 1920s, with his early work influenced by Surrealism and Expressionism .
[1][4] Works from the height of his career in the 1940s and 1950s show a lyrical sense, with colors such as grays, blacks, blues and whites dominant.