Xul Solar was the adopted name of Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari (14 December 1887 – 9 April 1963), an Argentine painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor of imaginary languages.

Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari was born in San Fernando, Buenos Aires Province, to a cosmopolitan family.

[citation needed] During the years of the war, he struck up what was to be a lifelong friendship with Argentine artist Emilio Pettoruti, then a young man living in Italy and associated with the futurists.

The first name reflected light, or lux, spelled backwards; the last, his maternal surname without the 'i,' was the sun itself.During the years that followed he continued his travels, extending his orbit to Munich and Hamburg.

He also struck up an acquaintance with British occultist Aleister Crowley and his mistress Leah Hirsig who held high hopes for his discipleship, but later that year he returned to Buenos Aires, where he promptly became associated with the avant garde "Florida group" (a.k.a.

He also invented a "Pan Lingua", which aspired to be a world language linking mathematics, music, astrology and the visual arts, an idea reminiscent of Hermann Hesse's "glass bead game".

[4] He and Borges had common interests in German expressionistic poetry, the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Blake, and Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism and the I Ching.

One of his early works in what would become his signature format, Entierro (Burial) demonstrates the confluence of Xul's internal thoughts and external influences.

[1] His writings at the time reveal a profound desire for creative expression, and a kind of angst caused by the profusion of ideas and thoughts he entertained, "Dazzling light, colors never seen, harmonies of ecstasies and of hell, unheard-of sounds, a new beauty that is mine… If my damaging sorrows are due to labor in childbirth, I am pregnant with an immense, new world!"

[1] Author Mario H. Gradowczyk describes Xul at this point in his life as "a visionary rabidly opposed to the canons reigning in the Buenos Aires of his time".

[1] Like other artistically inclined people of his generation, Xul sought to study in Europe, and settled for a time in Paris while it was an epicenter for avant-garde art.

[1] The artistic canons that Gradowczyk refers to were propagated by the official Argentine art institutions, which favored visual representations associated with national icons.

[1] Painters like Carlos P. Ripamonte, Cesáreo Bernaldo de Quirós, and Fernando Fader extolled images of pampas landscapes and rural gaucho culture.

[6] The arrival of Spanish intellectuals such as José Ortega y Gasset and Eugenio d'Ors created a new discourse around art that was disseminated among writers and artists working toward an aesthetic modernity.

The path twists and turns, and the doors cut into the mountainsides represent the stages, and possible moments of being waylaid, as one endeavors spiritually.

[1] Gradowczyk posits that "Xul reached his highest point of artistic expressivity in these ascetic paintings whose theme corresponded to that anguishing reality".

[7] Nearly fifty years later, his widow, Micaela (Lita) Cadenas established the Fundación Pan Klub, based on the original precepts set by Xul during his lifetime.

The museum exhibits works that Xul selected for the Pan Klub, as well as houses objects, sculptures, and the documents compiling his personal archive.

I am creator of twelve painting techniques, some of them surrealist, and others that transpose a sensory, emotional world on to canvas, and that will produce in those that listen a Chopin suite, a Wagnerian prelude, or a stanza sung by Beniamino Gigli.

In spite of so much confusion, there exists a well-defined tendency toward simplicity of means, toward clear and solid architecture, toward the pure plastic sense that protects and accents abstract meanings of line, mass, and color, all within a complete liberty of subject and composition… Let us admit, in any case, that among us now – if mostly still hidden – are many or all of the seeds of our future art, and not in museums overseas, and not in the homes of famous foreign dealers.

Because the wars of independence for our America are not yet over…"-Excerpted from an article written in anticipation of Emilio Pettoruti's first Buenos Aires exhibition for the magazine Martín Fierro, 9 October 1924