Lorenzo Homar, 1913–2004
The Father of the Puerto Rican Poster
Lorenzo Homar Gelabert was born on September 10, 1913, in Puerta de Tierra, San Juan. His parents, Lorenzo Homar Sampol and Margarita Gelabert Bruguera, were immigrants from Mallorca. In 1928, after his father ran into financial trouble, the family moved to New York. Homar left school young to help support the household, but he kept pursuing art on his own. In 1931, he enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied under the noted anatomy and figure-drawing teacher George Bridgman.
In the late 1930s, he entered Cartier in New York as a jewelry apprentice and later worked as a jewelry designer there for close to a decade. At the same time, he took night classes at Pratt Institute from 1939 to 1942. When the United States entered World War II, he served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945.
Afterward, he returned to Cartier and kept studying, this time at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where his teachers included Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo, Arthur Osler and Gabor Peterdi. Princeton today holds his Cartier jewelry drawings alongside his military drawings, prints, posters and carved blocks, so this New York period is unusually well documented.
That New York chapter matters. Homar did not return to Puerto Rico in 1950 as an inexperienced artist. He came back with training in fine art, commercial design, typography, precision craftsmanship and printmaking, all formed inside one of the major artistic centers of the United States.
The Pivotal Year: 1950
Homar returned to Puerto Rico in 1950 and presented his first solo exhibition that year at the Ateneo Puertorriqueño. That same year, he became one of the founding figures of the Centro de Arte Puertorriqueño, alongside artists including Rafael Tufiño, José Antonio Torres Martinó and Félix Rodríguez Báez.
The Centro was not simply an exhibition space. Its politics were specific. According to the ICAA's documentation of the period, its ideology drew on the nationalist thinking of Pedro Albizu Campos and on the example of the Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico, where Tufiño had studied.
The founders wanted to build an art identified with the Puerto Rican people, and they saw printmaking as the medium that could actually do that. A print could be made in the hundreds. A single painting could not.
That idea becomes fundamental to understanding Homar.
Art did not have to stay inside a gallery. A print could circulate. A poster could go up in the street. An image could reach thousands of people.
That is one of the central transformations in our larger story of Puerto Rican art.
DIVEDCO: Art Enters Public Life
In 1951, Homar joined the graphic section of the División de Educación de la Comunidad, or DIVEDCO, working under Irene Delano, who directed the print workshop. By 1952, he was directing the graphics section himself, a post he held until 1956. The following year, in 1957, he left DIVEDCO to organize the Taller de Artes Gráficas at the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña.
DIVEDCO was an extraordinary government cultural and educational project. It produced films, books, pamphlets, posters and other materials aimed at rural and economically disadvantaged communities. Its subjects included literacy, health, democracy, civic responsibility and community organization.
The posters, in other words, were not conceived as precious objects.
They were communication.
Many were printed in editions that could top 5,000 copies, then put up on walls, posts, trees and public gathering places to announce films and community activities.
Today these posters are collected by museums. Originally, many were meant to be seen outdoors by ordinary Puerto Ricans.
Homar's important DIVEDCO posters include:
Los Peloteros, 1951
Una voz en la montaña, 1951
Modesta, 1956
Modesta is particularly important. It advertised the DIVEDCO film of the same name, directed by Benji Doniger, part of a broader system in which a single community subject could generate a film, a book, a poster and a wall newspaper all at once.
The Plenas Portfolio
Another work worth serious attention is Plenas, made with Rafael Tufiño in 1954 and published in 1955, designed by Irene Delano with an introduction by writer Tomás Blanco. The portfolio combines letterpress and linocut and is now held in major collections including MoMA and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
What makes this especially valuable for our story is that Homar's own account of how the project started survives in his 1997 Smithsonian oral history interview.
In that interview, Homar says the plena had been part of the soundscape of his childhood in Puerta de Tierra, and that he was the one who suggested the portfolio to Tufiño. He remembered hearing plena around the San Juan docks and connected the project directly to those childhood memories.
That gives us something rare, not an interpretation built decades later by us, but Homar himself tying an important artistic project back to lived Puerto Rican experience.
His contributions to the portfolio include El Obispo de Ponce, Tintorera del Mar, Ay Lola Lola, La Guagua, Los Muchachos de Cataño and Ya Llegó.
Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña: Homar Becomes a Teacher of Generations
In 1957, Homar organized the Taller de Artes Gráficas of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, which he directed until 1973.
This may be the single most consequential part of his career.
At the Taller, Homar trained artists including Antonio Martorell, Myrna Báez, José Rosa, José R. Alicea and Luis Abraham Ortiz, among many others. Teresa Tió's scholarship goes so far as to argue that virtually every major Puerto Rican graphic artist who came after passed through the tradition he helped establish.
The Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico describes him as an initiator and central pillar of Puerto Rico's graphic tradition and credits him with training two full generations of Puerto Rican artists.
That is why calling him merely a “printmaker” undersells him.
Homar was an institution builder and a teacher. The Puerto Rican graphic tradition after Homar cannot really be separated from Homar.
More Than 500 Posters
EnciclopediaPR states that Homar produced more than 500 posters while working through the ICP, covering exhibitions, theater festivals, ballet, craft fairs, concerts, historical commemorations and other cultural activities.
Among documented examples are:
Exposición de Imaginería Popular, 1957
Gráfica de Puerto Rico, 1958
Myrna Báez: Pinturas, dibujos y grabados, 1962
Ramón Power y Giralt, 1963
Ballets de San Juan presentan María Tallchief y Frank Ohman, 1964
Alberto Peri, 1969
Homenaje a Julia de Burgos, 1969
Alfabetos de Lorenzo Homar, 1971
Homenaje a Neruda, 1971
The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns his 1958 poster for an exhibition of Puerto Rican graphic arts at the ICP, a silkscreen measuring approximately 29 by 19 inches, which Homar himself donated to the museum in 1962.
The Calligrapher
This is another part of the Homar story.
Typography gradually became image.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Homar was increasingly manipulating the form, placement, scale and color of letters until writing became part of the visual composition itself. Works such as Homenaje a Julia de Burgos, Alfabeto heroico and Homenaje a Neruda show this development clearly.
Homar discussed the relationship between calligraphy and poster design directly in his 1978 lecture, Algunas notas sobre el cartel.
This leads to an important distinction.
For Homar, letters did not simply explain the image.
Letters could become the image.
That eventually became central to his artistic identity. Princeton's holdings reinforce how seriously his calligraphic practice should be treated. His correspondence includes exchanges with the internationally influential type designer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf from 1967 to 1982.
His Philosophy of Craft
One quotation is particularly useful because it comes directly from Homar, in a 1960 statement preserved through Princeton's Graphic Arts Collection:
“Earning my living as an artist-craftsman, I try to honor my trade with the maximum of my efforts...”
He continues by saying that whether the task was a seal, an illustration, a painting or an engraving, everything happening around him was worth looking at closely.
There is another documented statement preserved through the ICAA:
“There is no vocation without discipline, and without discipline there can be no freedom in art, or elsewhere.”
That second statement may tell us even more about Homar because it connects directly to both his teaching and his extraordinary technical control.
The ICP Emblem
Homar also designed the emblem associated with the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Princeton identifies him as the designer of the ICP's first logo, and scholarship dates an important version of the emblem to 1956.
That earliest ICP insignia was not necessarily identical to the later, more familiar three-figure emblem, since the iconography evolved over time.
Recognition and International Reach
Homar's reach was not limited to Puerto Rico.
In 1956, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Three years later, he won the engraving prize at the Ateneo Puertorriqueño's Christmas Festival competition. In 1965, his print Unicornio en la Isla won a prize at the Leipzig Biennial in Germany, and in 1971, his illustrations for the book The Three Wishes were recognized at the Bratislava Biennial in Czechoslovakia.
He also exhibited internationally and taught graphic workshops outside the island. In 1970, he took part in the First Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano, and that same year the ICP presented a retrospective of his graphic work in connection with the Bienal.
Later retrospectives followed at La Tertulia in Colombia in 1972, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in 1978, Princeton University Library in 1983 under the title A Puerto Rican Master of Calligraphy and the Graphic Arts, and Pratt Institute Library in 1991. The University of Puerto Rico also awarded him an honorary doctorate.
His work is held today by institutions including:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museum of Modern Art
Smithsonian American Art Museum
National Gallery of Art
El Museo del Barrio
Princeton University Library
Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, among others
Princeton alone holds nearly 300 drawings, prints and commercial posters, including military sketches, Cartier designs, fine-art prints, caricatures, woodblocks and more than ninety international posters.
CLARIDAD and the Later Years
Homar's graphic work never separated cleanly from his politics.
For years, he contributed covers and illustrations to CLARIDAD, the newspaper aligned with Puerto Rico's independence movement, alongside artists including Carlos Raquel Rivera and, later, his own former student Antonio Martorell.
It is a reminder that the same hand producing calligraphic homages to Pablo Neruda and Julia de Burgos was also doing regular editorial work for a movement newspaper well into his later career.
A Recent Reassessment
A significant contemporary development took place in New York in 2025.
Poster House mounted Puerto Rico in Print: The Posters of Lorenzo Homar, on view from March 13 through September 7, 2025 and curated by art historian Alejandro Anreus.
The exhibition described Homar as a pioneering printmaker, designer, calligrapher, painter, illustrator and theatrical designer, and argued that few artists match his influence as a teacher of poster design and printmaking in Latin America. Poster House itself describes him as “the father of the Puerto Rican poster.”
The exhibition also places Homar within a broader history. His importance belongs not only to Puerto Rican art, but to the histories of graphic design, printmaking and Latin American art.
When Art Becomes Part of Everyday Life
What happens when art leaves the gallery and becomes part of everyday Puerto Rican life?
Homar is the artist through whom we can tell that transformation.
Campeche and Oller established extraordinary traditions of painting. The artists we have followed since gradually expanded what Puerto Rican art could represent. With Homar and the generation of the 1950s, something structurally different happens: art becomes reproducible, public, educational and widely distributed.
A poster might be tacked to a tree in a rural community.
A print might preserve the memory of plena.
A cultural institution might communicate through an artist's visual language.
A movement newspaper might carry his images to its readers every week.
And a workshop could teach the next generation how to do all of it again.
That is why Homar belongs here.
He did not simply make important works. He helped build the system through which Puerto Rican graphic art became a cultural force.
And there is a real tension underneath all of it. The institutions that employed Homar, DIVEDCO and the ICP, were part of a government pursuing rapid modernization while also constructing an official narrative of Puerto Rican cultural identity.
Homar built much of his life's work inside those institutions. He also spent decades contributing his art, unpaid and outside his institutional work, to CLARIDAD, a newspaper closely associated with Puerto Rico's independence movement.
Both things are true at once, and neither one cancels the other out.
