P7311
UNITED NATIONS
NATIONS UNIES
New York
Зc FOR
The Mural by Jose Vela Zanetti
located on the third floor, Conference Building,
United Nations Headquarters.
MAILING
IN U. S.
THE ARTIST
Jose Vela Zanetti born in Leon (Spain) 1913. Painted murals in Spain, Dominican
Republic (where his main works are located), Puerto Rico and Colombia. In 1951 he
received the Guggenheim Scholarship for Latin America. He is now Director of the
School of Fine Arts of the Dominican Republic.
Official United Nations Photo (Dept. of Public Information)
JOU
THE PAINTING
"This mural is an attempt to present the tension of modern man confronted with the
need for peace. The artist has used a series of symbols of our age: the shattered
family, man crying for peace, the march of the survivors of war, workers building a
new order under the aegis of the United Nations, and the quest for human rights.
These symbols culminate in the pyramidal composition of the family, in which a
man who has given up arms is sowing seeds in a generous soil. It is a work in
which forms and colours are left to speak for themselves, illustrating the feeling of
the artist that peace is, as Spinoza put it, not the absence of war, but a state of
mind."
- Jose Vela Zanetti
