The Magic Forest

Carlos Mérida was a Guatemalan-born artist who became a major figure in Latin American modernism. He studied at the Instituto de Artes y Artesanías in Guatemala and, in 1910, moved to Paris, where he lived for four years and worked alongside artists such as Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and Amedeo Modigliani. Mérida later settled in Mexico, where he integrated European modernist styles with Latin American cultural and indigenous traditions, creating abstract, geometric, and figurative works across painting, muralism, ceramics, and drawing. He also taught painting and held exhibitions internationally.

While Mérida primarily focused on visual arts, he occasionally illustrated books. Notable examples include A Treasury of Mexican Folkways (1947), The Hungry Moon: Mexican Nursery Tales, and The Magic Forest (1948), a collaboration with Patricia Fent Ross. The Magic Forest tells the story of orphan twins Coco and Concha Perez and their encounters with elves and talking animals, featuring Mérida’s distinctive geometric and organic illustrations, which appear on the cover, endpapers, and throughout the book.

Mérida’s work remains held in major museums worldwide, and his lasting influence is particularly strong in Mexico, where he spent most of his life.