Spanish-born Pompeyo Audivert migrated to Buenos Aires when he was eleven years old, in 1911. He specialised his artistic formation in engraving, mastering its technique to the point of becoming a central figure in the local artistic field. He also worked as an illustrator and one of his first important collaborations was his etching of the book Molino Rojo by Argentine poet Jacobo Fijman.
He displayed his work in numerous exhibitions, both in Buenos Aires, in venues such as the Asociación Amigos del Arte, and in other major Argentine cities such as Rosario, La Plata and Mendoza. Furthermore, he was a frequent participant of the Salón Nacional, where he was awarded two prizes for his engravings (one in 1934 and the other in 1942). His career coincided with a period when the art of engraving was flourishing, with artists turning to the technique as a medium of protest and denouncement. The 1930s and 1940s were characterised by an increasing overlapping of the political and social context with the artistic sphere, and Audivert’s graphic explorations were no exception. Combined with an “orthodox bias of the discipline” (Dolinko 2014, 173), his oeuvre was shaped by solid figures, sharp lines and black and white compositions that privileged the depiction of social imaginaries and protest images. One critic defined him as “being in that difficult category of artists who produce storms” (Cuadrado 1944, 5).
His closest network of fellow artists was made up of Spanish exiles Manuel Colmeiro and José Planas Casas and the Argentinian Demetrio Urruchúa, with whom he shared studios in the southern part of the city of Buenos Aires. Moreover, his activism involved him in the publication of covers for Unidad, a magazine edited by the antifascist Agrupación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores (AIAPE), along with the development of images of struggle against Nazism and fascism. One of his engravings entitled Unidad was included in the cover of the magazine’s first number.
After a period spent living in Mexico (between 1942 and 1944) and Paris (between 1944 and 1950), he dedicated the latter part of his life to teaching at the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Universidad de Tucumán and exhibiting his work worldwide. He died in Buenos Aires in 1977.