Felipe Cossío del Pomar (31 May 1888 – 25 June 1981) was a Peruvian painter and left-wing political activist. While in exile from Peru he founded an art school in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico in 1938. The school failed, but on his return in 1950 he founded the Instituto Allende, a university-level arts school that was still active in 2014. The short film "Felipe Cossio del Pomar in San Miguel de Allende", by Ezequiel Morones is in Youtube.
Felipe Cossío del Pomar was born on 31 May 1888 in the Piura city, in the north of Peru.
His family was connected to important figures in Peru, including Pío de Tristán, the last Viceroy and later foreign minister of the Peru–Bolivian Confederation.
He was also related to Paul Gauguin, the grandson of Flora Tristan.
He studied in Lima at the Colegio de Guadalupe, graduating in 1904.
He then began the study of Letters at the Universidad de San Marcos.
His parents wanted him to become a lawyer.
For this reason, in 1906 he sailed to Europe to study Law at the University of Leuven.
However, he chose to stay in Brussels and enrolled at the Free University to study fine arts for three years.
He then studied and worked as an artist in Paris until the beginning of World War I (1914–18).
He became part of the bohemian circle in Paris led by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse.
Cossío moved to the USA in 1917, where he was much in demand for his talent as a portrait painter in the modernist style.
After his return to Peru in 1921 he transferred to the Universidad San Antonio de Abad in Cuzco.
It was at this time that he became a friend of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre.
He obtained a degree of Doctor of Letters in 1922 with a thesis on the history of painting in Cuzco.
This was the basis for his book on colonial painting in Cuzco.
Haya de la Torre was deported by the Legufa regime in October 1923.
In 1924, the nascent Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) was forming its first sections in Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay. Cossío had returned to the USA by 1925, where he formed an important base of support for the APRA. Cossio visited Haya de la Torre in Mexico City, and while there met the painter Diego Rivera who introduced him to the forms and colors of traditional Aztec art.