Manuel Ángeles Ortiz (Jaén, 1895 – Paris, 1984) studied in Granada at the School of Arts and Crafts and at the Academy run by José Larrocha. He then moved to Madrid to further his training at the Academy run by Cecilio Plá. A friend since childhood of Federico García Lorca, he was involved in many of the latter's artistic projects (Cante Jondo competition, literary gatherings at El Rinconcillo, journals, etc.).

In 1915 he held his first exhibition, sharing the rooms at the Centro Artístico y Literario in Granada with Ramón Carazo. Later he moved to Paris with Emilio Prados, taking letters of recommendation from Falla, which enabled him to make friends with Picasso, among others. (He subsequently provided a route for many others to contact Picasso, to whom he introduced Dalí, for example.) He went to live in Montparnasse, attending the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and joining the group of Spanish artists who were to form the Paris school. In 1926 he held a solo exhibition at the Quatre Chemins and became a leading member of the 1927 generation in the visual arts (it was not by chance that he appeared in Buñuel's La edad de oro). In 1933 he returned to Spain, where he reestablished his links with Lorca, joining La Barraca, and secured the position of art teacher at the Instituto Maragall in Barcelona. He made friends with Torres García, and planned an avant garde art centre in Madrid with him, supported by the minister Fernando de los Ríos, but the plan had to be abandoned when the war broke out. In 1939 he returned to Paris, and the following year, after the outbreak of the Second World War, he moved to Buenos Aires, remaining there for nine years.

He then returned to Paris, spent time with Picasso in Vallauris, and in 1955 went to Granada. He spent three months in Carmen Matamoros and, although he continued living in Paris, he returned at regular intervals to his first adoptive city, beginning a series of works inspired in themes linked to Granada, which were to be his main interest until the end of his life. In 1980 the Manuel de Falla Centre organised his first retrospective and the following year he received the National Award for the Visual Arts from the Ministry of Culture. In 1989 his remains were taken back to Granada and in 1996 the Government of Andalusia, the Reina Sofía National Museum and Art Centre and Granada Provincial Council held a major retrospective exhibition of his life and work. Currently Granada Provincial Council is cataloguing all the work of Manuel Ángeles Ortiz which it owns.

AA.VV: Granada de fondo: colección de arte contemporáneo. Diputación de Granada, Granada, Granada Provincial Council, 2003 (catalogue)