Francisco Moreno Capdevila, painter, muralist, illustrator, and printmaker, was born in Barcelona, Spain, on January 18, 1926. At the age of thirteen-years-of-age, he immigrated to Mexico with his family as political refugees. Capdevila began his training in 1944 at the School of Artistic Initiation No. 1. From 1945 to 1948, he studied at the School of Book Arts in Mexico City where he was a student of Carlos Alvarado Lang. He later worked as an illustrator at the Printing Press of the Universidad Nacional Autómona de México (UNAM) between 1945 and 1950 and in the drawing workshop of the Ministry of Public Education between 1946 and 1955.

Between the years 1958 and 1979, Capdevila was a full professor at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas of the UNAM. He devoted much of his life to teaching and as a printmaker he worked in lithography, woodcut, silkscreen, engraving and etching. During his artistic career, Capdevila won eleven awards and honorable mentions, which included the First Prize for Engraving at the National Engraving Salon in 1955, the First Prize for Acquisition of Painting from the Salon de la Plástica Mexicana in 1962 and 1967, and the Gold Medal at the Third International Biennial of Art Graphics in Florence in 1972.

In 1987, a retrospective exhibition of Capdevilla’s work was mounted in the museum of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and, the following year, he became a member of the Academia de Artes in 1988. His work is represented in the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; the British Museum, London; and the Academia de Artes, the Museum nacional de la estampa, Ministry of Culture, and Museo Blaisten, Mexico City.

Francisco Moreno Capdevila died in Mexico City on May 3, 1995.