Manuel Ángeles Ortiz (Jaén, 1895 - Paris, 1984) began his career in Granada where he met Federico García Lorca and Ismael González de la Serna. He continued his studies in Madrid and in 1919 he moved to Paris.

Ortiz came into contact with Picasso through Manuel de Falla. He contributed backdrops and costumes to performances of compositions by Falla, Erik Satie, and Francis Poulenc. He was often in the company of the aristocracy in Paris and the French Riviera, before returning to Madrid in 1932 in the midst of a personal crisis. Ortiz collaborated with the itinerant university theater group La Barraca, led by Eduardo Ugarte and Lorca. Together with Joaquín Torres García he designed an avant-garde art center in Madrid, which never materialized due to the Spanish Civil War. He was one of the founders of the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals in the Defense of Culture.

After the war, he was imprisoned at the concentration camp of Saint-Cyprien, which he was able to leave thanks to Picasso’s intervention. Exiled in Argentina, he would visit Falla and Torres García. In the 1960s he returned to Paris and resumed contact with Picasso and Paul Éluard, and began developing lyrical paintings inspired by the memories of his childhood and adolescence in Granada.