Toward 20th-Century Venezuelan Art

Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros [ Notebook 3 ]

Toward 20th-Century Venezuelan Art Academicism and Imports Constructive Horizons: The Latin American Perspective Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Center for the Study of Modernism, University of Texas at Austin

Luis Pérez Oramas

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1. Champ de Mars, 1891. Oil on canvas, 61 x 76 cm. Private collection.

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2. Charlotte Corday allant à l’échafaud (Charlotte Corday on Her Way to the Scaffold), 1889.

Oil on canvas, 235 x 314 cm. GAN, Archivo CINAP

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Academicism and Imports It may seem unusual to begin a brief overview of the development of twentieth-century Venezuelan art by invoking images of two subjects seemingly alien both to our idea of the country and to its reality: the Eiffel Tower and the execution of Charlotte Corday.

At the 1889 World Exposition, Gustave Eiffel scandalized many when he unveiled his iron tower.Maupassant,for example,soon remarked that he liked to visit the EiffelTower because it was the only place in Paris from which one could not see it.TheTower, as is well known, came to symbolize the modern era; what is more, it preceded it as structural feat, becoming a constructive promise.The 1891 painting of the Tower by Arturo Michelena (1868–1898) (fig. 1) allows for a discussion of a whole segment of Venezuelan art that, because of the nature of its project and the strategies of its historical vision, also offered itself as modern promise, and, more precisely, as constructive promise—constructive in the not always accurate sense the term has in Latin America to refer to a particular form of abstract, geometric, rational art.

At that 1889 World Exposition commemorating the centennial of the French Revolution, the young Michelena, already renowned in Paris where he had lived since 1885, presented his version of the well-known subject of Charlotte Corday, Marat’s murderer, on her way to execution, as she leaves the cell where Jean-Jacques Hauer (1751–1829) has just

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finished painting her last portrait (fig. 2).1 The scene calls to mind Seneca’s anecdote, famous in antiquity, about the painter Protogenes depicting Prometheus as a dying slave whom he orders to maintain his pose just at the moment when the slave’s moans announce his imminent death.Though Michelena’s Charlotte Corday allant à l’échafaud (Charlotte Corday on Her Way to the Scaffold) did not achieve the fame of the nearby Tower, it was the work upon which the Exposition jury bestowed its gold medal.

After his last Parisian success with the 1891 Eiffel Tower painting, Michelena—the last of the great Venezuelan painters of the nineteenth century—returned to Venezuela. He was to die shortly thereafter. How can we forget, now, the work that would make him the most famous academic painter in his country, his Miranda en La Carraca (Miranda in the Carraca Prison) (fig. 3)? It portrays, in a dark cell of the Cadiz prison where he was to die, another wandering Venezuelan, General Francisco de Miranda—hero of the French Revolution, strategist of the battle of Valmy, plotter against Robespierre, mastermind, along with Antoine Quatremere de Quincy, of the fight against the Museum, friend of George Washington, precursor of South America’s independence, utopian believer in the 1 Hauer was known for this portrait of Charlotte Corday, now inVersailles, and for his painting La Mort de Marat (The Death of Marat), which was exhibited in the Salon of 1793. See E. Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays (Paris: Grund, 1976).

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“Colombeia” (a single South American republic that would include much of the continent).

We cannot explain the development of twentieth-century Venezuelan art without contemplating these academic paintings from the end of the nineteenth century.Where did our ideal of modernity originate? Certainly academic painting had no real following, but any discussion ofVenezuela’s modernartmustconsiderthediverseacademicstancestakenandimportations that occurred repeatedly throughout the twentieth century because these constitute the ideological core of the process of modernization.Modernity in Venezuela was established through a dynamic of journeys and returns to the motherland by artists who brought back with them the symbolic and technical devices of various academic schools and transplanted them with more or less success in the Venezuelan artistic milieu.

The title“Academicism and Imports”encompasses the diverse constellations of works by these artists who returned toVenezuela to introduce theoretical and practical artistic models imported from the world’s artistic centers.These models include the academic painting of the nineteenth century up to the neo-pop and neo-conceptual movements represented by artists such as Meyer Vaisman and Javier Téllez (see figs. 3 and 4). Not to be forgotten, of course,is theVenezuelan abstract-geometric and kinetic artists’complex and intense relationship with the historical models of several European abstract movements.

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Ar t u r o

M i ch e l e n a

3. Miranda en La Carraca (Miranda in the Carraca Prison), 1896. Oil on canvas, 196.6 x 245.5 cm.

GAN, Archivo CINAP.

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4. Una temporada en el infierno (A Season in Hell), 1997 (detail), Installation of six posters. CPPC.

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Michelena’s last painting, The Pantheon of Heroes (1898; fig. 5)—which I have always regarded as Venezuela’s last nineteenth-century work— is a pompier painting. It brings to an end and synthesizes that tradition of academic painting devoted almost entirely to the representation of historical events and military feats. As the title indicates, it depicts a funerary monument and, indeed, one could say it represents the tombstone of Venezuelan history painting. It can be linked to Michelena’s Charlotte Corday, the most accomplished self-referential painting—in my opinion, the only one—in nineteenth-century Venezuelan art. By making the historical subject of the moments before the heroine’s execution into a scene depicting the act of painting, the artist was signaling that painting—and specifically the act of portraying and depicting history—is the symbolic equivalent of an act of execution. Such acts therefore depend on a “funerary economy” of representation, a concept brilliantly elaborated upon in modern theory by, for example, Louis Marin in his texts on Philippe de Champaigne and Michael Fried in his book on Courbet.2 According to this concept, every portrait can be understood as a foreshadowing of its subject’s death—the subject’s “execution” by representation. An ancient tradition of moral reflection that goes back to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics postulates that a person’s ideal image can only be 2 Louis Marin, Pascal et Port Royal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 267–304, and Philippe de Champaigne, ou La présence cachée (Paris: Hazan, 1995), 85–123. See Michael Fried, Le réalisme de Courbet.

Esthétique et origines de la peinture moderne II (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 83–86; originally published as Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

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conceived once vital experience has ended, after death; to make a portrait is to make a premature death mask. As in the celebrated anecdote by Seneca about Protogenes, life can only be pictorially represented when its flow ceases. Thus the metaphoric meaning of these scenes from nineteenth-century Venezuelan painting could be applied to The Pantheon of Heroes; just as the scenes simultaneously represent funerary themes and problems of representation in art, so does Michelena’s last funerary work fulfill a double purpose: it portrays those who died for the cause of founding the country and, at the same time, it “executes” Venezuelan academic painting.

Although Michelena lived in France during the time of Cézanne, he took no notice of that other, newer form of “truth in painting.” He became, anachronistically, an academic artist, a pompier painter. Fifty years later, Jesús Soto, Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Omar Carreño, Marcel Floris would go to the sources of what they considered the “truth in painting” for their time: abstraction, serialism, repetition; the work of art as problem and manifestation of objective progress rather than as subjective expression.

Michelena’s work played a negligible role in the establishment of Venezuelan modernity; academicism, like all Venezuelan imports except kineticism, had no real following. Nevertheless, in his last painting he did produce a pictorial scene that exemplifies what in modern theory is called “pictorial absorption”: a scene that exists without the presence of

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Ar t u r o

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5. El Panteón de los Héroes (The Pantheon of Heroes), 1898. Oil on canvas, 135.3 x 168.9 cm. CPPC.

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6. Paisaje de Caracas (Caracas Landscape), 1943. Oil on canvas, 76 x 108 cm. Private collection.

spectators and thus “denies” their presence.3 As he fully assimilated the principles of the French academic tradition, Michelena may also have unknowingly taken in the axioms of an art that “denies” the presence of the spectator, making possible the idea of a viewerless painting—a painting that exists for a universal viewer, without subjectivity. If this is theoretically sound, Michelena’s painting, despite its lack of followers among Venezuela’s twentieth-century modernists, played an important role in the complex process through which the depiction of heroic deeds was replaced by a type of painting in which narrative forms no longer exist, where only space fills the canvas.

The Pantheon of Heroes was indeed the tombstone of history painting, not only because of its metaphoric, slightly kitsch quality, but also because its weighty Greco-Roman apparatus is set in a specific spot in the valley of Caracaswhere,inthebackground,behindtheheroicandpompierarchitecture, rises the form that would become the model and the axiomatic backdrop in painting after painting at the beginning of the twentieth century: Caracas’s essential landscape,Mount Ávila.Thus the last academic painting conceals, behind its ancient funerary apparatus, the birth of a protomodern type of painting of landscapes and spaces.The history of French academic painting inVenezuela came to an end, but the “funerary economy” of representation that was its greatest ideological legacy did not (see figs. 5 and 6).

3 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980)

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Pe d r o

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7. Desde una colina del sur (From a Hill South of the City) 1957. Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 124.5 cm.

GAN, Archivo CINAP.

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8. Dezplazamiento de un elemento luminoso (Displacement of a Luminous Element), 1954.

Mixed media on wood, 50 x 80 cm. CPPC.

The New Frontier: The Ávila as Problem Around 1912, the artists belonging to Caracas’s Círculo de Bellas Artes (Circle of Fine Arts) rebelled against the academicism of the late nineteenth century and proposed a freer, plein air manner of painting.

They were under the postimpressionist influence of the FrenchVenezuelan painter Emile Boggio, as well as of the Vienna Secession and Russian modernism through the émigré artists Samys Mützner and Nicolás Ferdinandov. The artists of the Circle of Fine Arts, which included such great twentieth-century Venezuelan landscape painters as Manuel Cabré (see fig. 9), Antonio Edmundo Monsanto, and Pedro Ángel González (see figs. 6 and 7), devoted themselves almost exclusively to depicting the valley of Caracas. Many focused on the Ávila, the great mountain that separates Caracas from the Caribbean coast, whose silhouette is omnipresent in the city.

Thus, beyond its value as geographical anecdote, beyond the modest history of Caracas’s modern landscape, the Ávila became a problematic motif in Venezuelan art. As an obsessive theme, it turned out to be a sort of model, perhaps a bit archaic but no less effective, of pictorial “repetition,” the first artistic rendering of what Soto would achieve consciously and decisively in the early 1950s (see fig. 8).

Though historical antecedents may be hard to find, if we are to look for them—if we are to think that something happened in Venezuelan

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9. El Ávila desde el Country Club (The Ávila from the Country Club), 1947. Oil on canvas, 80 x 120 cm. CPPC.

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art in the first half of the twentieth century; if we want to believe that Soto’s work, for instance, did not occur in a vacuum and cannot be explained solely in terms of one more import, one more instance of academicism—we must acknowledge that the landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century treated the silhouette of the Ávila as Manet treated Olympia or the scene of Emperor Maximilian’s death: as “a desensitized tooth,” “a monster of banal love,” in Georges Bataille’s words, according to a “principle of indifference.” With Mount Ávila as pretext, incessantly repeated on their canvases, these first modern painters would come to represent nothing that had a “discursive equivalent,” to represent in painting only that immense silhouette impossible to render in words or concepts.

It could be said, then, that while the great frontier of Venezuelan art at the end of the nineteenth century was the ocean that separated the country from Europe (and in a sense still does, sometimes dramatically and painfully), the art practiced by the Circle of Fine Arts established the Ávila as a new frontier and a new problem for Venezuelan art.

This new iconographic and symbolic frontier, however, was not set down solely by the artists of the Circle of Fine Arts, the so-called School of Caracas. The Ávila also works for us as a critical limit that encloses an interior space and points at the same time to a vast exterior space of representation because Armando Reverón (1889–1954), who belonged to the same generation as the artists of the

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10. Retrato de Casilda (Portrait of Casilda), 1920. Oil on canvas, 29.5 x 29.5 cm. CPPC.

Circle of Fine Arts, decided to settle on the coast on the other side of the mountain. His was a gesture of self-exclusion from the art practiced by his contemporaries, a stand of autorelegatio in insulam that rejected the very idea of the “city.” It was an eccentric act, which placed him at the border, in the margins. There on the other side of the Ávila, in its shadow, he opted for a different kind of painting, one situated at the limits of painting’s possibilities, at a point of exhausted vision in the face of Caribbean climate and light conditions—a light that defies representation.

Both Reverón’s art and his persona constitute a great challenge to the writing of a critical and theoretical history of modern art inVenezuela. He studied first at the Academy in Caracas and later at the Spanish Academy.

His teachers in Spain included Muñoz Degrain and José Ruiz, Picasso’s father, and he was influenced by such masters as Isidro Nonell, Ignacio Zuloaga,andAnglada Camarasa.Reverón began his work in a“nocturnal” postimpressionist style, which also revealed the influence of the Russian painter Nicolás Ferdinandov (see fig. 10).

Despite these crude forms of modernity assimilated in an unorthodox fashion by an eccentric and unpredictable young man, Reverón’s work took shape around 1925 as an unusual kind of painting that was the first manifestation of modern art in Venezuela. Reverón worked in self-exile, in his hut in Macuto. There is no indication whatsoever that

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11. Paisaje blanco (White Landscape), 1940. Oil on canvas, 65 x 88 cm. CPPC.

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he intended to be modern, or that he wished to paint in terms of the ever-present paragone that have led so many twentieth-century Venezuelan artists to seek to validate themselves and their work in comparison to European art and, since the 1970s, to art produced in the United States.

Reverón’s most surprising achievements were not motivated by a will to be modern, so we cannot understand his work as the outcome of a modern program or reduce it to a modern canon. In his art the landscape acts as a mirror for painting itself, as a pretext for a process of self-reflection that achieves seminal forms and figures. His desertlike paintings and absolute landscapes reveal the material conditions of painting: its planarity, its shapeless materiality, its “objectness.” Thus Reverón was the first to embody a kind of unintentional modernity—one that is perhaps distorted, certainly residual. Although Reverón’s was the first Venezuelan art that can be characterized as fully modern even in terms of the European paragone, it was the modern “residue” of a history that was—or seemed to be—entirely indifferent to its modern destiny.

The Ávila as frontier separated two models in Venezuelan painting that prevailed up to Reverón’s death in 1954. In Reverón’s art we find the desertlike figuration of an absolute, uninhabited, ghostly landscape, freed of any anecdotal or narrative form, homotopic—with the shadow of the Ávila as a ruin, the residue of a huge visual fire

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12. El árbol (The Tree), 1931. Oil and gouache on canvas, 64.5 x 80.5 cm. CPPC.

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13. Vista del Puerto de La Guaira (View of the Port of La Guaira), c. 1941.

Oil and gouache on burlap, 70.2 x 83.2 cm. CPPC.

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14. Vista de Caracas y el Ávila desde El Paraiso (View of Caracas and the Ávila from El Paraiso), 1917. Oil on canvas, 25 x 47.5 cm. GAN, Archivo CINAP.

(figs. 11–13). In the art of the painters of the Ávila, the monumental, tectonic, fractal obstinato of the mountain appears like a sort of labyrinth and stands as the symbolic image of Caracas. For these artists, the Ávila is a form of heterotopic immensity that no image can exhaust, no concept can grasp (fig. 14); painting, then, in an act that is tantamount to a process dealing with the sublime, can only endlessly repeat its form.

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The Modern Scene All of these early manifestations, this strange and belated ground of modernity, seem to point to a formal (even a formalist) destiny for modern Venezuelan art. Social and political realities were not consistently integrated with the modern stance, as in Mexico or Brazil. In addition, many early modern Venezuelan artists and intellectuals harbored an ideal of innocence. Through a sort of paradisiacal myth, they attempted to formulate the country as a pristine reality, a victim of its own history and blameless as to its anthropological sins of poverty and violence. As a result of this attitude they created an Arcadian pictorial and photographic repertoire of the national landscape.

This paradisiacal view of vast, uninhabited territories or ghostly cities with hardly a trace of human existence—along with their spectral obverse in Reverón’s version of a bacchanal, a primeval scene of melancholy bathers (fig. 15)—is the symptom, in the form of an iconographic repertoire, of Venezuela’s modern ideology. This is an ideology—perhaps even in the Marxist sense—characterized by two extreme outlooks: the idea of “endowment” and the idea of “promise.”

Venezuela’s modern humanism portrayed the country in terms of “innocence,” and as endowed with an abundance of natural riches— contrasting the historical possibilities of this endowment with the historical state of atavism in which the country found itself at the end

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15. Mujer del río (Woman of the River), c. 1939. Oil on canvas, 131 x 145 cm. CPPC.

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of the nineteenth century. “Chosen” by nature, “blessed” with natural resources, Venezuelans, according to this modern ideology, were the innocent victims of their own history. This estimation was to last well into the twentieth century, as can be seen in the characterization of oil, so abundant in the land, as the devil’s excrement. At the other end of the spectrum of Venezuela’s modern scene, and opposed to this idea of endowment—so problematic since it views nature as blessing, not as challenge, and history as suffering rather than as freedom’s task—we find modernity as promise of emancipation, which generated a messianic view of modernity.

Venezuela’s “nativism”—the pictorial and literary eulogizing of primitivism and indigenous life—was also, therefore, a part of the modern scene. However, this nativism constituted not a political but rather an anthropological version of the national ideology, as can be seen in the monumental murals that Francisco Narváez created in the late 1920s for the family of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. In these works, among the most beautiful and honorable of this kind, the “national” character is typified by its games, collective rites, and communal traditions (fig. 16).

For a long time it has been thought that this nativism was the opposite of Venezuela’s more explicit, declared modernity, and that the determination to achieve “universal modernity” embodied in the geometric abstraction of early modern works was at odds with the

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16. Joropo (folk dance) Toros coleados (throwing bulls down by their tails) Bolas criollas (creole ball game) Pelea de gallos (Cockfight) 1930. Oil on canvas, each 300 x 400 cm. CPPC

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nativist version of the national ideal. However, we cannot discount the fact that the two movements existed at the same time. The emblematic 1950s, during which Venezuela reached the highest level of prosperity in its history, has always been wrongly described solely as the era of great achievements in geometric abstraction and universal modernity as exemplified by the project of integration of the arts carried out by Carlos Raúl Villanueva in Caracas’s Ciudad Universitaria (University City). In reality, this was a period of two equally powerful movements: allegorical nativism, which the ruling dictatorship promoted as official ideology under the name “new national ideal,” and constructive modernity, which the dictatorship financed and used as a showcase for its own political prominence.

The University City of Caracas is an important key to understanding how both movements coexisted and were organized dialectically. Their confrontation, really more superficial than it seems, tends to hide the course of action through which they were channeled to form a unified process. In the end, the University City of Caracas was the place where this modern ideology split apart and was transformed, identifying it from then on exclusively with the forms of geometric abstraction.

Nonetheless, these two trends were most likely two facets of the same modern stance—a stance that was purposeful and liberating, programmatic, and at times even dogmatic. Nativism displays the idea of endowment at the base of this modern endeavor (fig. 17), while constructive abstraction announces and signifies the idea of promise.

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N a r va e z

17. Barutaima (Indian chieftain), 1947. Cumarebo stone, 173 x 60 x 56 cm. CPPC.

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At the heart of this promise lay the belief behind all founding fictions: that Venezuela would at last be integrated into the “universal time” of the rest of the world. Hence, the modern scene in Venezuela constituted the narrative framework for a tale of modernization.

Outside this framework, artists like Reverón and Bárbaro Rivas (fig. 18) or writers like Teresa de la Parra and José Antonio Ramos Sucre created a different modernity,one that was exempt from messianic connotations.I like to call it “residual” modernity because, though it can be characterized as modern, it was the result of processes that were alien to modernity. It could even be said that these processes were the symbolic remains of purposes far removed from the programmatic and canonical spirit that characterizes the accomplishments of Venezuela’s modern ideology.

Geometric abstraction and its later version, kineticism, are part of the history of modern voluntarism. Their insertion into the Venezuelan artistic context suffered the same pitfalls that besieged our academic movements and aesthetic importations. Geometric abstraction presented itself as a universal, meta-historic art, as the culmination (naively, at times) of progress in art; this position attests its participation in the messianic promise embedded in all of Venezuela’s modernization endeavors (figs. 19 and 20). Its deceptive opposition to figurative nativism did not prevent it from becoming one more “national style.” The public role of geometric abstraction during the

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B á r b a r o

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18. El teleférico de Los Naranjos (The Cable Railway at Los Naranjos), 1961. Duco on Masonite, 59.5 x 75.5 cm. CPPC.

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19. Fisicromía 21 (Physichromy 21), 1960. Mixed media on wood, 103.4 x 106.4 cm. CPPC.

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20. Pre-penetrable, 1957. Industrial paint on iron structure, 166 x 126.5 x 85.5 cm. CPPC.

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1960s and 1970s as the official art of the democratic government was nothing more than the continuation of the program set up by the dictatorial regime in order to achieve the appearance of a modern country. Hence, the allegorical art, vernacular and nationalistic, and the abstract constructive art that aspired to universality each played equivalent roles in this program of modernization. The virtues and limitations of abstract constructivism, its contradictions and achievements, its canonical structure and the subtle resistances that surfaced from its own ranks, its false enemies and its authentic counterfigures (among whom I would count Alejandro Otero and especially Gego) should occupy us for a long time (fig. 21). Only a critical review of Venezuelan art history that sets aside any demonizing and eulogizing would be able to enrich a controversial and fruitful discussion that would serve Venezuelan artists and their creations.

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G e g o 21. Dibujo sin papel (Drawing without Paper), 1984. Iron and copper assemblage, 25 x 25 x 20 cm. CPPC.

The Fundación Cisneros is committed to the future of LatinAmerica.Founded by Patricia,Gustavo,and Ricardo Cisneros in association with the Cisneros Group of Companies,the Fundación supports innovative community,cultural,educational, environmental,and public health programs,focusing on LatinAmerican concerns.

The CPPC,a collection of mostly modern and contemporary art with emphasis on the art of LatinAmerica,forms the principal visual arts program of the Fundación.

Its mission is to advance the art of our continent in the international arena, and to contribute to its proper critical and theoretical evaluation.

Founding President Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Executive President Peter Tinoco Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection Director Rafael A Romero D Assistant to Director Mariela Guilarte Curators Luis Pérez Oramas Ariel Jiménez Jorge Rivas Registrar William Parra Assistant Registrar, Management Betty Zambrano Assistant Registrar, Collection Gerardo Báez Installation Jaime Castro Registrar/New York Guillermo Ovalle Assistant Registrar /New York Daniela Montemayor Decorative Arts Collection Registrar Ingrid Melizán Education Coordinator Dianella Corrie

[Notebook 3] Toward20th-CenturyVenezuelanArt Academicism and Imports Lecture in the series Constructive Horizons: The Latin American Perspective, a research and art loan program sponsored by the Patricia PhelpsdeCisnerosCollection,theJackS.Blanton Museum of Art, and the Center for the Study of Modernism of the University of Texas, Austin.

Cover Manuel Cabré, El Ávila desde el Country Club (The Ávila from the Country Club), CPPC. Fundación Cisneros Project director Juan Luis Delmont Coordinator Kelsy Koch Editor Evelyn Rosenthal Translator Julieta Fombona Zuloaga Design Titulus, Gisela Viloria Photography Rodrigo Benavides, Peter Maxim Electronic prepress Imagen Color, L.C. Printing Gráficas Acea Caracas, May 2001 ISBN: 980-6454-02-2