Art and History at the Banco popular dominicano visual arts collection
of the masters of modern art and emerging youth…. Anyway, as the saying goes: «There is plenty of fabric where to cut» in the extraordinary collection of the Banco Popular, amassed during half-century history of sustained patronage. In our case, the argumentative gaze of a Dominican art historian, does not consist of a sequential tracing of generations in ascending and successive periods, but in the perspective that allows us to discern those generations based on the specificities of the works of different creators in differentiated contextual periods. With our selective perspective we aim to demonstrate that there is a relationship between artists, created works, history and the treasures of Banco Popular, from the precursory representation of a 1900s icon, «The Moor» by Arturo Grullón, synchronizing later on the decade of 1920, where the youthful self-portrait of Morel Yoryi heralds a modern painter with distinct works during his productions from 1930 to 1979, the date of his death. We don’t visualize this master’s paintings in a single or unique gaze with generational inscription in the third decade of the twentieth century, but in relation to works by other artists who, like him, expand the topics or reorient the discursive styles, as in the cases of Celeste Woss y Gil, Hernández Ortega, Guillo Pérez, Ada Balcácer… This way we find generational interrelationships and pronounced dissent between established teachers and emerging artists, and from the emblematic works of each other. With this visual dialogue, we try to demonstrate the dialectic plurality as well as the unity, recognizing the overall flavour of Dominican art that recreates the landscape and the native population, forest and flora, racial distinctions, still life and many signs of our antillanía or Caribbeaness. Dominican Republic ‘s art is a creation tree with many branches, blooms, seeds, sprouts and a wide shadow that does not block the tropical light, nor suppresses the hurricane winds, neither the ineffable time of our national life. 350