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Lot Essay
We are grateful to the Proyecto Armando Reverón for their assistance in confirming the authenticity of this work--to be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of the artist.
The consummate insider-outsider artist, Reverón ranks as one of Latin America's most radically original and idiosyncratic modernists, his paintings astonishing and uncanny studies of light, landscape, women and dolls. The academically trained son of a wealthy Caracas family, he withdrew from society beginning in the 1920s, building a compound that he called El Castillete ("The Little Castle") in the coastal fishing village of Macuto and later surrounding himself with a harem of life-sized dolls. Reverón entertained day-tripping visitors at El Castillete beginning in the early 1930s, playing to primitivist fantasy and projection by dressing himself, his companion Juanita, and sometimes his guests in loincloth and feathers. In the persona of what John Elderfield, curator of the major Reverón retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, has named the "White Indian," Reverón painted native women--"Daughters of the Sun," he called them --in differing guises over the remainder of his career.
The 1940s marked Reverón's last decade of steady and significant work, and his final reprise of figuration is characterized by a shift in medium and the looming presence of the muñecas, dolls sewn from burlap sacks and treated as both models and family members. Following a schizophrenic episode in 1945, Reverón returned to El Castillete and reemerged two years later as a figurative artist, abandoning landscape painting and beginning to draw. Worked with a mix of charcoal, pastels, and chalks, his drawings from the later 1940s focus almost exclusively on female subjects, represented variously as dancers and as Indians and modeled, all but interchangeably, on Juanita and the family of muñecas. "The pictorial evidence suggests that the muñecas were created, in the first place, for their usefulness to a process of imaginative, pictorial representation of the female figure before accruing intrinsic value as representations themselves," Elderfield has observed. But considering Juanita's recollection that Reverón worked from the dolls and then attempted to give them her skin, he acknowledges: "We cannot be entirely sure which works were done from live models and which from muñecas. This is especially true of some drawings of the 1940s, in which identity confusion is their very theme."[1] This confusion of identities is doubly underscored in the present work, in which the three figures elide the boundaries between woman and doll, Indian and faux-naïf.
Strangely and disarmingly fetishistic, Las indias is composed of a central figure dressed in a headdress and necklace, her partially sketched body surrounded by two additional figures that emerge, eerily, from the background. With darkly penetrating, wide-open eyes, two of the figures hold an unflinching, unreadable gaze, their fixed expressions and garishly colored-in features suggesting their identities as muñecas dressed up in Indian garb. "I have liked the world of the fantastic, of dolls that are like living creatures but do not speak," Reverón explained in 1953 in his only interview. "They only look. It is I who speak. They look at me and listen to me."[2] As passive projections of Reverón's inner anima, the drawn muñecas of Las indias embody a tantalizingly liminal space between the animate and the inanimate, here amplified by the addition of an indigenous costume not unlike those donned, whether ironically or madly, by the artist himself. The frenzied charcoal drawing, accented with bold scrawls of color, imparts an agitated intensity to the three "Indians," their blurred faces and indeterminate bodies compounding the ontological confusion of their uncanny, doubled, and projected selves.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) John Elderfield, "The Natural History of Armando Reverón," in Armando Reverón (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 59.
2) Armando Reverón, "Through his Own Eyes," in Armando Reverón, 226.
The consummate insider-outsider artist, Reverón ranks as one of Latin America's most radically original and idiosyncratic modernists, his paintings astonishing and uncanny studies of light, landscape, women and dolls. The academically trained son of a wealthy Caracas family, he withdrew from society beginning in the 1920s, building a compound that he called El Castillete ("The Little Castle") in the coastal fishing village of Macuto and later surrounding himself with a harem of life-sized dolls. Reverón entertained day-tripping visitors at El Castillete beginning in the early 1930s, playing to primitivist fantasy and projection by dressing himself, his companion Juanita, and sometimes his guests in loincloth and feathers. In the persona of what John Elderfield, curator of the major Reverón retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, has named the "White Indian," Reverón painted native women--"Daughters of the Sun," he called them --in differing guises over the remainder of his career.
The 1940s marked Reverón's last decade of steady and significant work, and his final reprise of figuration is characterized by a shift in medium and the looming presence of the muñecas, dolls sewn from burlap sacks and treated as both models and family members. Following a schizophrenic episode in 1945, Reverón returned to El Castillete and reemerged two years later as a figurative artist, abandoning landscape painting and beginning to draw. Worked with a mix of charcoal, pastels, and chalks, his drawings from the later 1940s focus almost exclusively on female subjects, represented variously as dancers and as Indians and modeled, all but interchangeably, on Juanita and the family of muñecas. "The pictorial evidence suggests that the muñecas were created, in the first place, for their usefulness to a process of imaginative, pictorial representation of the female figure before accruing intrinsic value as representations themselves," Elderfield has observed. But considering Juanita's recollection that Reverón worked from the dolls and then attempted to give them her skin, he acknowledges: "We cannot be entirely sure which works were done from live models and which from muñecas. This is especially true of some drawings of the 1940s, in which identity confusion is their very theme."[1] This confusion of identities is doubly underscored in the present work, in which the three figures elide the boundaries between woman and doll, Indian and faux-naïf.
Strangely and disarmingly fetishistic, Las indias is composed of a central figure dressed in a headdress and necklace, her partially sketched body surrounded by two additional figures that emerge, eerily, from the background. With darkly penetrating, wide-open eyes, two of the figures hold an unflinching, unreadable gaze, their fixed expressions and garishly colored-in features suggesting their identities as muñecas dressed up in Indian garb. "I have liked the world of the fantastic, of dolls that are like living creatures but do not speak," Reverón explained in 1953 in his only interview. "They only look. It is I who speak. They look at me and listen to me."[2] As passive projections of Reverón's inner anima, the drawn muñecas of Las indias embody a tantalizingly liminal space between the animate and the inanimate, here amplified by the addition of an indigenous costume not unlike those donned, whether ironically or madly, by the artist himself. The frenzied charcoal drawing, accented with bold scrawls of color, imparts an agitated intensity to the three "Indians," their blurred faces and indeterminate bodies compounding the ontological confusion of their uncanny, doubled, and projected selves.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) John Elderfield, "The Natural History of Armando Reverón," in Armando Reverón (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 59.
2) Armando Reverón, "Through his Own Eyes," in Armando Reverón, 226.