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Lot Essay
“I’m extremely satisfied as I see how I, all on my own, without any external inspiration of any kind, have worked along the lines of what will be the dominant trend of higher art in the future,” Solar wrote to his father in 1912. He had just arrived in Europe, where he would spend the next twelve years traveling between his mother’s family home in Zoagli, near Genoa, and the major artistic capitals of France, Germany and Italy. Self-described as “a painter, a utopian by profession,” Solar embarked on a spiritual journey that ranged across the occult sciences—the Kabbalah and the I Ching, astrology and tarot—in search of cosmic meaning and revelation.[1] He gravitated toward the mysticism and primitive abstraction of Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich-based artist group led by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and made contact with the magical fraternity Astrum Argentum, founded by Aleister Crowley, and with London’s Theosophical Society. “An esoteric and an occultist,” Solar charted a sui generis path between symbolism and expressionism during his European sojourn, curator Patricia M. Artundo has observed. “What’s more, his trip to Germany between 1921 and 1923 with Munich as the first stop, coincided with the establishment of Schwabing—known as the suburb of the new world—almost as a place of pilgrimage,” she continues. “This place was not only the point of encounter for theosophers, mystics, gnostics, taoists, buddhists, neo-buddhists but also for nihilists, unionists, bolsheviks and pacifists. Moreover, Xul’s move to Stuttgart sealed his decision to get closer to the founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner.”[2]
Accompanying Solar during his travels in Germany and intermittently elsewhere was his great friend and compatriot Emilio Pettoruti, who shared his expansive modernist vision and with whom he returned to Argentina in the summer of 1924. In the wake of the First World War, Solar’s interest in the occult took on increasingly social and regional dimensions, keyed to the spiritual unification of Latin America—the ultimate utopia—through his invention of New World language (Neocriollo and, later, Pan-Lengua) and iconography. “We are and we feel new people, old and foreign paths don’t lead towards our new goal,” he stated in a text dedicated to Pettoruti in 1923. “We can clearly see the urge to break the invisible chains (they are the strongest) that in so many fields reduce us to a COLONY, the great LATIN AMERICA with 90 million inhabitants. . . . To this tired world, let’s contribute a new meaning, a more varied life and a higher mission for our race which is in the ascendant. . . . Because we are an aesthetic race, with art—its mother, POETRY—we will start to say a new thing that is ours and ours alone.”[3] Solar’s Pan-Americanism is conjured in a number of paintings from the 1920s, including the present Untitled, in which boats or dragons, adorned with the flags of Latin America, sail from the New World to the Old. He adapted this iconography in the watercolor Dragon (1927) and for a cover of Proa, the literary magazine founded by his friend Jorge Luis Borges and devoted to the advancement of the Argentine avant-garde. Implicit in the modernist and anticolonial vision they shared was a belief in the ascendance of the Americas as a cultural and artistic center, richly rooted in its indigenous heritage and, by virtue of its criollo hybridity, incipiently universal.
In Untitled, the transatlantic metaphor commingles with the mysticism of the sea, among Solar’s enduring fascinations. “In the midst of my agitation, my spirit flutters about, looking for a way to escape, I don’t know where to,” Solar wrote. “I hear the splintering waves from between the hum of the sea and I feel cooling breezes; but the nighttime fleets of wandering ships vanish when called; mounted stern giants go silently through distant deserts of air, hiding the tight-colored moon, but their lesser souls do not understand me; ghosts, veiled things fill the air, I cannot define them nor do they help me; keen hidden laughter and quick heard movements attract me fatally, while the fogs, like snakes, vanish.”[4] His dramatic evocation of the sea, full of magic and danger, is tempered in the tranquil waters of the present Untitled, the once fly-by-night boats given new, collective purpose as the bearers of Latin America’s autochthonous identity and revanchist designs. The flags of Argentina, at bottom center and upper right, are joined by those of Peru, Chile, and Brazil in a colorful show of hemispheric solidarity, adorning a small flotilla of boats that set sail under the cosmic light of the sun and the stars.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Accompanying Solar during his travels in Germany and intermittently elsewhere was his great friend and compatriot Emilio Pettoruti, who shared his expansive modernist vision and with whom he returned to Argentina in the summer of 1924. In the wake of the First World War, Solar’s interest in the occult took on increasingly social and regional dimensions, keyed to the spiritual unification of Latin America—the ultimate utopia—through his invention of New World language (Neocriollo and, later, Pan-Lengua) and iconography. “We are and we feel new people, old and foreign paths don’t lead towards our new goal,” he stated in a text dedicated to Pettoruti in 1923. “We can clearly see the urge to break the invisible chains (they are the strongest) that in so many fields reduce us to a COLONY, the great LATIN AMERICA with 90 million inhabitants. . . . To this tired world, let’s contribute a new meaning, a more varied life and a higher mission for our race which is in the ascendant. . . . Because we are an aesthetic race, with art—its mother, POETRY—we will start to say a new thing that is ours and ours alone.”[3] Solar’s Pan-Americanism is conjured in a number of paintings from the 1920s, including the present Untitled, in which boats or dragons, adorned with the flags of Latin America, sail from the New World to the Old. He adapted this iconography in the watercolor Dragon (1927) and for a cover of Proa, the literary magazine founded by his friend Jorge Luis Borges and devoted to the advancement of the Argentine avant-garde. Implicit in the modernist and anticolonial vision they shared was a belief in the ascendance of the Americas as a cultural and artistic center, richly rooted in its indigenous heritage and, by virtue of its criollo hybridity, incipiently universal.
In Untitled, the transatlantic metaphor commingles with the mysticism of the sea, among Solar’s enduring fascinations. “In the midst of my agitation, my spirit flutters about, looking for a way to escape, I don’t know where to,” Solar wrote. “I hear the splintering waves from between the hum of the sea and I feel cooling breezes; but the nighttime fleets of wandering ships vanish when called; mounted stern giants go silently through distant deserts of air, hiding the tight-colored moon, but their lesser souls do not understand me; ghosts, veiled things fill the air, I cannot define them nor do they help me; keen hidden laughter and quick heard movements attract me fatally, while the fogs, like snakes, vanish.”[4] His dramatic evocation of the sea, full of magic and danger, is tempered in the tranquil waters of the present Untitled, the once fly-by-night boats given new, collective purpose as the bearers of Latin America’s autochthonous identity and revanchist designs. The flags of Argentina, at bottom center and upper right, are joined by those of Peru, Chile, and Brazil in a colorful show of hemispheric solidarity, adorning a small flotilla of boats that set sail under the cosmic light of the sun and the stars.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park