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Lot Essay
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Fundación Guayasamín signed by Pablo Guayasamín, dated 8 April 2020.
Born in Rosario, Argentina, Israel Drapkin (1906–1990), was a criminologist and physician who pioneered criminological studies in Latin America. In 1936 he established the first Criminological Institute in Chile, and in 1950 the chair of criminology at the University of Chile. He advised on the establishment of other national institutes of criminology, particularly in Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Mexico. Drapkin settled in Israel in 1959 and established the chair of criminology and the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University.
During his frequent travels to Latin America, including the city of Quito he befriended the Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamín and his family. It was during one such visit to the artist’s home in Quito in May 1967, that Drapkin commissioned the present lot after seeing a similar painting of a violinist in the artist’s studio. Guayasamín painted just two violinists, the present lot and the aforementioned painting which remains in the collection of the artist’s estate in Quito.
“Oswaldo Guayasamín, whose art springs from the earth and the people, is not merely an artist who draws on the past, the traditions and the civilization of Ecuador,” Federico Mayor, former Director-General of UNESCO, once observed. “His paintings are the expression and symbol of the universal American who has turned art into the tool of solidarity amongst men.”1 The eldest of ten children, Guayasamín graduated from Quito’s Escuela de Bellas Artes in 1941 and drew early acclaim for his defiant, emotional images of an oppressed and tragic humanity. His searing portrayals of indigenous subjects, drawn from the working classes of the Americas and exemplified in his early series, Huacayñán (“Trail of Tears”), belong within the expressionist lineage of El Greco, Goya, Picasso, and the great Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, with whom he spent time in 1943. In the wake of travel to Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, Guayasamín’s work became more expressly polemical, castigating imperialist exploitation and brutality across the twentieth century. These drawings and paintings defined his epic, decades-long cycle, La edad de la ira (“Age of Anger”), registering the cruelties of the human condition and the universality of rage, unrest, and alienation.
The Violinist emanates the stark, visceral intensity characteristic of Guayasamín’s Age of Anger series, to which it belongs. Skeletal and ashen, the body of its eponymous subject is compressed in the narrow, vertical composition, its spindly frame bent in pinched, uncomfortable angles. His posture anticipates that of the defeated, slumping figures portrayed in La espera VIII and La espera X (1968-69), who rest their heads in their hands, their wait interminable. But here the violin—a brilliant orange interlude within the artist’s typically limited, grisaille palette—suggests a lyrical respite from the miseries of modern servitude. The player cradles his head against the curved frame of his instrument; four bony fingers, eerily elongated and disembodied, wrap around the neck of the violin. His gnarled, oversized hands, a leitmotif of Guayasamín’s work, here convey not only the age-old abuses of labor, but the liberating means of musical expression, as well.
Guayasamín learned to play the guitar from his mother, and his noted sensibility to both classical and Latin American music provides rare glimpses of joy, as in The Violinist, as well as expressive visual cadence. “Rhythm is immediately noticed in his work,” Claude Sabsay has remarked. “The artist himself looks for it, since he always listens to music while working. He chooses the adequate tune for his work, which is invariably repeated until the work is finished. In this way, the brush or knife ‘dances’ in the artist’s hand. Consequently, the work is rhythmic, in fact it almost transcends ‘sound’ too.”2 The syncopation of song is mirrored here in a kind of modified, seated contrapposto: the violinist’s body frames the instrument in a series of subtle angles, rising from long, slanting tibiae to the skeletal torso and clavicle to the tilted, ovoid head. The wiry lines of the bow echo the graphic rendering of the rib cage, whose scrawled bones are counterbalanced by the fingers of the left hand, their placement dramatically low.
“Each painting is a finished work of the series,” Guayasamín declared of the Age of Anger, which ultimately encompassed more than 250 paintings. “But taken together they form a whole,” he explained. “As the viewer passes from one painting to another, he sees each as connected with the others and gets an integral picture.” Like his occasional depictions of guitar players, The Violinist suggests a reprieve from the brutal and mundane oppressions of the world, its pensive subject permitted an exhilarating, if ephemeral freedom of expression. “Its underlying message is the tragedy of people in the modern bourgeois world,” Guayasamín insisted of the series. “I will end that cycle only when violence is ended,” he pronounced in the early 1980s, with the grudging acknowledgement: “But it is not all that easy to accomplish. For that reason, as long as I live I shall go on painting canvases.”3
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Born in Rosario, Argentina, Israel Drapkin (1906–1990), was a criminologist and physician who pioneered criminological studies in Latin America. In 1936 he established the first Criminological Institute in Chile, and in 1950 the chair of criminology at the University of Chile. He advised on the establishment of other national institutes of criminology, particularly in Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Mexico. Drapkin settled in Israel in 1959 and established the chair of criminology and the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University.
During his frequent travels to Latin America, including the city of Quito he befriended the Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamín and his family. It was during one such visit to the artist’s home in Quito in May 1967, that Drapkin commissioned the present lot after seeing a similar painting of a violinist in the artist’s studio. Guayasamín painted just two violinists, the present lot and the aforementioned painting which remains in the collection of the artist’s estate in Quito.
“Oswaldo Guayasamín, whose art springs from the earth and the people, is not merely an artist who draws on the past, the traditions and the civilization of Ecuador,” Federico Mayor, former Director-General of UNESCO, once observed. “His paintings are the expression and symbol of the universal American who has turned art into the tool of solidarity amongst men.”1 The eldest of ten children, Guayasamín graduated from Quito’s Escuela de Bellas Artes in 1941 and drew early acclaim for his defiant, emotional images of an oppressed and tragic humanity. His searing portrayals of indigenous subjects, drawn from the working classes of the Americas and exemplified in his early series, Huacayñán (“Trail of Tears”), belong within the expressionist lineage of El Greco, Goya, Picasso, and the great Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, with whom he spent time in 1943. In the wake of travel to Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, Guayasamín’s work became more expressly polemical, castigating imperialist exploitation and brutality across the twentieth century. These drawings and paintings defined his epic, decades-long cycle, La edad de la ira (“Age of Anger”), registering the cruelties of the human condition and the universality of rage, unrest, and alienation.
The Violinist emanates the stark, visceral intensity characteristic of Guayasamín’s Age of Anger series, to which it belongs. Skeletal and ashen, the body of its eponymous subject is compressed in the narrow, vertical composition, its spindly frame bent in pinched, uncomfortable angles. His posture anticipates that of the defeated, slumping figures portrayed in La espera VIII and La espera X (1968-69), who rest their heads in their hands, their wait interminable. But here the violin—a brilliant orange interlude within the artist’s typically limited, grisaille palette—suggests a lyrical respite from the miseries of modern servitude. The player cradles his head against the curved frame of his instrument; four bony fingers, eerily elongated and disembodied, wrap around the neck of the violin. His gnarled, oversized hands, a leitmotif of Guayasamín’s work, here convey not only the age-old abuses of labor, but the liberating means of musical expression, as well.
Guayasamín learned to play the guitar from his mother, and his noted sensibility to both classical and Latin American music provides rare glimpses of joy, as in The Violinist, as well as expressive visual cadence. “Rhythm is immediately noticed in his work,” Claude Sabsay has remarked. “The artist himself looks for it, since he always listens to music while working. He chooses the adequate tune for his work, which is invariably repeated until the work is finished. In this way, the brush or knife ‘dances’ in the artist’s hand. Consequently, the work is rhythmic, in fact it almost transcends ‘sound’ too.”2 The syncopation of song is mirrored here in a kind of modified, seated contrapposto: the violinist’s body frames the instrument in a series of subtle angles, rising from long, slanting tibiae to the skeletal torso and clavicle to the tilted, ovoid head. The wiry lines of the bow echo the graphic rendering of the rib cage, whose scrawled bones are counterbalanced by the fingers of the left hand, their placement dramatically low.
“Each painting is a finished work of the series,” Guayasamín declared of the Age of Anger, which ultimately encompassed more than 250 paintings. “But taken together they form a whole,” he explained. “As the viewer passes from one painting to another, he sees each as connected with the others and gets an integral picture.” Like his occasional depictions of guitar players, The Violinist suggests a reprieve from the brutal and mundane oppressions of the world, its pensive subject permitted an exhilarating, if ephemeral freedom of expression. “Its underlying message is the tragedy of people in the modern bourgeois world,” Guayasamín insisted of the series. “I will end that cycle only when violence is ended,” he pronounced in the early 1980s, with the grudging acknowledgement: “But it is not all that easy to accomplish. For that reason, as long as I live I shall go on painting canvases.”3
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park