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Lot Essay
“All of my pictures have something to do with my background—with my homeland,” Morales reflected. “I was born in Granada, Nicaragua. In my art I constantly mix memories of different times and places in my Central American past and elsewhere but I always return—indirectly sometimes, but inevitably—to the theme of life in my native country.”1 Nicaragua’s preeminent painter and printmaker of the twentieth century, Morales frequently turned his gaze toward his homeland from parts abroad, conjuring the sensuality and, at times, the violence of the tropics. He studied at Managua’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes under Rodrigo Peñalba, a foundational figure within modern Nicaraguan art, and with grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Organization of the American States he rose quickly to international prominence. In 1959, he won the Ernst Wolf Prize at the V São Paulo Bienal, awarded to an outstanding Latin American artist. Morales found early success with expressionist paintings characterized by chromatic sobriety and the specter of death, notably in the series Guerrillero muerto and Tauromachia. By the late 1960s, he had evolved out of lyrical abstraction as his painting took a more metaphysical turn, exploring the reaches of “magical realism” in the landscapes, still lifes, and female nudes for which he is renowned. Morales received the Order of Rubén Darío, his country’s highest honor, from the Sandinista government in 1982, the same year that he settled in Paris and was named Nicaragua’s alternate delegate to UNESCO.
“Eventually Morales returned, symbolically, to his homeland,” critic Dore Ashton wrote in her introduction to his solo show at Galerie Claude Bernard in 1986, in which the present Adiós a Sandino was exhibited. “Perhaps the remote snapshots that emerge in the recent work arrived in his memory unheralded during all those wandering years—the one, for instance, of the guerrilleros led by Sandino who posed one day in 1934 for a group photograph across the street from his father’s hardware store.”2 Morales often recalled this childhood memory of the ragtag bandoleros, seen just before the assassination of Augusto César Sandino, the insurgent leader who had dauntlessly resisted the “gunboat diplomacy” of the United States. “I don’t know if it was that same night that they were killed but, in any case, it must have been very close in time,” Morales later remarked. “Hence the title,” he explained of the present work, “the adiós of a seven-year-old boy who didn’t know that he was saying goodbye to someone who, a few decades later, would be his hero among heroes.”3
The overthrow of the brutal Somoza dynasty in 1979 brought the Sandinistas to power, and their martyred namesake endures as a symbol of anti-imperial resistance and liberation. Morales began to address Sandino in his work around this time, notably in the monumental Mujeres de Puerto Cabezas (1984), which paid tribute to the women who assisted his first military incursion—the seizure of rifles and ammunition—in 1926. “I prefer to call them paintings of the uprising rather than the revolution,” Morales once clarified. “The real revolution will come to Nicaragua when peace has returned and life has become stable. Then a reconstruction can take place and true revolutionary change can come about in the country. This has, of course, already begun with the vast and effective forms carried out by the Sandinista government with which I am in complete sympathy.”4 Morales later reprised Adiós a Sandino in one of seven lithographs included in the portfolio, La saga de Sandino (1993), which cast his protagonist within a heroic narrative of Nicaragua’s modern history.
Sandino stands at the center of the present painting, flanked by five of his generals and tightly framed by an archaizing, architectural backdrop bathed in prismatic light and shadow. His jacket open, he clasps his hands behind him in a pose likely informed by a period photograph; his steady gaze, visible beneath the low brim of his trademark Stetson, and relaxed contrapposto convey a hard-gained and gallant composure. His men betray greater wariness, perceptible in the tanned, veiny hands that bend around the bandoliers at their waists and in the dusty red neckerchiefs knotted at their throats. Morales describes the group’s well-worn field uniforms in dim, variegated tones of ocher and brown; the flecked patina of their khaki garments, no less of the sidewalk and walls around them, is meticulously rendered with the fine, cross-hatched scrapes of a razor blade drawn across the canvas.
The surface effects created by this “elaborate, old-masterish technique” sustain a “quality of remoteness,” Ashton observed, whose “nostalgic dimness does not change the fact that most of these paintings refer to dreams that can only be dreamed by a man whose psychic inventory derives from Managua, Granada, Puerto Cabezas, Corinto. . . .” Like “his great poetic predecessor” Rubén Darío, she continued, “Morales deliberately sets out to evoke pastness, fusing his love for the past of his own art—a past that encompasses the great painting tradition of the West from Velásquez and the Flemish painters to Cézanne and Picasso—with his love for his personal past.”5 Indeed, Morales directly related the “dream-like Adiós a Sandino” to Francisco de Goya’s famous Third of May 1808 in Madrid (1814), a harrowing commemoration of the Spanish loyalists executed for their insurrection against the invading Napoleonic army, according to the art critic and historian David Craven. Morales sought to portray Sandino as “‘a figurative apparition already threatened’ with martyrdom,” Craven further noted, quoting the artist. “The result,” he concluded, “is a poignant glimpse of a figure who signifies an uneven historical process that, while interrupted, also has proved irrepressible.”6 The great romantic-tragic figure of Nicaraguan history, Sandino is here superbly immortalized on the eve of his capture and execution, his legend burnished by a mystical chiaroscuro awash with glimmers of turquoise and vermilion.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“Eventually Morales returned, symbolically, to his homeland,” critic Dore Ashton wrote in her introduction to his solo show at Galerie Claude Bernard in 1986, in which the present Adiós a Sandino was exhibited. “Perhaps the remote snapshots that emerge in the recent work arrived in his memory unheralded during all those wandering years—the one, for instance, of the guerrilleros led by Sandino who posed one day in 1934 for a group photograph across the street from his father’s hardware store.”2 Morales often recalled this childhood memory of the ragtag bandoleros, seen just before the assassination of Augusto César Sandino, the insurgent leader who had dauntlessly resisted the “gunboat diplomacy” of the United States. “I don’t know if it was that same night that they were killed but, in any case, it must have been very close in time,” Morales later remarked. “Hence the title,” he explained of the present work, “the adiós of a seven-year-old boy who didn’t know that he was saying goodbye to someone who, a few decades later, would be his hero among heroes.”3
The overthrow of the brutal Somoza dynasty in 1979 brought the Sandinistas to power, and their martyred namesake endures as a symbol of anti-imperial resistance and liberation. Morales began to address Sandino in his work around this time, notably in the monumental Mujeres de Puerto Cabezas (1984), which paid tribute to the women who assisted his first military incursion—the seizure of rifles and ammunition—in 1926. “I prefer to call them paintings of the uprising rather than the revolution,” Morales once clarified. “The real revolution will come to Nicaragua when peace has returned and life has become stable. Then a reconstruction can take place and true revolutionary change can come about in the country. This has, of course, already begun with the vast and effective forms carried out by the Sandinista government with which I am in complete sympathy.”4 Morales later reprised Adiós a Sandino in one of seven lithographs included in the portfolio, La saga de Sandino (1993), which cast his protagonist within a heroic narrative of Nicaragua’s modern history.
Sandino stands at the center of the present painting, flanked by five of his generals and tightly framed by an archaizing, architectural backdrop bathed in prismatic light and shadow. His jacket open, he clasps his hands behind him in a pose likely informed by a period photograph; his steady gaze, visible beneath the low brim of his trademark Stetson, and relaxed contrapposto convey a hard-gained and gallant composure. His men betray greater wariness, perceptible in the tanned, veiny hands that bend around the bandoliers at their waists and in the dusty red neckerchiefs knotted at their throats. Morales describes the group’s well-worn field uniforms in dim, variegated tones of ocher and brown; the flecked patina of their khaki garments, no less of the sidewalk and walls around them, is meticulously rendered with the fine, cross-hatched scrapes of a razor blade drawn across the canvas.
The surface effects created by this “elaborate, old-masterish technique” sustain a “quality of remoteness,” Ashton observed, whose “nostalgic dimness does not change the fact that most of these paintings refer to dreams that can only be dreamed by a man whose psychic inventory derives from Managua, Granada, Puerto Cabezas, Corinto. . . .” Like “his great poetic predecessor” Rubén Darío, she continued, “Morales deliberately sets out to evoke pastness, fusing his love for the past of his own art—a past that encompasses the great painting tradition of the West from Velásquez and the Flemish painters to Cézanne and Picasso—with his love for his personal past.”5 Indeed, Morales directly related the “dream-like Adiós a Sandino” to Francisco de Goya’s famous Third of May 1808 in Madrid (1814), a harrowing commemoration of the Spanish loyalists executed for their insurrection against the invading Napoleonic army, according to the art critic and historian David Craven. Morales sought to portray Sandino as “‘a figurative apparition already threatened’ with martyrdom,” Craven further noted, quoting the artist. “The result,” he concluded, “is a poignant glimpse of a figure who signifies an uneven historical process that, while interrupted, also has proved irrepressible.”6 The great romantic-tragic figure of Nicaraguan history, Sandino is here superbly immortalized on the eve of his capture and execution, his legend burnished by a mystical chiaroscuro awash with glimmers of turquoise and vermilion.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park