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Lot Essay
“Amazing is the word for the paintings by Claudio Bravo,” raved the critic John Canaday, for The New York Times, in his review of the paintings and drawings of wrapped packages first exhibited at the Staempfli Gallery in 1970. “Amazing. Really amazing. So amazing that the question as to whether these paintings are works of art or only staggering technical exercises is beside the point. Which must mean that works of art is exactly what they are.”1 A consummate realist, Bravo brought remarkable technical virtuosity to bear on his now iconic renderings of paper-wrapped packages tied with string. The series marked his first serious preoccupation with still-life painting following his success as a society portraitist in Madrid, where he had established residence in 1961. Informed by the Spanish School of painting, particularly Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán, the package pictures emerged in the late 1960s and continued through the mid-1970s; latter-day bodegones, they were reprised in the late 1990s and rank among Bravo’s most celebrated and influential works.
A touchstone for his subsequent still-life and vanitas paintings, the first packages provided Bravo with a medium through which to revisit age-old problems of illusion, mimesis, and abstraction. “At first, my work was very realistic,” he explained. “Later on, when I had shows in New York, I started becoming a little more abstract. I’ve been aligning myself more with the priorities of modern art without ever forgetting the fact that I’m a realist. As you get older, you become younger. . . . I’ve taken a trip through the history of art in my paintings.”2 A riff on the classical still-life tradition and on contemporary abstraction, the packages are cognizant of Christo’s wrapped objects and Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings of stretcher frames, no less of the camera reality of the American Photorealists and the mythmaking bravado of the Color Field artists. “I think that I was originally inspired to do these pictures after looking at some works by Antoni Tàpies, whom I greatly admired,” Bravo reflected. “He’d done paintings with string that resembled wrapped objects. Rothko’s work was also instrumental, but in a more indirect way.”3
Though well pedigreed within the Western canon, the packages originated, at least anecdotally, from an unexpectedly pedestrian source. In the 1960s, when Bravo lived for a time in New York, three of his sisters visited him and day after day returned to his apartment with shopping bags filled with their purchases. Piqued by the amorphous dimensions and material surfaces of the packages, he began to describe the tones and textures of wrapping paper and string. The intrigue of the packaging ultimately hinged less on the objects they concealed, Bravo later implied, than on the means of the concealment itself: “There’s some mystery in the wrapped packages, but what I really wanted to paint was the wrapping. I wanted to give a sense of trompe l’oeil tactility. I’m constantly realistic.”4 The critic Artirnomis recognized this sensation in her review of the first Staempfli show, writing that “like the apples on the tree of knowledge,” the packages “are meant as an enticement, a lure, a trap, by the very fact of existing. Bravo’s careful rendering of folded, wrapped, and crumpled packages is essentially abstract trompe-l’oeil, with a poetic message.”5
Many of the early packages, particularly those drawn in pastel, chalk, and conté crayon on paper, explore techniques of grisaille, and Bravo’s facility with monochrome and fine-grained realism is exemplified in the present work. The drawing distills Bravo’s extended allegory on the nature of representation into the mundane, irregular geometry of a package, its wrinkled underside here revealed as a surreal, sculptural topography of cast shadows and shapeless volumes held in place by two taut, vertical lengths of string. The exquisite tactility of the wrapping—the velvety sheen of the paper, its subtle creases and indentations, its superb chiaroscuro—heightens the artifice of the illusion, an effect amplified by the ambiguity and mystery of the very thing that the paper conceals. Package ultimately transforms its seemingly commonplace subject into a strange and extraordinary semblance of itself, probing the essential veracity of art and artifice.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
A touchstone for his subsequent still-life and vanitas paintings, the first packages provided Bravo with a medium through which to revisit age-old problems of illusion, mimesis, and abstraction. “At first, my work was very realistic,” he explained. “Later on, when I had shows in New York, I started becoming a little more abstract. I’ve been aligning myself more with the priorities of modern art without ever forgetting the fact that I’m a realist. As you get older, you become younger. . . . I’ve taken a trip through the history of art in my paintings.”2 A riff on the classical still-life tradition and on contemporary abstraction, the packages are cognizant of Christo’s wrapped objects and Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings of stretcher frames, no less of the camera reality of the American Photorealists and the mythmaking bravado of the Color Field artists. “I think that I was originally inspired to do these pictures after looking at some works by Antoni Tàpies, whom I greatly admired,” Bravo reflected. “He’d done paintings with string that resembled wrapped objects. Rothko’s work was also instrumental, but in a more indirect way.”3
Though well pedigreed within the Western canon, the packages originated, at least anecdotally, from an unexpectedly pedestrian source. In the 1960s, when Bravo lived for a time in New York, three of his sisters visited him and day after day returned to his apartment with shopping bags filled with their purchases. Piqued by the amorphous dimensions and material surfaces of the packages, he began to describe the tones and textures of wrapping paper and string. The intrigue of the packaging ultimately hinged less on the objects they concealed, Bravo later implied, than on the means of the concealment itself: “There’s some mystery in the wrapped packages, but what I really wanted to paint was the wrapping. I wanted to give a sense of trompe l’oeil tactility. I’m constantly realistic.”4 The critic Artirnomis recognized this sensation in her review of the first Staempfli show, writing that “like the apples on the tree of knowledge,” the packages “are meant as an enticement, a lure, a trap, by the very fact of existing. Bravo’s careful rendering of folded, wrapped, and crumpled packages is essentially abstract trompe-l’oeil, with a poetic message.”5
Many of the early packages, particularly those drawn in pastel, chalk, and conté crayon on paper, explore techniques of grisaille, and Bravo’s facility with monochrome and fine-grained realism is exemplified in the present work. The drawing distills Bravo’s extended allegory on the nature of representation into the mundane, irregular geometry of a package, its wrinkled underside here revealed as a surreal, sculptural topography of cast shadows and shapeless volumes held in place by two taut, vertical lengths of string. The exquisite tactility of the wrapping—the velvety sheen of the paper, its subtle creases and indentations, its superb chiaroscuro—heightens the artifice of the illusion, an effect amplified by the ambiguity and mystery of the very thing that the paper conceals. Package ultimately transforms its seemingly commonplace subject into a strange and extraordinary semblance of itself, probing the essential veracity of art and artifice.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park