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Lot Essay
Los novios features the most characteristic figures populating Venezuelan painter Héctor Poleo’s oeuvre – campesinos and veiled women. Arranged into a triad, a man in a brown poncho and straw hat stands slightly in front of a similarly dressed woman in blue, while the cloaked head of a woman in black appears between their shoulders. With her neck slightly tilted, the profile of this woman in black contrasts with the frontal position of her peers, the three of them tightly unified into a silent, sculptural group.
Long engaged in the depiction of these subjects, Poleo’s interest in portraying the poorer classes dates to his earliest years in the 1930s, a period when social themes dominated the imaginaries of artists worldwide, provoked by the effects of modernization and the impact of the Great Depression. While still a student, Poleo won a scholarship to study in Mexico City where the work of the muralists influenced his developing aesthetic. In 1941, the artist’s travels to the Andean regions of Ecuador, Colombia, and within his own country, further shaped his artistic approach. Accordingly, with their ponchos and straw hats, the figures in Los novios reflect Poleo’s representative, if somewhat generalized, approach to depicting a local population.
While the presence of campesinos remained a consistent subject, Poleo explored various styles over the course of his career, ranging from solidly rendered volumetric bodies, to a quasi-Surreal aesthetic, as well as dreamy-expressionism. Painted in 1956, Los novios reflects Poleo’s aesthetic of the 1950s decade, which critics have alternately described as his “classist” (Carlos Silva) and “neo-plastic” (Alfredo Boulton) phase. As this latter term suggests, this period witnessed the artist’s turn to flattened forms, in which both the fore- and back-grounds are brought to the surface of the canvas. This phase coincides with the rising dominance of geometric abstraction on the Venezuelan art scene, and the backgrounds of many of these works reveal abstract compositions of fractured planes of color, albeit with schematically rendered architectural motifs. Thus, in Los novios a house is visible behind the woman in the straw hat, while the tower of what may be a church emerges from the shoulder of the man. Executed in white, these contextual details are links connecting the figures of Los novios within their surrounding landscape. This disjointed relationship literally casts the figures into the foreground, endowing their bodies with a monumental presence.
Los novios is related to a similar painting that shares the same name and belongs to the collection of the Galería Internacional de Arte Moderno of the Ca’ Pesaro in Venice. Also executed in 1956, this Italian work includes four figures, the three protagonists joined by an additional man who stands shoulder to shoulder alongside the woman in blue. In this painting, the figures are portrayed at full length, and the abstracted background reveals slight variations. By isolating the three right-most figures in the featured lot, Poleo heightens the painting’s sense of drama. Whereas the four figures can readily be identified as two couples in the Venetian canvas, the relationship shared between the two women and single man remains unknown. Is one of the women a mother to another figure? A daughter? A mistress? An imagined, younger self? This unresolved narrative adds a poignant tension to the piece, tension that Poleo further heightens in his close cropping of the group.
The artist’s tight perspective maximizes the focus of the painting onto the faces of the figures. Clear complexioned with their features rendered in the most delicate of lines, these people are both anonymous and expressionless, and represent the everyman and women of the region. It is precisely these characteristics that imbue Poleo’s figures with a sense of enduring stoicism. Indeed, rather than downtrodden peasants, the protagonists of Los novios seem to suggest a notion of spiritual transcendence that links Poleo to the great religious artists of the past. In particular, the sweet faces of his veiled women have long invoked comparisons to depictions of the Madonna by such Renaissance masters as Raphael. The flattened planar perspective of Poleo’s work of the 1950s suggests additional links to Byzantine and Coptic art, sources which the artist directly referenced in the earliest paintings from this phase, dating to 1953.
Susanna Temkin, Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Long engaged in the depiction of these subjects, Poleo’s interest in portraying the poorer classes dates to his earliest years in the 1930s, a period when social themes dominated the imaginaries of artists worldwide, provoked by the effects of modernization and the impact of the Great Depression. While still a student, Poleo won a scholarship to study in Mexico City where the work of the muralists influenced his developing aesthetic. In 1941, the artist’s travels to the Andean regions of Ecuador, Colombia, and within his own country, further shaped his artistic approach. Accordingly, with their ponchos and straw hats, the figures in Los novios reflect Poleo’s representative, if somewhat generalized, approach to depicting a local population.
While the presence of campesinos remained a consistent subject, Poleo explored various styles over the course of his career, ranging from solidly rendered volumetric bodies, to a quasi-Surreal aesthetic, as well as dreamy-expressionism. Painted in 1956, Los novios reflects Poleo’s aesthetic of the 1950s decade, which critics have alternately described as his “classist” (Carlos Silva) and “neo-plastic” (Alfredo Boulton) phase. As this latter term suggests, this period witnessed the artist’s turn to flattened forms, in which both the fore- and back-grounds are brought to the surface of the canvas. This phase coincides with the rising dominance of geometric abstraction on the Venezuelan art scene, and the backgrounds of many of these works reveal abstract compositions of fractured planes of color, albeit with schematically rendered architectural motifs. Thus, in Los novios a house is visible behind the woman in the straw hat, while the tower of what may be a church emerges from the shoulder of the man. Executed in white, these contextual details are links connecting the figures of Los novios within their surrounding landscape. This disjointed relationship literally casts the figures into the foreground, endowing their bodies with a monumental presence.
Los novios is related to a similar painting that shares the same name and belongs to the collection of the Galería Internacional de Arte Moderno of the Ca’ Pesaro in Venice. Also executed in 1956, this Italian work includes four figures, the three protagonists joined by an additional man who stands shoulder to shoulder alongside the woman in blue. In this painting, the figures are portrayed at full length, and the abstracted background reveals slight variations. By isolating the three right-most figures in the featured lot, Poleo heightens the painting’s sense of drama. Whereas the four figures can readily be identified as two couples in the Venetian canvas, the relationship shared between the two women and single man remains unknown. Is one of the women a mother to another figure? A daughter? A mistress? An imagined, younger self? This unresolved narrative adds a poignant tension to the piece, tension that Poleo further heightens in his close cropping of the group.
The artist’s tight perspective maximizes the focus of the painting onto the faces of the figures. Clear complexioned with their features rendered in the most delicate of lines, these people are both anonymous and expressionless, and represent the everyman and women of the region. It is precisely these characteristics that imbue Poleo’s figures with a sense of enduring stoicism. Indeed, rather than downtrodden peasants, the protagonists of Los novios seem to suggest a notion of spiritual transcendence that links Poleo to the great religious artists of the past. In particular, the sweet faces of his veiled women have long invoked comparisons to depictions of the Madonna by such Renaissance masters as Raphael. The flattened planar perspective of Poleo’s work of the 1950s suggests additional links to Byzantine and Coptic art, sources which the artist directly referenced in the earliest paintings from this phase, dating to 1953.
Susanna Temkin, Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University