Some months ago I took a family and their two sons to a Latin American Art preview at Sotheby’s. The first sale in this category took place at the auction house in 1977 and the sales have been going strong ever since.
This department offers paintings,
sculpture, works on paper and religious icons spanning 500 years from Latin
American artists. Major sales of Latin American Art are held two times a year
in May and November in New York.
We discussed
several prominent artists in this category: Rufino Tamayo, Fernando Botero,
Diego Rivera and Jesus Rafael Soto. As with all of my tours, we not only had in
depth conversations about the works Sotheby’s presented, but also spent time
making art historical comparisons.
The first piece
we saw, Tamayo’s Watermelon Slices,
1950 prompted a discussion of the term ‘still life.’ Below are a few key points
about this type of painting:
Still lives are
created by artists, often in their studios, of traditionally two types of subjects:
natural and artificial - natural meaning organic materials such as food,
flowers, or fruit and artificial referring to objects that are inanimate, such
as the image above. With a still life, an artist has total control of his
subject, which is certainly not the case in landscape or figurative painting
where external elements play a large factor in the makeup of the composition. Traditionally,
still lives became a popular form of painting in 17th century
Europe, some of the most well known examples being of Dutch and Italian origin.
Artists like to share
and borrow ideas with and from each other. It is my feeling that Tamayo’s
Watermelon still life is the artist’s way of interpreting Cubism. I went onto
show the group a Picasso cubist still life.
No
discussion of Latin American art would be complete without the mention of the
infamous Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero, known for his oversized
and proportionally exaggerated figures and portraits. We talked about an oil on
canvas titled Man and a Horse.
Botero explains
his use of these "large people," as they are often called by critics,
in the following way: "An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form
without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you
attempt to rationalize or even justify it.”
Diego Rivera
is an equally prominent figure in Latin American Art, and we examined a
watercolor on paper titled Hombre con Burro y Olla [Man with Donkey and Pot].
Prior to the Rivera we focused on looking at oil paintings but whenever
possible I always like to include a discussion of different artistic mediums
such as works on paper rather than canvas, and the use of watercolor as opposed
to oil.
Speaking
of alternate mediums, we next turned to sculpture with a discussion of
Venezuelan artist Jesus Rafael Soto. Soto
is known for interactive sculptures that consist of square arrays of thin,
dangling tubes through which observers can walk. The artist traveled to Paris in 1950 and
began associating with optical artists – this prompted a discussion of Op Art
and Victor Vasarely. Op Art is the short form for the art movement known as Optical Art.
An
issue of Time Magazine in 1964 described Op Art as “Pictures That Attack the
Eye” for the tricks they play on the human retina and the optical illusions
that result. A year later in 1965, the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan
created an exhibition solely dedicated to Op art called The Responsive Eye. Art
in this style elicits different responses in observers through patterns,
flashes, contrasts, movement, and hidden imagery. The viewer is pulled into the
picture in the same way that he or she is attacked by the image.
No discussion of Op
Art would be complete without mentioning and showing viewers a piece by
Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely (1906 – 1997) who was widely regarded as the
father of Op Art.
Moving
completely away from Latin American art, a few floors down I took the family to
see an exhibition of 19th
century American and European furniture and decorative arts. We stopped to
discuss several pieces, one of which was a large gilt bronze mounted ebonized
pietra dure center table that I’ll briefly describe here.
To
break down the title a bit, gilt bronze, found most prominently on the legs of
this table, is an alloy made to look like gold. The term ebonized refers to a
stain or finish applied to furniture to make it look black.
Pietre Dure is a wonderful technique that deserves some attention. Popular in the late
16th and 17th century, whole workshops in Florence, Italy
specialized in producing objects decorated in this manner. It was a mosaic
technique using hard stone; the term pietre dure literally means "hard
stones" where semiprecious stones and other colorful hardstones were cut
to fashion extravagant luxury objects, from architectural ornament and
furniture to ornate display items and personal jewelry. From the Renaissance to
the early 19th century, the affluent societies of Europe were mesmerized by
works in pietre dure, both as diplomatic gifts and as objects of desire
dedicated to this magnificent medium. In 2008 the
Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exceptional exhibition titled Art of the
Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the
Palaces of Europe.
Overall it was quite a diverse tour and
allowed us to travel extensively without ever leaving York Avenue.
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