Armando Reverón (1889-1954) Anthological Exhibition

Alfredo Boulton divides Reverón's work into three periods: Blue (1919-1924), White (1924-1934) and Sepia (1935-1954), dominated and differentiated not only by pigment, but also by stylistic and technical changes. The sense of completion found in the first period, seen in works such as La cueva (1920) and Los baños de Macuto (1921), progressively fades to the rendering of details dominated by a heightened sense of light, as in Uveros (1927) and Cocoteros (1931), in which he uses blunt wooden brushes to apply colour. Boulton states how the: “Freedom of technical and pictorial interpretation signifies the start of a separation from the past of the figurative and realist conception of image (Cocoteros, 1944).”

Reverón is a painter akin to the French artists Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard because of both his themes (portraits, groups of bathers, landscapes, seascapes) and his vocabulary. Relevant criticism maintains his arrival at the same conclusions and pictorial outcomes as both those artists, reflected in works such as Juanita en traje de baño rojo (1933) and Figura con abanico (1947), without him ever knowing their work. By the same token, the development of the theme of the “Maja” (woman) and the recovery of expression in his brush strokes at the end of the thirties, visible in the Dama con mantilla (1939), enable art criticism to allude to elements of Goya's work running through his painting.

The two nervous breakdowns he suffers in 1936 and 1945 heighten his existing extravagant social attitudes and, after being unable to find any models, he turns to making dolls and mannequins. This last period features diverse wicker figurines Esqueleto and paper masks that denote a shift towards children's art and naïve art