Curator, John Elderfield: This is John Elderfield, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum, and I’m the curator of the Reverón exhibition.
Armando Reverón is an artist unlike any other that the museum has exhibited. He came from a very different culture than we expect to see early modern paintings and sculptures from, and also he was as an individual, very inventive, also rather strange, in that the range of his art is very great—from small beautiful monochromatic landscapes to rather grotesque life-size dolls, which he and his companion Juanita Ríos produced in the 1940s.
Reverón grew up in Caracas. He trained in Europe. He returned to his native country in 1915. The real direction of the art in the exhibition begins around 1920. It’s a relatively short period of production -- very various, however, and very mysterious. A lot of art deals with clarifying what objects look like in space. But Reverón seemed to want to show that looking at the world can be actually puzzling.
This is the first major retrospective of Reverón to be seen in the United States. It’s important that these pioneering Latin American artists really are seen by international audiences, because it provides a broader view of what the practice of early modernism in fact was.
As you go into the exhibition, [you see] early paintings, done around 1920. They include to your left two figurative paintings which look back to Goya, and these will be worth bearing in mind as you move forward.
In each of the galleries there will be stops in English and in Spanish. The Spanish ones will be delivered by my colleague, Luis Pérez-Oramas. You will hear another voice reading words from Reverón himself. Sometimes he speaks of himself as ‘Reverón.”
Narrator: To hear instructions on using this Acoustiguide, press 101 at any time.