This book is the second in Boulton’s history of Venezuelan painting and carries that story from Juan Lovera to Armando Reverón, from about 1800 when Lovera’s activity began to 1954 when Reverón died. Its principal subject is the art and artists connected with two kinds of institutions: the academies, especially the Academia de Bellas Artes in Caracas, which functioned under various names and leaders from 1835 until 1913, and the Círculo de Bellas Artes, an artists’ club. Although the latter was in effective existence for just three years, 1913-1916, its principles were the foundation for all the antiacademic modern art produced since that time in Venezuela. Both of these institutions produced important artists who expressed their ideals. Martín Tovar y Tovar, Francisco Michelena and Cristóbal Rojas, all products of the Academy or associated with it, exemplify the intellectual, craftsmanly pictorial tradition which reflected the mundane and materialistic ideals of nineteenth-century society. All three were profoundly French in orientation and spent much of their creative lives in France.
Armando Reverón, Federico Brandt and Rafael Monasterios are among the major products of the Círeulo de Bellas Artes, which sponsored an Impressionist style and opened the way for the sensuous visionary modern styles. Reverón took the Impressionist style to its logical conclusion in almost pure light—white or pale sepia canvas with a relief of white paint in designs of Oriental delicacy.
Boulton does not study here the social and intellectual history implied by these profound changes of vision, but he provides the data by which they might be studied. He traces briefly the rise of the Academy, its changing relations with the political leadership, and its decline under the government of Cipriano Castro. He gives some new historical impressions, as of Guzmán Blanco, a generous patron to Tovar y Tovar and several other painters who contributed battle paintings to the decoration of the Federal Capitol. Indeed, the period of Guzmán Blanco was the heyday of the Academy.
The book is exceptionally handsome. The coated paper makes the 137 illustrations (20 in color) show at their best. Notes at the end of each chapter, an extensive bibliography, a list of archives and libraries, and a good index complete the work. The text, which is in Spanish, offers no deep technical analyses and is accessible to the general reader. Venezuelan art has clearly found its historian in Boulton, whose two volumes provide the basic material for the study of that country’s art since its first European settlement. A third volume on modern styles, which have had a noteworthy history in Venezuela, may be hoped for.
