‘Retratos’ On View At El Museum Del Barrio Through March 20

‘Retratos’ Lively And Grandly Colorful

‘Retratos’

‘Retratos’

‘Retratos’

A Moche portrait vessel with a stirrup spout was made between 100 and 800 AD and shows an adult male wearing a knotted turban headdress decorated with stepped frets. The piece is painted and slipped and the face is modeled expressively.

 

Puerto Rican artist Jose Campeche y Jordan painted “An Ensign in a Regiment of the Permanent Infantry of Puerto Rico” in 1789. The ensign poses with his hand inside his jacket, signifying a high position. Campeche took as his inspiration classical engravings that he saw; he never left his homeland.

 

Colonial Mexican painter Andres de Islas painted Ana Maria de la Campa y Cos y Ceballos in an exquisite gown, identifying her as a person of style and importance. The leyenda along the right side of the portrait identifies the sitter and provides her titles. The startlingly large round mark on the right side of her face is a beauty mark, much in fashion at the time.

 

An unidentified Chilean artist painted Dona Maria Mercedes de Salas y Corvalan in 1789. The relative plainness of the sitter’s clothing and accessories are reflective of Chilean simplicity, which stands in marked contrast to the grandiosity of Mexican life.

 

Jose Gil de Castro y Morales’s posthumous portrait of Simon Bolivar pays tribute to the liberator of Peru and Columbia. The leyenda on the shield at the lower left offers biographical information and reminds future generations that he was worth emulating.

 

Miniatures gained in popularity after independence in Latin America. Jose Maria Espinosa Prieto depicted Columbian General Francisco de Paula Santander in about 1840 in an oil on marble likeness that eventually was used on Columbian currency.

 

“Dama de Bahia” a mid-Nineteenth Century portrait of an Afro Brazilian woman is purely regal. The sitter may have been a slave in a wealthy household or the free daughter of slaves. Her gold jewelry suggests the techniques of West Africa.

 

Mexican artist Abundio Rincon painted the picture of the village priest “Fray Francisco Rodrigues Padre de Cocula.” The painting is restrained but detailed enough to provide information about the Franciscan friar who was a teacher and scholar.

 

An unknown artist of the Quito school rendered the image of the exquisite “Madre Maria Encarnacion Regalado.” The picture combines details of the beautifully dressed young nun when she entered the convent and her role as abbess some 40 years later.

 

Lasar Segall first came to Brazil from his native Lithuania in 1912. His self-portrait, “Autoretrato III,” shows the influence of the German expressionists whose work he had seen in Europe.

 

Elisa Saldivar de Gutierrez Roldan was the wife of a Mexico City petrochemical magnate and art collector. Her portraits by such artists as Rufino Tamayo, Jesus Guerrero Galvan, Carlos Orozco Romero, Roberto Montenegro and David Alfaro Siquieros figured prominently in the collection. The image by Diego Rivera was made in 1946.

 

Frida Kahlo painted “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” for her lover, photographer Nickolas Muray, in 1940. The positioning of her spider monkey, a prowling black cat and a thorn necklace that pierces her neck and from which is suspended a dead hummingbird, a love charm, round out an image of pending anguish.

 

Fernando Botero painted Joachim Jean Aberbach and his family, incorporating his idiosyncratic rotundity with classical imagery and Latin American grounding to capture bourgeois social convention.

 

“The Mask,” a 1993 self-portrait by Puerto Rican artist Angel Rodriguez-Diaz, exhibits bold coloration and a provocative subject. Rodriguez-Diaz paints in San Antonio these days.