Painting Modernism

Chapter Five: Writers as Art Critics

6 7 5 WRITERS AS ART CRITICS The modernization of Latin American literary texts that began in the 1870s was, as we have already noted, a socioeconomic and aesthetic process that resulted in the transference of techniques observed in the visual arts and their application to discursive practices in both prose and poetry. A synaesthetic relationship between literature and painting permeated theoretical statements, stray notebook entries, poetry and prose texts and led to the creation of a chromatic literary palette as well as to the incorporation of the impressionistic and expressionistic experiments cultivated by European artists in the late nineteenth century. Writers in a sense became painters, jewelers, photographers, sculptors, and art critics. The plastic arts became inseparable companions in the development of revolutionary literary ventures, the nature of which, Martí, a pioneering writer, touched upon in 1875 in an essay on the Spanish poet and dramatist José Echegaray . At the conclusion of the essay, which is fundamentally a review of one of Echegaray’s plays that Martí saw performed in Mexico City, Martí drifts into an enunciation of a series of linkages between artists and writers. All of which subsequently leads him to establish metaphoric, impressionistic , and even philosophic connections inspired by the canvases of painters the Cuban had studied early in the development of his modernist stylistic innovations. “In literature as in painting,” he wrote, “there are so-called momentous styles”: Shakespeare makes me think of Rubens. Although he makes me think more of Michelangelo. Rubens displays enormous deformities, but always those of a deformed giant. Michelangelo 6 8 PA I N T I N G M O D E R N I S M dreams of robust trunks, huge muscles, dense atmospheric shadows , sinewy monsters in the gloom. Michelangelo had a touch of genesis and apocalypse. With this somber, daring form, he offers us an idea of the supreme slavery in which, with a capacity for total encompassment, everything flees, everything escapes, everything is repressed, is frightened and maddened. (En literatura como en pintura, hay lo que se llama grandes maneras. Shakespeare me hace pensar en Rubens. Aunque más me hace pensar en Miguel Angel. Rubens tiene deformidades de gigante, pero es siempre un gigante deforme. Miguel Angel sueña troncos robustos, músculos rudos, apretadas tinieblas en la atmósfera y monstruos nervudos en las tinieblas. Había en Miguel Angel algo de génesis y apocalipsis. . . . Da, con este sombrío atrevimiento de la forma, idea de esta suprema esclavitud en que, con facultades para concebirlo todo, todo huye, todo se escapa, todo reprime, espanta, y enloquece.) (1963– 1973, 15: 79–80) In expanding the frontiers of literary language not just Martí but other writers associated with the modernist revolution were inspired by the visual arts and inserted the techniques of these arts in their texts. And, in addition, they tried their hand at art criticism as we shall see in the sections of this chapter. JoSé MARTí: EuRopEAn, AMERICAn, AnD MExICAn ART Martí’s interest in the plastic arts and its relation to “painting with words” began in Cuba prior to the colonial government’s order that he be deported to Spain.1 We know, for example, that he studied drawing at the Academia de San Alejandro in Havana. But it was in Spain where he first developed his skills as an art critic. The prado Museum, the Academy of San Fernando , as well as the galleries of Zaragoza sharpened his critical eye and in the late seventies generated a series of notes (1879) on several Spanish painters, including Francisco de Goya2 and Raimundo de Madrazo.3 However , it was his residency in the united States (1880–1895) that provided him with the opportunity to study the canvases of Western painters with an intensity that neither his stay in Europe, Mexico, Venezuela, or Guatemala afforded him. And it is in his essays written in the united States W R I T E R S A S A R T C R I T I C S 6 9 that we find theoretical notes of substance with respect to the nature of the visual arts. In 1885, for example, conjoining the sister arts of literature and painting, he wrote: Art like literature can neither be improvised nor transplanted: nor transplanted bear good fruit. To be powerful you must be genuine. In painting as in writing, only what is direct lasts. Art like...