Chayo Barroso’s homage to the masters
By Margaret Failoni

Art Opening Chayo Barroso Sat, Nov 17, 7pm Le Noir Gallery Jesus 2-A

Detail from The Turkish Bath by Ingres

An homage to Portrait of a Young Girl by Petrus Christus

Replica of Cosimo’s Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci

Over the last 800 years, painters learned by copying their masters. Many became apprentices in their ateliers and others copied their art outright. The purpose was not to make forged copies for fraudulent purposes, but to try to master their teachers’ techniques. There was the school of da Vinci, the School of Rembrandt and so forth—all churning out replicas of what would turn out to be the masterworks of the future. Such was the case in most of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in Italy and during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century French art scene. Even in San Miguel, there is a house with a very large, important painting from the School of Velazquez.

Today, with many art schools spread widely through the world, few artists take the time to study in a master’s atelier. They leave school to go out into the brave new (art) world taking their chances, learning along the way. For some—very few—it works.

Chayo Barroso chose both systems. While flying as a hostess first with Pan Am and later with Delta, Barroso had the great opportunity to nurture her love for art by visiting all the great museums of the world. Her collection of museum catalogues and art monographs is staggering. Based in New York City, she took advantage of time off between trips to take classes at the Art Students League. Over the years she studied anatomy with life drawing classes, sculpture, art history, etc. A sketchbook was part and parcel of her travel equipment. She showed some of her work in the early Art Students League exhibitions. Moving to Mexico City, she continued studying with a Mexican teacher and exhibiting in group atelier shows and took some classes during prolonged stays in Venice.

The artist—and by now she really was one—moved to San Miguel de Allende and soon was taking courses with artist and renowned instructor Edgar Soberon. She wanted to learn the glazing (color layering) techniques of the old masters and Soberon, who had taught in New York’s Pratt Institute before coming to Mexico, was the perfect choice.

A lifelong romance with art and an almost two-year-long love affair with the great masters resulted in a stunning collection of replica masterworks from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries by Petrus Christus, Vittore Carpaccio, Piero di Cosimo, Guido Reni, Pierre Subleyras, Ingres, Paul Gauguin and Gustave Moreau.

The results are stunning. Barroso is now working on commissions while preparing to embark on a new series of original-subject works.

Margaret Failoni is an independent curator and art historian who has lived in San Miguel for 13 years. She curates exhibitions of contemporary art for museums, public spaces and some galleries in Mexico after a full-time career in Rome, Italy.

Diego Rivera in Veracruz
By Francisco Vidargas, Assistant director Patrimonio Mundial, INAH

This year, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the extraordinary Mexican artist Diego Rivera, several national and state museums (Bellas Artes and National Museum of Arts in Mexico City, and Museo Casa de Diego Rivera in Guanajauato) have organized special exhibitions of his work, both on canvas and in mural form.

One of the most important public collections of Rivera’s work is owned by the government of Veracruz. The collection houses 36 pieces on canvas, from early oil paintings to drawings. They are kept in the State Art Museum, located in the former convent of San Felipe Neri in Orizaba. The Veracruz influence on Diego seems curious, until one considers the state’s long artistic traditions and the significance of his teacher José María Velasco. 

For a long time, Veracruz was the land that linked our past, present and future. “The narrow door of Mexico,” as it was called by author Fernando Benítez, eternally existing between the sea and the plateau, always filled with the sea breeze.

Joyful spring and jealous guardian of our eastern door, Veracruz has everything it gets from the sea, its woods and cultivated lands, where corn, cacao, vanilla, sugar cane and coffee flourish, as well as orchards of mango, sapodilla plum, papaya, soursop, avocado, pomegranate and citrus. Since 1519, the Spanish conquerors used to say that on its plateaus “could be found what in the whole of Spain could not be better…so peaceful to see as well as fruitful.”

In the nineteenth century, Veracruz was “invaded” by traveling artists who journeyed all around the region discovering, says Carlos Fuentes, even the more hidden places, “the brightness of Mexican colors, the mutant painting of nature…the perfection, the longed-for harmony and the peace of the elements.”

Not only local artists were enraptured before “the fertility and calm” of these sites, but from many other places—as we could see some time ago in the splendid exhibition “Veracruz: The Colors of the Sun,” curated by Elisa García Barragán—“traveler-artists and globetrotters…were deeply captivated by so many sights and a profusion of horizons.”

A long list of artists and scientists, Mexican and foreign, devoted their interests to discovering the Veracruz landscape. Among them we can remember the Germans Johan Moritz Rugendas (of strong brush and contrasting colors), Carl Nebel and August Lohr; the Swiss Johann Salomon Hegi; the Italians Pedro Gualdi and Eugenio Landesio; the British William Bulloc, John Phillips, J. Moncalfe and James Gay Sawkins; the French Pharamond Blanchard, Jean Baptiste Louis de Gros (who with his picture El Pico de Orizaba from 1833 majestically reproduced the tropical fertility) and Paul Edouard Alfred Darràs. All left testimony in their work of their passing trough Veracruz. 

Among the Mexican artists during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, we can count Cleofas Almanza, Agustín Arrieta, Casimiro Castro (and his train sights), the Orizaba artists José Justo Montiel and Gonzalo Argüelles Bringas, the Jalapa painter Carlos Rivera, Ignacio Rosas (who pictured Nahui Ollin), Mateo Saldaña, Julio Montalvo, Albert Fuster and Salvador Ferrando, both from Tlacotalpan, and Ramón Cano Manilla. 

We must not forget Joaquín Clausell, splendid landscapist (who for his Sights of Pico de Orizaba used the brushes with “great agility”) and Gerardo Murillo, Dr. Atl, the ultimate Mexican landscapist. 

With little doubt, the most famous Mexican painter was José María Velasco, an artist and teacher who formed new generations of painters in the San Carlos Academy, among them Diego Rivera. The artist from Temascalcingo induced his students to study nature directly, based on sound understanding. He motivated them to interpret, with their own sensibility and creativity, the colors and light of the Mexican landscape. Their periodical excursions to draw from nature contributed to output ranging from architectural fragments to backgrounds and whole landscapes. 

In 1873, the Mexico-Veracruz railroad opened and a year later Velasco traveled through that region. During his journey he found—according to his biographer María Elena Altamirano—new images for his paintings in the physiognomy of tropical plants, the impenetrable thickness of forest and the vegetation covering the edges of rivers and waterfalls. Two years later, he returned to Veracruz, through Jalapa and Coscomatepec, at the foot of Pico de Orizaba, where he painted landscapes, pines and flora which live at altitudes of more than 2,000 meters. From his journeys, he produced a great diversity of works, among them Volcán de Orizaba or Citlaltépetl (1876), Hacienda de Monte Blanco (1878-79), painted with his teacher Landesio, and Cañada de Metlac (1897-1898).

Diego Rivera, extraordinary artist and founder of modern Mexican art, learned from Velasco not only the study and use of techniques and practical theories, but also analytical meticulousness and imaginative flight. Thanks to that teaching, Rivera got several awards at the Academy, being recognized by teachers for his wideness of concept and his sober style, almost as that of a teacher. 

The esthetic qualities of Diego were confirmed two years later after the success he obtained with the 26 works he presented in the Exhibition of Mexican Artists organized by Dr. Atl. That exhibition and particularly his canvas Pico de Orizaba (1906) opened doors and the governor of Veracruz, Teodoro A. Dehesa, awarded him a scholarship to study in Europe with a pension of 300 francs. 

In the summer of 1907, Rivera traveled around Andalucía and Extremadura in Spain, along with his first wife, the Russian artist Angelina Beloff, visiting Toledo for the first time and spending some time in the Catalan town of Montserrat. Later they traveled to London, Ghent, Bruges, Brussels and Paris. This first stay in Europe lasted from February 1907 to September 1910. 

Diego periodically sent back part of his European work as payment for his scholarship. 

Unfortunately, the correspondence to his benefactor was lost during the convulsive years of the Mexican Revolution. Martín Luis Guzmán pointed out that the artist wrote “submissive and obedient letters to the person who had generously helped him to follow the way by which he would become a great artist.” Governor Dehesa left his post in 1911, a month after Porfirio Díaz resigned from the Mexican presidency, so Rivera’s economic support came to an end. 

Fortunately, a year later, during a brief stay in Paris, Diego had exhibited his works in the Academy between November and December 1910 as a scholarship holder (in 1991, art historian Ramón Favela investigated, curated and reconstructed that first exhibition). The works were placed in chronological order, and helped him display some of his former teachers, Leandro Izaguirre, Félix Palma and Velasco. It was opened by Carmen Romero Rubio, President Díaz’s wife; Justo Sierra, minister of Education; and Antonio Rivas Mercado, principal of the Academy. It included 45 works—35 oil paintings, 2 watercolors and 8 drawings. One of these works, Naturaleza muerta con calabaza, (Still life with pumpkin), 1910, is inscribed “from Paris to Governor Dehesa.” This painting was auctioned in 1981 by Sotheby’s in New York. 

Ninety years later, the remainder of that first exhibition is not easy to re-assemble. Of the group of Diego’s paintings, 21 of the works sent from Europe are dispersed in public and private collections in Mexico and the United States. Only one is in Veracruz: Retrato de Angelina Beloff (Portrait of Angelina Beloff). Six more works are only known through photographic reproductions. His watercolors are in private collections and one drawing is in Museo Casa Diego Rivera in Guanajuato. 

It will be almost impossible to gather again the canvases of the Mexican artist. But the Veracruz footprint, besides the outstanding academic formation, marked forever his artistic labor, so that we can conclude by saying, as did Guatemalan Luis Cardoza y Aragón, that “in any way we study the plastic arts in Mexico, we will always find Diego Rivera there, a universal Mexican artist.”