Armando Reverón (1889-1954)

Ernesto Adler, Caracas
Sale: Christie's, New York, Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, and Prints, May 17, 1993, lot 98, illustrated in color 
Johanna Andrei Collection, Caracas
Private Collection, Key Biscayne

Pérez Art Museum Miami, Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, April 18-August 17, 2014, no. 33

This work has been restored and should be hung as is. The work is lined with a non-wax adhesive, which is stabilizing the heavy burlap typically used by the artist. The paint layer seems to be very healthy.
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In Alfredo Boulton’s categorization of Armando Reverón's oeuvre, the Sepia Period is described as the artist's last important body of work. By the end of the 1930s, Reverón had abandoned his atmospheric compositions in whites and blues in favor of more realist landscapes. Taking as a point of departure a painting titled Paisaje blanco, 1940 in the Patricia Phelps Cisneros Collection, John Elderfield, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and curator of the Reverón retropective held there in 2007, commented: “Reverón's White Landscape of 1940 seems in many ways to be a transitional image between his early and late landscape production. While in this painting Reverón continues his exploration of hazy skies and dissolving, imprecise contours, the seaside is here depicted in the shadowed, sepia tone common to later landscapes. It is highly abstracted and shares compositional features with such 1940's natural seascapes as El Playón, 1942 and the much simplified Coconut Tree. A horizontal band of white paint curves upward on the right side of each canvas...” (1)

The Coconut Tree, shown here (fig. 1) on the cover of Boulton's seminal book on the artist dates from 1939-1940, the same circa date as Amanecer. Both paintings were executed at sunrise and face east from the humble house Reverón built about a hundred feet from the shoreline. Amanecer was painted on burlap, a support he used throughout the 1940s. The landscape, still in the dark, reveal an ocean and sky entering sunlight. It would seem that the whole purpose of this painting is to represent the first bursts of light. In Coconut Tree, the two white brushstrokes define the composition. In Amanecer, the first lights are modulated: from the dark brown vegetation to over the mountain the artist has layered cadmium, yellow and whites. A blue haze surrounds the sea grape tree while touches of  blue sky and yellow lights are seen through the branches.

In the certificate written by Boulton in 1993 he commented: “This beautiful work represents very well this period of our painter and is in excellent condition.”

1: John Elderfield, Armando Reverón, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007, p. 151