Armando Reverón (1889-1954)

Inocente Palacios Collection, Caracas
Private Collection, New York

Caracas, Museo de Bellas Artes, Exposición Retrospectiva de Armando Reverón, July, 1955, p. 36, no. 240
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Armando Reverón, February 11-April 16, 2007, p. 173, illustrated in color

Juan Calzadilla, Armando Reverón, Caracas, Ernesto Armitano Editor, 1979, p. 262, no. 334, illustrated in color

After devoting much of the early 1940s to painting a series of luminous plein air landscapes as well as his Turneresque La Guaira harbor scenes, Reverón returned in 1945 to the intimacy of his studio at the Castillete and produced a second cycle of nudes (at times using his now legendary life size “dolls” as models).

It is interesting to note Reverón’s preference for seated or reclining female figures in the earlier stages of his career. With few exceptions, the only standing figures found in his work prior to 1945 are those in his joyous self-portraits in which he depicts himself in the very act of painting.

The figural drawings of his late career were executed from a re-visited approach. Reverón appears to have returned to the classic live model poses he observed while practicing anatomy in his early twenties at the Academias of La Lontja in Barcelona and San Fernando in Madrid. In these drawings, full-bodied, mature women alternate with dolls or muñecas. Although at times it is difficult to differentiate the two, (in this case, the broken figure on the left seems to indicate the body of a muñeca) in this work, models and dolls pose or are posed with one or two hands on the hips animating an otherwise fully frontal and vertical view that reaffirms their femininity by exposing their naked bodies rather than their nudity.

These rather radical drawings signaled a significant shift in the artist’s attitude towards nudes, one of his most recurring subject matters. Rather than the typical relaxed nudes resting ideally between the shades of the Macuto studio and the land of Utopia, the women in Las Tres Modelos* stand closely, in a provocative pose, smiling at the viewer (a rarity), self-confident in the tight and fleshy space defined by thousands of charcoal and pastel strokes that reveal the lights and shadows of this sensual forest of legs, pubis, wombs, breasts, and dark hairy heads. These four figures, since there are clearly four heads, is one of the finest examples of what was perhaps the artist’s favorite subject matter and one of the largest late drawings from his impressive figural oeuvre.

* The title of this drawing has changed since it was in the prestigious collection of Inocente Palacios in Caracas, from Las Tres Majas to The Three Models which is as it appeared in the catalogue and exhibition label at the recent exhibition Armando Reverón at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.