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Lot Essay
“The important thing about my work is not whether it is good or bad, whether people like it or not, but that it is has the authenticity of my geography,” Reyes once reflected. “My painting has the color, form, and baroque style of my roots” (in Emma Reyes, exh. cat., MAMCO Geneva, 2023, p. 24). Abandoned as a child and raised in harrowing conditions at a convent in Bogotá, she began a peripatetic life that would take her first around South America—Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Caacupé (Paraguay)—and then to Paris, Mexico City, Israel, and Italy before she settled permanently in France in 1960. Self-taught, Reyes began to paint in 1943 and later studied at the Académie André Lhote and with artists including Antonio Berni, Diego Rivera, Lola Álvarez Bravo, and Enrico Prampolini. Her extraordinary epistolary memoir, The Book of Emma Reyes, which recounts the impoverished and astonishingly abusive conditions of her childhood, was published to critical acclaim in 2012. Reyes participated in the XXVIII Venice Biennale (1956), but it was her revelatory presentation in the most recent edition, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere (2024), curated by Adriano Pedrosa, that has newly brought her work to light.
In 1957, Reyes was invited by the Instituto Cultural de América Latina en Israel to join the artist’s colony, Ein Hod, in Israel, and she spent eighteen months in residence. “It was there,” journalist Gloria Valencia explained, “that she became fascinated with the landscape she saw growing in the form of forests, villages, and cement factories in places that had once been deserts” (in Emma Reyes: cajones & dechados, Santiago de Cali, 2017, p. 72). Following her return to Italy, in 1958, she exhibited works from the resulting series, Paisajes de Israel, at Galleria Schneider (Rome; 1959) and Galleria Montenapoleone (Milan; 1960). “No one here dares to paint like that,” wrote a contemporary reviewer. “Looking at the paintings, one finds a form of violence that is neither European nor even Israeli. It is the aggression of the Americans that finally takes shape” (A. de Moravia, in Emma Reyes: cajones & dechados, op. cit., p. 73).
Heated to the point of incandescence, Monte Calvario teems with a telluric energy that courses through the jagged ridges and faces of its prismatic mountains and across its tangerine sky. “The landscapes resemble tapestry cartoons,” noted critic Marta Traba, “whose meticulous and painstaking workmanship revived the ornamental fury of fin-de-siècle Art Nouveau and the melancholic colored-glass screens cut by thick black lines, forming cascades of leaves” (Mirar en Bogotá, Bogotá, 1976, pp. 45-6). Here, these decorative effects of pattern, shade, and texture describe a spectacular landscape, abstracted through glossy, plastic color—a ruddy palette of red, orange, pink, and brown—and sinuous, flowing line. Reyes did not pursue landscape outside of this period—other works in the series include Monte Carmelo and Monte Tabor (Galilea)—and Monte Calvario is a rare and dazzling example of her monumental vision.
The present work takes its name from Mount Calvary, outside of Jerusalem, where Jesus was crucified. But Reyes almost certainly understood Monte Calvario in more broadly humanist and universal terms. “The motif of my palette is the human being,” she explained in 1958. “The landscape is found within the human being. And that’s why man has the color of the landscape, the landscape of my country, the strong colors of the tropics. Man bears the imprint of that local color; but along with it, also the colors and the anguish of universal mankind, which is not only the indigenous people of the lands of the New Continent, but also the tired, the lonely, and the hopeless who live in the technological and sophisticated environment of our century” (in Emma Reyes: Cajones & dechados, op. cit., p. 38).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
In 1957, Reyes was invited by the Instituto Cultural de América Latina en Israel to join the artist’s colony, Ein Hod, in Israel, and she spent eighteen months in residence. “It was there,” journalist Gloria Valencia explained, “that she became fascinated with the landscape she saw growing in the form of forests, villages, and cement factories in places that had once been deserts” (in Emma Reyes: cajones & dechados, Santiago de Cali, 2017, p. 72). Following her return to Italy, in 1958, she exhibited works from the resulting series, Paisajes de Israel, at Galleria Schneider (Rome; 1959) and Galleria Montenapoleone (Milan; 1960). “No one here dares to paint like that,” wrote a contemporary reviewer. “Looking at the paintings, one finds a form of violence that is neither European nor even Israeli. It is the aggression of the Americans that finally takes shape” (A. de Moravia, in Emma Reyes: cajones & dechados, op. cit., p. 73).
Heated to the point of incandescence, Monte Calvario teems with a telluric energy that courses through the jagged ridges and faces of its prismatic mountains and across its tangerine sky. “The landscapes resemble tapestry cartoons,” noted critic Marta Traba, “whose meticulous and painstaking workmanship revived the ornamental fury of fin-de-siècle Art Nouveau and the melancholic colored-glass screens cut by thick black lines, forming cascades of leaves” (Mirar en Bogotá, Bogotá, 1976, pp. 45-6). Here, these decorative effects of pattern, shade, and texture describe a spectacular landscape, abstracted through glossy, plastic color—a ruddy palette of red, orange, pink, and brown—and sinuous, flowing line. Reyes did not pursue landscape outside of this period—other works in the series include Monte Carmelo and Monte Tabor (Galilea)—and Monte Calvario is a rare and dazzling example of her monumental vision.
The present work takes its name from Mount Calvary, outside of Jerusalem, where Jesus was crucified. But Reyes almost certainly understood Monte Calvario in more broadly humanist and universal terms. “The motif of my palette is the human being,” she explained in 1958. “The landscape is found within the human being. And that’s why man has the color of the landscape, the landscape of my country, the strong colors of the tropics. Man bears the imprint of that local color; but along with it, also the colors and the anguish of universal mankind, which is not only the indigenous people of the lands of the New Continent, but also the tired, the lonely, and the hopeless who live in the technological and sophisticated environment of our century” (in Emma Reyes: Cajones & dechados, op. cit., p. 38).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park