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Lot Essay
The painting was in the collection of the late Dr. Harold E. Moore who was a world renowned botanist from Cornell University, where he was also Director of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium. At the time of his early death, nearly twenty-five years ago, he was considered a world expert in palms. His travels had taken him all over the tropical and sub-tropical world studying palms and to Mexico where he purchased the work.
By the time Juan O'Gorman finished his architectural studies at the age of twenty-two, he was already a consummate painter with a signature style. Since childhood, he had shown prodigious talent for drawing and his father, Cecil Crawford O'Gorman, a mining engineer by profession, being an exquisite painter himself, made certain that he taught his oldest son everything he knew about drawing and painting. Cecil was a stern man with a severe personality and an obsession for detail. He only believed that Juan had learned his hard-driven lessons when the boy's style of painting finally mirrored his own. To his drawing, Cecil applied the golden mean and his painting style had been learned from the Flemish primitives; but his exquisite craft and obsession with minutiae were products of an unbending discipline. Cecil passed all of these teachings (and personal conflicts) to Juan who, in fear, learned them so well that he spent much of his life searching for ways to break away from them. He succeeded best in his easel work, particularly in his many landscapes. But before producing this mature work, Juan dedicated himself to architecture, his first professional love.
For Juan O'Gorman, becoming an architect was one step toward independence from his father's influence. A short step, one might say, as in his early architectural work he sought to create functional but ascetic environments that could have been seen as machines in which to live. Shortly after finishing architectural school, around 1924, the young Juan came upon Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture, a book he read and studied over and over. He was deeply influenced by Le Corbusier's shifting away from academically designed houses to creating living spaces intended for strict functionalism that seemed to have been designed more by an engineer than by an architect. Juan built houses for his father, brother, for Julio Castellanos, and some public buildings. But the structures for which he is best known are the twin houses he designed as Casa-Estudio for Diego Rivera and Casa-Habitación for Frida Kahlo, stark cube-like structures built side by side and connected by a bridge on Altavista Avenue in the suburb of San Angel. Rivera's was pink and Kahlo's was indigo.
The effect that Rivera and Kahlo had on O'Gorman, the painter and the person, cannot be underestimated. After establishing a friendship with both, each exerted his or her own brand of influence on him, which O'Gorman took in gratefully to water down the influence of his father. Juan painted portraits of Rivera and Kahlo, and he followed in Rivera's footsteps as social critic. With these ideas he created extraordinary murals, two of which were destroyed for their controversial themes. Justino Fernández saw in O'Gorman's murals the best work of its kind that followed the murals created by Los Tres Grandes. With Frida Kahlo, the friendship was of another nature, more playful, more intimate; they critiqued each other's work and teased each other who could better the other's work. It is not unusual to discover details produced in the work of one appear in the work of the other. The mutual admiration was based on great affection and respect for each other as artist.
It was not unusual to discover certain themes that Rivera had explored in his easel work later were explored by Juan O'Gorman. One strong influence is Rivera's sensuous landscapes and vegetation. For example, in O'Gorman's Walden Pond, one can see the tiny erotically charged trees that grow out of the rocks and earth derive from Rivera's paintings of anthropomorphic trees such as Cazahuatl, and Copalli (also known as La pareja), both created in 1937. Rivera's natural inclination to the sensuousness found in nature was a major source of inspiration for O'Gorman who readily learned from it. Before creating the extraordinary landscape El Reino Vegetal, Juan O'Gorman had been struggling to break away from the symmetric repetition of forms that traditional architecture uses to capture space. Although interesting in theory and appealing as experiments, in the end he came to believe that they lacked the rhythm of life, which was also how he felt about himself. El Reino Vegetal is personified by a larger-than-life tree that grows differently from all other trees. Rather than rising straight out of the earth toward the sky, it grows freely, unconcerned with the laws of gravity, moving in a rhythmic flow, like the rhythm of the sea, to escape the prison of time. This is how O'Gorman would have liked to live.
The painting's title derives from Carlos Pellicer's poem Discurso por las Flores:
The vegetable kingdom is a faraway country
Even if we believe it nearby...
When I give my hand as branch to a tree
I feel a connection and what the soul
Exudes when someone is near a brother...
To be a tree means staring sometimes
(Without continuing to grow) humanity's water
and to be filled with birds, to be able to, singing
Reflect the waves of quietude and solitude.
Salomon Grimberg, Dallas, Texas, 2006.
By the time Juan O'Gorman finished his architectural studies at the age of twenty-two, he was already a consummate painter with a signature style. Since childhood, he had shown prodigious talent for drawing and his father, Cecil Crawford O'Gorman, a mining engineer by profession, being an exquisite painter himself, made certain that he taught his oldest son everything he knew about drawing and painting. Cecil was a stern man with a severe personality and an obsession for detail. He only believed that Juan had learned his hard-driven lessons when the boy's style of painting finally mirrored his own. To his drawing, Cecil applied the golden mean and his painting style had been learned from the Flemish primitives; but his exquisite craft and obsession with minutiae were products of an unbending discipline. Cecil passed all of these teachings (and personal conflicts) to Juan who, in fear, learned them so well that he spent much of his life searching for ways to break away from them. He succeeded best in his easel work, particularly in his many landscapes. But before producing this mature work, Juan dedicated himself to architecture, his first professional love.
For Juan O'Gorman, becoming an architect was one step toward independence from his father's influence. A short step, one might say, as in his early architectural work he sought to create functional but ascetic environments that could have been seen as machines in which to live. Shortly after finishing architectural school, around 1924, the young Juan came upon Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture, a book he read and studied over and over. He was deeply influenced by Le Corbusier's shifting away from academically designed houses to creating living spaces intended for strict functionalism that seemed to have been designed more by an engineer than by an architect. Juan built houses for his father, brother, for Julio Castellanos, and some public buildings. But the structures for which he is best known are the twin houses he designed as Casa-Estudio for Diego Rivera and Casa-Habitación for Frida Kahlo, stark cube-like structures built side by side and connected by a bridge on Altavista Avenue in the suburb of San Angel. Rivera's was pink and Kahlo's was indigo.
The effect that Rivera and Kahlo had on O'Gorman, the painter and the person, cannot be underestimated. After establishing a friendship with both, each exerted his or her own brand of influence on him, which O'Gorman took in gratefully to water down the influence of his father. Juan painted portraits of Rivera and Kahlo, and he followed in Rivera's footsteps as social critic. With these ideas he created extraordinary murals, two of which were destroyed for their controversial themes. Justino Fernández saw in O'Gorman's murals the best work of its kind that followed the murals created by Los Tres Grandes. With Frida Kahlo, the friendship was of another nature, more playful, more intimate; they critiqued each other's work and teased each other who could better the other's work. It is not unusual to discover details produced in the work of one appear in the work of the other. The mutual admiration was based on great affection and respect for each other as artist.
It was not unusual to discover certain themes that Rivera had explored in his easel work later were explored by Juan O'Gorman. One strong influence is Rivera's sensuous landscapes and vegetation. For example, in O'Gorman's Walden Pond, one can see the tiny erotically charged trees that grow out of the rocks and earth derive from Rivera's paintings of anthropomorphic trees such as Cazahuatl, and Copalli (also known as La pareja), both created in 1937. Rivera's natural inclination to the sensuousness found in nature was a major source of inspiration for O'Gorman who readily learned from it. Before creating the extraordinary landscape El Reino Vegetal, Juan O'Gorman had been struggling to break away from the symmetric repetition of forms that traditional architecture uses to capture space. Although interesting in theory and appealing as experiments, in the end he came to believe that they lacked the rhythm of life, which was also how he felt about himself. El Reino Vegetal is personified by a larger-than-life tree that grows differently from all other trees. Rather than rising straight out of the earth toward the sky, it grows freely, unconcerned with the laws of gravity, moving in a rhythmic flow, like the rhythm of the sea, to escape the prison of time. This is how O'Gorman would have liked to live.
The painting's title derives from Carlos Pellicer's poem Discurso por las Flores:
The vegetable kingdom is a faraway country
Even if we believe it nearby...
When I give my hand as branch to a tree
I feel a connection and what the soul
Exudes when someone is near a brother...
To be a tree means staring sometimes
(Without continuing to grow) humanity's water
and to be filled with birds, to be able to, singing
Reflect the waves of quietude and solitude.
Salomon Grimberg, Dallas, Texas, 2006.