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Lot Essay
“In 1940,” wrote the critic Marta Traba, “the man who was to become our greatest national painter began to work: Alejandro Obregón.” Born in Spain, Obregón studied briefly at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts under Karl Zerbe before moving to Barcelona and later settling in Bogotá, where he taught at (and later directed) the Escuela de Bellas Artes beginning in 1944. “Over a period of fifteen years, Obregón perfected his style,” Traba continued. “His romantic and baroque traits—his delight in surprising and dazzling, his deep and passionate sense of painting, his conviction that a work of art must become flesh and bone—combined to strengthen his formal arguments and to define them with increasing precision.”[1] Obregón rose to international prominence in the 1950s and 1960s as his expressionist abstraction—like that of Peru’s Fernando de Szyszlo and Nicaragua’s Armando Morales—came to define postwar Latin American painting. “The magnetism of Obregón made one think for a moment that Colombian painting was Obregón,” Traba recalled, such was the sheer force of his personality and his prodigious, impassioned talent.
“His condors and his semi-abstract seascapes, his coloristic analogues of the opulent Caribbean flora, are, to be sure, extracted from the world of observed experience,” wrote Thomas Messer, longtime director of the Guggenheim and among Obregón’s early champions. “But it is his apprehension of the form language of his generation—private version of abstract expressionism—that renders his shapes and images alive and meaningful.”[2] Notwithstanding the rich cultural and mythological symbolism of his subjects, Obregón embraced the (existential) primacy of plastic values in his work. “Painting is a tremendous responsibility,” he acknowledged. “When I squeeze the paint out I am afraid, literally afraid....Too much light kills color....In violence—a chance to see and feel extreme tenderness or extreme fury. In love—the obsession for a solution of that which one can never solve.”[3]
“What one can paint is very limited,” he later reflected. “The sea, air, earth, people, and animals, and an eternal combination of them all.” Yet within his self-described limits of “four or five subjects and three colors: red, blue and yellow,” he portrayed the raw beauty, and violence, of the natural world in now archetypal paintings of condors and bulls, barracudas and tigers, volcanoes and mangrove swamps.[4] “The bull,” explains art historian Carmen María Jaramillo, “is the animal of strength, fiesta, ritual, or death. The bulls come from painting, from the caves of Altamira, and from his stay in Barcelona (1940-1944), when he developed a deep admiration for Picasso” and traveled often “to Madrid to see Goya, ‘the painter par excellence.’”[5] The figure of the bull may have appeared for the first time in the painting Entierro de Joselito Carnaval (1957), here in reference to the “famous danza del torito” of the Barranquilla Carnival. Early works featured hybrid animals—“toro cóndor,” “cóndor toro”—that allude to Andean ritual festivals; later toros, including the present example, depict a solitary animal, at times evoking the ritual drama of the bullfight.
Rendered in virile, gestural brushstrokes, the subject of the present El toro strikes a commanding pose, his magnificent body gleaming against a tenebrous ground. “These figures do not represent anything but the painting itself,” wrote the poet J. G. Cobo Borda of Obregón’s vaunted subjects. “In the space created, they are merely a cobalt blue, a zinc white, a veronese green and a crimson red. The hand and the eye of a painter.”[6] In El toro, startling passages of red, blue, and white highlight the bull’s dense musculature, vigorous brushstrokes distilling the heroic bravura and aggression for which it is revered into an explosive, painterly drama of contrasts and chiaroscuro. “His painting, with horizons of thundercaps, comes out dripping with fighting minotaurs, patriotic condors, lusty goats, bellowing barracudas,” declared Obregón’s great friend, the writer Gabriel García Márquez. “It’s not that he only lives to paint. No: it’s that he lives only when he paints.”[7]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“His condors and his semi-abstract seascapes, his coloristic analogues of the opulent Caribbean flora, are, to be sure, extracted from the world of observed experience,” wrote Thomas Messer, longtime director of the Guggenheim and among Obregón’s early champions. “But it is his apprehension of the form language of his generation—private version of abstract expressionism—that renders his shapes and images alive and meaningful.”[2] Notwithstanding the rich cultural and mythological symbolism of his subjects, Obregón embraced the (existential) primacy of plastic values in his work. “Painting is a tremendous responsibility,” he acknowledged. “When I squeeze the paint out I am afraid, literally afraid....Too much light kills color....In violence—a chance to see and feel extreme tenderness or extreme fury. In love—the obsession for a solution of that which one can never solve.”[3]
“What one can paint is very limited,” he later reflected. “The sea, air, earth, people, and animals, and an eternal combination of them all.” Yet within his self-described limits of “four or five subjects and three colors: red, blue and yellow,” he portrayed the raw beauty, and violence, of the natural world in now archetypal paintings of condors and bulls, barracudas and tigers, volcanoes and mangrove swamps.[4] “The bull,” explains art historian Carmen María Jaramillo, “is the animal of strength, fiesta, ritual, or death. The bulls come from painting, from the caves of Altamira, and from his stay in Barcelona (1940-1944), when he developed a deep admiration for Picasso” and traveled often “to Madrid to see Goya, ‘the painter par excellence.’”[5] The figure of the bull may have appeared for the first time in the painting Entierro de Joselito Carnaval (1957), here in reference to the “famous danza del torito” of the Barranquilla Carnival. Early works featured hybrid animals—“toro cóndor,” “cóndor toro”—that allude to Andean ritual festivals; later toros, including the present example, depict a solitary animal, at times evoking the ritual drama of the bullfight.
Rendered in virile, gestural brushstrokes, the subject of the present El toro strikes a commanding pose, his magnificent body gleaming against a tenebrous ground. “These figures do not represent anything but the painting itself,” wrote the poet J. G. Cobo Borda of Obregón’s vaunted subjects. “In the space created, they are merely a cobalt blue, a zinc white, a veronese green and a crimson red. The hand and the eye of a painter.”[6] In El toro, startling passages of red, blue, and white highlight the bull’s dense musculature, vigorous brushstrokes distilling the heroic bravura and aggression for which it is revered into an explosive, painterly drama of contrasts and chiaroscuro. “His painting, with horizons of thundercaps, comes out dripping with fighting minotaurs, patriotic condors, lusty goats, bellowing barracudas,” declared Obregón’s great friend, the writer Gabriel García Márquez. “It’s not that he only lives to paint. No: it’s that he lives only when he paints.”[7]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park