Alfredo Boulton and His Contemporaries

At the core of this book is a collection of documents from the period 1912 – 74 relating to art and culture in Venezuela, very few of which have previously been available in English. These include staccato manifestos, interviews, newspaper articles, letters, essays, and extracts from longer scholarly texts. The value of such material is enormous for general reference, for comparative research, and for undergraduate courses. There is also a Spanish edition (Museum of Modern Art and Fundación Cisneros, 2009) with the same pagination, so the material could be useful in courses involving a component of language instruction.These historical documents are framed by a number of contemporary essays written especially for this book. These range widely, covering history, politics, and identity as well as the history of art, architecture, and the urban environment. There is interesting material here, and it is certainly good to see so many Venezuelan scholars represented, but much of it is rather broad-brush and is only loosely related to the primary sources it purports to contextualize. Clearly, with nearly 60 texts by around 20 different authors (not including the multiple-authored manifestos), it would not have been feasible or desirable to have a detailed study of each writer, far less of each text, but I would have preferred a more focused historiographical approach that aimed to place some of the recurrent themes of the sources (Latin/Other/Our America; art and politics; figuration versus abstraction; the role of art in society; kineticism and the art market) within a framework of broader intellectual debates in Venezuela at the time.Inevitably for a volume of this scope, there is much that begs to be explored in greater depth, not least the figure of Alfredo Boulton himself. The book’s title gives him a prominence that is not really matched in the content. Rather, he serves as a useful node around which to gather material relating to others: the artists Armando Reverón, Alejandro Otero, and Bárbaro Rivas, and the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva are particularly well represented, for example. Boulton himself is the subject of two useful essays by Roldán Esteva-Grillet and Luis Pérez-Oramas, but his own writings are represented by only a few tantalizing texts. The first of these is a bravura piece by the young Boulton, published in 1933 under the pseudonym Bruno Plá, which condemns almost everything in a major show of contemporary Venezuelan art on display at the Ateneo de Caracas as dull, smug, and badly executed. The astonishingly swift change in the Venezuelan art scene over the next few years is illustrated here by an exchange of letters between Boulton and Otero dating from the late 1940s to early 1960s, where he encourages the artist in his radical exploration of abstraction. These examples made me wish for more, but a heavily abridged version of Boulton’s catalog essay for the 1955 exhibition of Reverón’s work at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas illustrates how difficult it would be to do him justice in this format. His main art historical writings are too substantial and the arguments unfold too discursively to be easily extracted. A more complete bibliography than that provided here, one that at least included all his major books and catalogs, would have been a valuable addition.This is probably not a book many people other than reviewers will read straight through from cover to cover, and indeed it was probably not intended to be used in this way. The diversity of the contents lend themselves to a more personal form of exploration — dipping in, moving back and forth — which, like surfing the Web, enables readers to make their own connections and spin their own narrative and critical threads between the various pieces and sections. This approach can pay good dividends in relation to the illustrations. Indeed, because they are not explicitly referenced in either the essays or the documents, and there are no obvious organizational parallels between texts and images, this may be how the designer hoped they would be used. Moving around the illustrations I was struck not only by the tremendous richness and diversity of Venezuelan art during the twentieth century but also by surprising visual echoes across time and between very different artistic traditions. Arturo Uslar Pietri wrote to his cousin Alfredo Boulton in 1928 about a short story he had just written that he felt achieved his goal of giving “a Venezuelan impression without Venezuelanisms,” that even if translated into Russian it “would smell of Venezuela” (p. 101). The same could be said of the art that is the subject of this book. And it smells good

Aesthetics · Art · History · Literary and Cultural Studies · Photographic and Visual Arts