The View From the Equator

Meeting at the Pentagon demands your attention—five brutally square canvases almost 6 feet tall and wide encase bulky, scheming figures who have more than a little in common with the grotesqueries German artist George Grosz saw during the years that led to the Nazi regime. The men in the paintings could be Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle planning their moves at home and abroad. But not quite—this painting was created in 1970 by Ecuadorian painter Oswaldo Guayasamín, providing one more reminder of the similarities between eras of warfare separated by nearly 40 years. Vanderbilt University has assembled the first U.S. full-career retrospective of the art of Guayasamín, who died in 1999 after six decades of art-making that established him as one of his country’s leading artists. He produced a body of work most notable for its strong political and social passions, expressed in a modernist style that owed more to Paris than New York. This exhibit takes us back into a world of politics and aesthetics that existed as a kind of parallel universe not always visible to the American art world then and now. Guayasamín was the son of working-class parents who came up through Ecuador’s art schools. As a young artist he quickly gained international attention (including support from Nelson Rockefeller during a stint at the State Department’s Office of Inter-American Affairs), and spent most of his life based in Quito. As he gained stature, he developed associations and friendships with notable cultural and political figures like Pablo Neruda, Fidel Castro and Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú (who spoke at Vanderbilt when this show opened). Guayasamín categorized his own work into three major periods reflecting his tone, style and content at the time—“Huaycaynan” or “The Path of Tears” in the 1950s, “The Age of Wrath” from the 1960s through the early ’80s, and a final period he called “Tenderness.”

His most satisfying works are the pieces from the Path of Tears and Age of Wrath periods, where his work was motivated by protest and rage in the face of the world’s violence and injustice. Meeting at the Pentagon clearly reflects this spirit, with its gallery of plodding and plotting characters, as do two other triptychs from the period, “The Tortured” (1976-77) and “The Cry” (1983). With its figures broken down at awkward angles,“The Cry” recalls Picasso, whose own masterpiece “Guernica” was an important predecessor in the use of modern art to express the most impassioned protest. Guayasamín also engaged the traditional craft of drawing in works like “The Tortured,” where he emphasized the underlying bones and muscles of figures, bringing them close to the surface in skeletal visions that add to the horror of screaming heads outlined in red.

During the years when Guayasamín was most productive, the New York-centered art world was preoccupied with a series of movements not reflected in his work—pop, minimalism, conceptual art and so forth. Guayasamín, meanwhile, stayed firmly within the language of the earlier Paris-based artists. (At the Vanderbilt show, you can see similarities to Matisse in a series of Guayasamín’s ink drawings of nudes.) Earnest protest art doesn’t fair so well in the prevalent narrative of postwar art history, but his work was not anachronistic within the context of Latin America. There the prevalence and proximity of dictatorships, juntas, coups, “dirty wars” and U.S. interventions (most notoriously the overthrow of Chile’s elected president Salvador Allende in 1973) gave “protest art” greater cultural centrality throughout this period. Describing Guayasamín’s work (during his early and middle periods) as art of protest should not be taken as a dismissal of its aesthetic value. He showed a firm sense of craft throughout his career, which may come out most clearly in the prints on display at Sarratt Gallery (an annex to the show at the Fine Arts Gallery). A lithograph such as “Cabeza (Head)” has a deeply satisfying range of earthy colors—oranges, yellows, brown, olive, black and a little green. It makes you notice the handling of color in the paintings, for instance the red outlines around the figures and the outer border in“The Tortured.” The red varies subtly across the three paintings, but a very vivid tone predominates, obviously chosen with great care. The paint in the triptych is applied in layers and scraped away to create complexities of color, texture and shape—a common enough technique, but in the context of this subject, it heightens the sensation of horrendous rawness. In Meeting at the Pentagon, the hulking figures are created from paint applied so thickly that up close it looks like a mineral deposit. Technique again reflects the subject very immediately, as if Guayasamín were engaged in a process analogous to method acting, where he physically manifests the characteristics of his subjects.