Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism, written by Edward J. Sullivan

2016; Brill; Volume: 90; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1163/22134360-09003046

2213-4360

Sally Price,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Francisco Oller was a Puerto Rican artist born into a "white uppermiddle-class family of intellectuals and medical professionals" (p.12), whose life work was deeply marked by relationships with Impressionist artists and extended sojourns in European capitals, especially Madrid and Paris.Edward Sullivan looks at the ways in which Oller combined the influences of his experiences abroad with an "intense attachment to the specifics of Puerto Rican geography, light, flora, and the customs of its inhabitants" (p.3).Tacking between art historical and social/political analysis, he attempts to tease out Oller's positions (abolitionist sympathies, anticlericalism, etc.) in the details of particular paintings.Chapter 1 runs through Caribbean scenes by American and European artists such as Winslow Homer and Frederic Church, arguing that Oller's art fits the mold of works by these foreign travelers in spite of the fact that he was a native son.The next five chapters give special attention to particular paintings, using each to launch discussion of related topics in art history-Postmortem photography, Naturalist painting in France, nineteenth-century history painting in Spain, the recent renewal of interest in still-life art, etc. Chapter 2 analyzes El Velorio, described by Cuban art historian Yolanda Wood as "the most important painting for the turn-of-the-century Caribbean."(It also inspired a stunning homage to Oller by Puerto Rican artist Antonio Martorell-see nwig 85 [2011]:90.)Sullivan interprets El Velorio as "both allegorical and realistic [and] a mordant critique of both working-class society and the clergy" (pp.77, 80).Chapter 3 analyzes a painting depicting Rafael Cordero, the son of free persons of color who founded Puerto Rico's first school for the children of slaves.Chapter 4 focuses on The Battle of Treviño, a tumultuous scene realized at the end of Oller's 1873-84 trip to Europe.Sullivan points out that Oller's only battle painting depicts a scene from the history of Spain, and he contrasts the absence of war imagery in art of nineteenth-century Puerto Rico (and the Caribbean more generally) with its presence in contemporaneous art of postindependence Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.Chapter 5 returns to the Caribbean and Oller's famous still lifes of Caribbean fruits, relating them to early European precedents-both Spanish still lifes and the depiction of Brazilian fruits by seventeenth-century Dutch artist Albert Eckhout.