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Excerpt: Carlos Cruz-Diez in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez
This excerpt is from the book Carlos Cruz-Diez in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez, published by Fundación Cisneros/Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in 2010. The book is available to read and download for free.
Born in Venezuela in 1923, Cruz-Diez traveled in Western Europe throughout the 1950s, absorbing Bauhaus color theory and trends in geometric abstraction. He returned to Venezuela in 1957 to help initiate a massive wave of experimentation in Abstract, Concrete, Op, and Kinetic art. His work explored the relationship between color and perception in installations, environments, and public sculptures.
Carlos Cruz-Diez (CCD): Ever since I was a child, nothing captivated me more than drawing and painting. When I entered the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas (School of Visual and Graphic Arts), I discovered the vast world of art and the pleasure of working with materials I had never used before, such as oil, canvas, and pastel. As I learned and progressed, I was plagued by many doubts, concerns, and anxieties, as well as a deep feeling of exclusion when I saw that not a single Venezuelan was featured in the art history books that fell into my hands. And so I asked myself, weren’t Arturo Michelena, Cristóbal Rojas, and Tovar y Tovar artists? If not, what were they? Did art and artists simply not exist in Venezuela?
Ariel Jiménez (AJ): Anyone with even the slightest historical consciousness, who is able to gauge the immense inequalities in our country, cannot help but be pained by them. Dissatisfaction with the present inevitably awakens a desire for change and, among some of us, a desire to contribute through our work to help make that change possible. It makes perfect sense, then, that at the close of one of the longest and most backward dictatorships in Venezuelan history, that of Juan Vicente Gómez,[1] young Venezuelans would feel a need to transform the reality they had known, most especially if they had a dim view of our country’s cultural legacy.
CCD: Sometimes it is a healthy response to caricature grave things because it helps make them less painful. I learned this from my mother, who was able to make a joke out of the most difficult situations. This is why I say, with great pride, that I come from a country that is “pre-Columbianly underdeveloped,” in which great historic traditions do not exist, and where the most educated Indians, who inhabited the regions at the mouth of the Orinoco River, had to flee upon the arrival of the savage Caribes. Our legacy, though significant, did not reach the level of development that it did in Peru, Mexico, Central America, and even Colombia. As we know, Spain invested very little in these lands because the wealth was hidden mostly beneath the earth, invisible to the naked eye. When Venezuela was a Capitanía General territory under Spanish rule, neither buildings nor temples of stone were built, with the exception of castles for protecting the salt mines, which were the only visible source of wealth. King Charles V used the territory to pay off the debts generated by the wars in Flanders, by handing over these lands to a group of German bankers who found nothing but death there.[2] Since wealth was not generated here, Spain made no cultural investment in Venezuela, nor were individuals of importance sent as administrators. In addition, our sad nineteenth century (with the exception of Guzmán Blanco,[3] who founded the Academia de Historia [Academy of History] and the Academia de Bellas Artes [Academy of Fine Arts]) was dominated by strongmen, some of them ambitious, uneducated thieves who dressed themselves up as military officers when they reached office, and for whom art and culture meant nothing at all. These origins do not depress me—they make me feel proud, because everything that I am and everything that we can be is the result of the individual efforts of each and every one of the Venezuelan people. We do not inherit our culture, we have to invent it.
AJ: And yet for those of us who today face the task of assembling at least part of the history that seemed nonexistent when we were younger, it becomes clear that the great Venezuelan artists did not come from nowhere. On the contrary, there are traditions that begin to emerge, that inform and lend meaning to what each of you has done. You have to acknowledge, at least, what you owe to the landscape practices of your teachers at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Caracas.
CCD: Of course, but back then we had very little understanding of that past. Alfredo Boulton’s Historia de la pintura en Venezuela [History of Painting in Venezuela] didn’t even exist.[4] The Escuela de Artes Plásticas was located on the corner of El Cuño, in the Altagracia parish, in the building that had been the headquarters of “Los Chácharos,” the Andean policemen that Juan Vicente Gómez had brought to Caracas to terrorize city residents. The school survived on a meager budget, but it did have its virtues, among them the truly solid education it offered, due in great part to the intellectual and moral fiber of its professors. In art history, for example, we had professors like Luis Alfredo López Méndez, who would take us to see and study the best collections in Venezuela, such as those of the Pietri, Boulton, and Röhl families. These included works by classic European artists and even Flemish painters as well as, of course, the works of Venezuelan academic painters. We would continually meet with the teachers, which included Antonio Edmundo Monsanto, Luis Alfredo López Méndez, Marcos Castillo, Juan Vicente Fabbiani, César Prieto, and Francisco Narváez, and they would show us the art books from the library, making all sorts of comments. López Méndez was particularly engaging.
AJ: The fact that you were studying art just a few years after the end of the Gómez dictatorship must have been symbolic of the tremendous change that was such an inspiration to that generation. The most influential intellectuals at the time spoke of a rebirth, almost a renaissance; perhaps many of you felt that the moment had come to create truly important works of art.[5]
CCD: We felt the need to act, to change the country and become part of history. We were anxious to move forward and not continue to be submissive to ideas from abroad. Weren’t we capable of creating a form of art that represented us? This was how it occurred to me that perhaps by studying our folklore, I might identify the source of a discourse that could be ours, something that had never been said before, and that would free us from cultural dependence. This idea was what prompted me to take a number of trips through the interior of the country, taking photographs and making movies, drawing and gathering information that I would later sprinkle in works that told the story of a number of popular traditions. I was convinced that this was how we would find a powerful, authentic universe of meaning that would be every bit as significant to us as those of other countries were to them. From there I thought we could create works to represent our history like those that the Americans had made out of the stories of their wars, indigenous people, cowboys, and gangsters, and that the Europeans had done with their own immense historical patrimony.
AJ: This is still a valid aim. These are authentic social and cultural phenomena, part of the cultural reality of the world. And as with all the best cultural forms, they are most effective when they have universal underpinnings. Perhaps what had been missing was a painter of broad, expansive talent like Diego Rivera in Mexico, someone capable of envisioning and creating a powerful work of art from those depths of meaning?
CCD: Underlying that desire was the hope that a Venezuelan might be able to see eye-to-eye with anyone in the world. We wanted to have a voice, to be heard. To affirm our existence. As I have said a number of times, I believe this wasn’t a personal motivation, it was the need of an entire generation.
AJ: You wanted to emerge from the sort of history-free limbo that Venezuela then inhabited, or that you perceived. I think this sentiment is shared by a great many Latin Americans even today.
CCD: Not long ago, a young woman told me what it had been like for her to visit the Tate Gallery in London. "You can’t imagine the joy," she said, "the deep feeling that is awakened when you go to such an important museum and you find works by Venezuelan artists. It fills me with pride."
I too have felt that same pride for those Venezuelans who have made significant works and who have reached a worldwide audience. Is it a feeling of vindication that tells us "Yes, we can!"? Perhaps, but patriotic sentiments are not enough to make a work of art meaningful. On the contrary, they can actually inspire misguided and even dangerous, regrettable passions. The ideas that find an audience and generate interest among people in different parts of the world are those that have never been heard before, those key works that guide the human spirit toward new horizons.
[1] Juan Vicente Gómez (1857–1935) was a Venezuelan strongman from the region of Los Andes who governed the country from 1908 to 1935.
[2] In 1528 the Wesler family, bankers and businessmen from Augsburg, Austria, signed an agreement with the Spanish crown to exploit, populate, and govern the province of Venezuela. The pact remained in force until 1546, at which point the concession was withdrawn because of the dissatisfaction that had spread among Castilian settlers and accusations that the agreement had been violated.
[3] Antonio Guzmán Blanco (1829–1899) was a Venezuelan strongman who controlled the country from 1870 to 1888. He championed the secularization of the state and issued a decree establishing that education was to be universal and free of cost to all. He was among the presidents who offered the greatest support to visual artists, through scholarships and large-scale projects for the government.
[4] Alfredo Boulton (1908–1995) was a photographer as well as one of the most influential art historians and critics in Venezuela. He authored the first history of painting in Venezuela, Historia de la pintura en Venezuela [History of Painting in Venezuela], a work that encompasses art from the Colonial period through the 1970s.
[5] Intellectuals like Mariano Picón Salas (1901–1965) often said that the Venezuelan twentieth century began in 1936, after the death of dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. Alfredo Boulton, for his part, wrote an article in 1939 comparing Giotto’s historic circumstance to that of Venezuela, coming to the conclusion that the time had indeed arrived for Venezuelans to produce authentic work. A few years later, Alejandro Otero started working on his series entitled Las cafeteras [The Coffeepots], with the conviction that for the first time in Venezuela, he had received a calling to create a truly important painting.
Image: Carlos Cruz-Diez at the exhibition Fisicromías y Color Aditivo held at Museo de Bellas Artes in 1960.
Born in Venezuela in 1923, Cruz-Diez traveled in Western Europe throughout the 1950s, absorbing Bauhaus color theory and trends in geometric abstraction. He returned to Venezuela in 1957 to help initiate a massive wave of experimentation in Abstract, Concrete, Op, and Kinetic art. His work explored the relationship between color and perception in installations, environments, and public sculptures.
Carlos Cruz-Diez (CCD): Ever since I was a child, nothing captivated me more than drawing and painting. When I entered the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas (School of Visual and Graphic Arts), I discovered the vast world of art and the pleasure of working with materials I had never used before, such as oil, canvas, and pastel. As I learned and progressed, I was plagued by many doubts, concerns, and anxieties, as well as a deep feeling of exclusion when I saw that not a single Venezuelan was featured in the art history books that fell into my hands. And so I asked myself, weren’t Arturo Michelena, Cristóbal Rojas, and Tovar y Tovar artists? If not, what were they? Did art and artists simply not exist in Venezuela?
Ariel Jiménez (AJ): Anyone with even the slightest historical consciousness, who is able to gauge the immense inequalities in our country, cannot help but be pained by them. Dissatisfaction with the present inevitably awakens a desire for change and, among some of us, a desire to contribute through our work to help make that change possible. It makes perfect sense, then, that at the close of one of the longest and most backward dictatorships in Venezuelan history, that of Juan Vicente Gómez,[1] young Venezuelans would feel a need to transform the reality they had known, most especially if they had a dim view of our country’s cultural legacy.
CCD: Sometimes it is a healthy response to caricature grave things because it helps make them less painful. I learned this from my mother, who was able to make a joke out of the most difficult situations. This is why I say, with great pride, that I come from a country that is “pre-Columbianly underdeveloped,” in which great historic traditions do not exist, and where the most educated Indians, who inhabited the regions at the mouth of the Orinoco River, had to flee upon the arrival of the savage Caribes. Our legacy, though significant, did not reach the level of development that it did in Peru, Mexico, Central America, and even Colombia. As we know, Spain invested very little in these lands because the wealth was hidden mostly beneath the earth, invisible to the naked eye. When Venezuela was a Capitanía General territory under Spanish rule, neither buildings nor temples of stone were built, with the exception of castles for protecting the salt mines, which were the only visible source of wealth. King Charles V used the territory to pay off the debts generated by the wars in Flanders, by handing over these lands to a group of German bankers who found nothing but death there.[2] Since wealth was not generated here, Spain made no cultural investment in Venezuela, nor were individuals of importance sent as administrators. In addition, our sad nineteenth century (with the exception of Guzmán Blanco,[3] who founded the Academia de Historia [Academy of History] and the Academia de Bellas Artes [Academy of Fine Arts]) was dominated by strongmen, some of them ambitious, uneducated thieves who dressed themselves up as military officers when they reached office, and for whom art and culture meant nothing at all. These origins do not depress me—they make me feel proud, because everything that I am and everything that we can be is the result of the individual efforts of each and every one of the Venezuelan people. We do not inherit our culture, we have to invent it.
AJ: And yet for those of us who today face the task of assembling at least part of the history that seemed nonexistent when we were younger, it becomes clear that the great Venezuelan artists did not come from nowhere. On the contrary, there are traditions that begin to emerge, that inform and lend meaning to what each of you has done. You have to acknowledge, at least, what you owe to the landscape practices of your teachers at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Caracas.
CCD: Of course, but back then we had very little understanding of that past. Alfredo Boulton’s Historia de la pintura en Venezuela [History of Painting in Venezuela] didn’t even exist.[4] The Escuela de Artes Plásticas was located on the corner of El Cuño, in the Altagracia parish, in the building that had been the headquarters of “Los Chácharos,” the Andean policemen that Juan Vicente Gómez had brought to Caracas to terrorize city residents. The school survived on a meager budget, but it did have its virtues, among them the truly solid education it offered, due in great part to the intellectual and moral fiber of its professors. In art history, for example, we had professors like Luis Alfredo López Méndez, who would take us to see and study the best collections in Venezuela, such as those of the Pietri, Boulton, and Röhl families. These included works by classic European artists and even Flemish painters as well as, of course, the works of Venezuelan academic painters. We would continually meet with the teachers, which included Antonio Edmundo Monsanto, Luis Alfredo López Méndez, Marcos Castillo, Juan Vicente Fabbiani, César Prieto, and Francisco Narváez, and they would show us the art books from the library, making all sorts of comments. López Méndez was particularly engaging.
AJ: The fact that you were studying art just a few years after the end of the Gómez dictatorship must have been symbolic of the tremendous change that was such an inspiration to that generation. The most influential intellectuals at the time spoke of a rebirth, almost a renaissance; perhaps many of you felt that the moment had come to create truly important works of art.[5]
CCD: We felt the need to act, to change the country and become part of history. We were anxious to move forward and not continue to be submissive to ideas from abroad. Weren’t we capable of creating a form of art that represented us? This was how it occurred to me that perhaps by studying our folklore, I might identify the source of a discourse that could be ours, something that had never been said before, and that would free us from cultural dependence. This idea was what prompted me to take a number of trips through the interior of the country, taking photographs and making movies, drawing and gathering information that I would later sprinkle in works that told the story of a number of popular traditions. I was convinced that this was how we would find a powerful, authentic universe of meaning that would be every bit as significant to us as those of other countries were to them. From there I thought we could create works to represent our history like those that the Americans had made out of the stories of their wars, indigenous people, cowboys, and gangsters, and that the Europeans had done with their own immense historical patrimony.
AJ: This is still a valid aim. These are authentic social and cultural phenomena, part of the cultural reality of the world. And as with all the best cultural forms, they are most effective when they have universal underpinnings. Perhaps what had been missing was a painter of broad, expansive talent like Diego Rivera in Mexico, someone capable of envisioning and creating a powerful work of art from those depths of meaning?
CCD: Underlying that desire was the hope that a Venezuelan might be able to see eye-to-eye with anyone in the world. We wanted to have a voice, to be heard. To affirm our existence. As I have said a number of times, I believe this wasn’t a personal motivation, it was the need of an entire generation.
AJ: You wanted to emerge from the sort of history-free limbo that Venezuela then inhabited, or that you perceived. I think this sentiment is shared by a great many Latin Americans even today.
CCD: Not long ago, a young woman told me what it had been like for her to visit the Tate Gallery in London. "You can’t imagine the joy," she said, "the deep feeling that is awakened when you go to such an important museum and you find works by Venezuelan artists. It fills me with pride."
I too have felt that same pride for those Venezuelans who have made significant works and who have reached a worldwide audience. Is it a feeling of vindication that tells us "Yes, we can!"? Perhaps, but patriotic sentiments are not enough to make a work of art meaningful. On the contrary, they can actually inspire misguided and even dangerous, regrettable passions. The ideas that find an audience and generate interest among people in different parts of the world are those that have never been heard before, those key works that guide the human spirit toward new horizons.
[1] Juan Vicente Gómez (1857–1935) was a Venezuelan strongman from the region of Los Andes who governed the country from 1908 to 1935.
[2] In 1528 the Wesler family, bankers and businessmen from Augsburg, Austria, signed an agreement with the Spanish crown to exploit, populate, and govern the province of Venezuela. The pact remained in force until 1546, at which point the concession was withdrawn because of the dissatisfaction that had spread among Castilian settlers and accusations that the agreement had been violated.
[3] Antonio Guzmán Blanco (1829–1899) was a Venezuelan strongman who controlled the country from 1870 to 1888. He championed the secularization of the state and issued a decree establishing that education was to be universal and free of cost to all. He was among the presidents who offered the greatest support to visual artists, through scholarships and large-scale projects for the government.
[4] Alfredo Boulton (1908–1995) was a photographer as well as one of the most influential art historians and critics in Venezuela. He authored the first history of painting in Venezuela, Historia de la pintura en Venezuela [History of Painting in Venezuela], a work that encompasses art from the Colonial period through the 1970s.
[5] Intellectuals like Mariano Picón Salas (1901–1965) often said that the Venezuelan twentieth century began in 1936, after the death of dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. Alfredo Boulton, for his part, wrote an article in 1939 comparing Giotto’s historic circumstance to that of Venezuela, coming to the conclusion that the time had indeed arrived for Venezuelans to produce authentic work. A few years later, Alejandro Otero started working on his series entitled Las cafeteras [The Coffeepots], with the conviction that for the first time in Venezuela, he had received a calling to create a truly important painting.
Image: Carlos Cruz-Diez at the exhibition Fisicromías y Color Aditivo held at Museo de Bellas Artes in 1960.
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