PEDRO FIGARI
www.pedrofigari.com
sitio web de Fernndo Saavedra Faget
fernandosaavedra@pedrofigari.com - figarisaavedra@hotmail.com
PEDRO FIGARI by LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
COUNCIL FOR INTER-AMERICAN COOPERATION
NEW YORK - 1946
Due to the ample possibilities afforded by our museums, there is a rapidly diminishing gap between the creation of an artist's work and its public exhibition, no matter how special his imagination or remote his studio from our cities. For example, it is unlikely that an important contemporary painter of international reputation should not be at least superficially known througout the United States within a decade of his death. While there are always surprises in first one-man shows, there seem few novelties left us when we are shown the lifework of a personal and authoritative hand.
Yet suddenly, such is the case with Pedro Figari, who died in Montevideo some nine years ago. To be sure, he has often been noticed with pleasure by travellers, and the Museum of Modern Art has hung one of his pictures since 1941, the gift of Robert Woods Bliss, acquired when U.S. Ambassador to Argentina. But he is a many sided artist, and it takes more than a dozen separate pictures to demonstrate his diverse and fascinating gifts. The great series of retrospective exhibitions, illuminating his great career, held in Montevideo by the Ministry of Public Instruction from August through September, 1945, has made it possible to now send to this country a fair choice of his paintings. It is not too much to predict that within a short time, Figari will be represented in many of our museums and private collections, not as a "Latin-American" artist, but as an author of delicious and intensely felt paintings.
Pedro Figari may also become the focus of the popular biographer, for his was a romantic and melodramatic life, the curve of which suggests the publicized mystery and incidental tragedy of certain European artists, like Van Gogh and Gauguin. Indeed his work, as his life, is in the style of international post-impresionists. Having spent many years in Paris, technically he certianly felt the infuence of Vuillard, and to a perhaps greater degree, of Bonnard. However, in using the idiom of the advanced expression of his time, his subjects were generally drawn from his own large memory - an exile's obsessive nostalgia for his own childhood, and of the childhood of his country, thousands of miles away, across the South Atlantic.
It is good, in approaching him for the first time, and in estimating his work, to know a little of Uruguay. Uruguay is often called the Denmark of South America, and it bears certain historical resemblances also to Holland and Switzerland. After a long period of bitter civil wars, the Oriental Republic in recent years has enjoyed a dominantly liberal regime, in which there has been active progress towards social practice and democratic policy. Montevideo is traditionally a haven of political exiles. Its ancient French colony has insured close ties with Paris. Its strategic position commanding the estuary of the Plate is symbolic of the country's independent watchfulness, between Brazil and Argentina. The little country of the Band Oriental (the Eatern Bank, from Buenos Aires) has a sturdy tradition in the arts, letters and jurisprudence,- three branches of activity in which Pedro Figari distinguished himself.
He was born in Montevideo in 1861, from a dominantly Italian-Riviera heritage. He was strictly trained in law, and, as far as most of Montevideo might know, the greater part of his life would certainly be spent in her service. In 1886 he recieved his degree as Abogado, was accredited Defender of the Poor in the Civil and Criminal Courts, married, and sailed for France. It is commonly repeated that Figari did not commence to paint until he was forty-seven. Actually, he seems always to have painted. His early, tight water-color and oil sketches have more than an academic charm. His double portrait of himself and and his young wife at the easel, recalls the expert domestic ontimacy of Manet and Degas. It is true, that in the early part of his life, he considered himself a professional jurist and and amateur painter. But from 1918 until 1938*, he certainly painted to the exclusion of the practice of law, or of writing*. In the recent retrospective shows in Montevideo, a selection from all his paintings was shown in three fortnightly groups; the catalogue numbered some 650 separate items, many from public and private colletions.
During his carrer as public servant, Figari was the focus of a violent cause célèbre, in which he found himself projected into the rôle of an American Zola. In 1895 he consecrated hiself to the defense of a poor youth, in the notorious crimen de la calle Chaná. The affair of the murder on Chana Street had been prejudged with an appalling unanimity, both by the press and in public feeling. It cost Figari four years to obtain, not only the freedom of an innocent, but a complete vindication of himself, whose reputation as Deputy, State Counsellor, attorney and politician had been gravely questioned, due to the brilliance, eloquent agility and clever strategy of his unpopular defense which also forced a reformation in the criminal code.
Finally, however, his honors were restored to him, and he served his country in France as Cultural Commissioner, founded with his son, the National School of Fine Arts* in 1911, and two years later published "El Arte, la Estética y el Ideal", the summation of his philosophical and critical thought. The recent excellent studies, by his friend, the distinguished historian Sr. Arq. Carlos A. Herrera MacLean, the article in "Cuadros Americanos" by Jorge Romero Brest, and the monograph of Giselda Zani, furnish and extended treatment of his biography and supply full bibliographies and catalogues of exhibitions and individual pictures. Here, there is room anly for an introductory word as to his painting.
He was, primarily, the painter of a time and a place. The time was the epoch of 1830 to 1860, when the ex-colony which three European empires had worried between them like dogs a disputed bone, was suffering intermittent civil disorders, attendant upon its emergence as an independent state. It was the epoch of the American life of Figari's emigrant parents, the epopée of the criollo,- the local Platenese amalgam of Spaniard, colonial, and perhaps a dash of Guarani blood, added before all the Indinas had been killed or driven south by battle or massacre, even before the wars of Independence. His place is either the single port, Montevideo, the seat of Governor, Dictator, the Army, society ladies and domesticated African servants - or the plain, vast pampas studded with the solitary ombú, the ranch-house with dancers in the courtyard, or the diligence tracking across the roadless grass, linking the estancias with each other and the far-away town. Figari peoples his time and place with a recurring cast of characters, the bands of pioneers of the early national migrations, the first gauchos, their roughbred horses, their dancing and fighting partners, and the soldiers and their camp-followers sent out from the town quartels, against them. There are also the figures from the train of the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel Rosas, his terrible secret-police, and the crowded salons of the provincial aristocracy which opposed him.
Figari painted in series of subjects. First of all there are his landscapes, with a tall powder-blue sky, the large vibration of the pampas' wide aerial room, landscapes with a single ombú, or an oasis-like clump of this pithy plant, so well described by W. H. Hudson, enormous in its overbranching expansion, which somehow gathers into its shadows, the loneliness of the plain's arid nostalgia. There are landscapes with gauchos working, their painted ponies spotting the grass with leathery white and russet accents. Among many others, there is a particularly memorable image of a wild, abandoned, neighing horse, the stubby creole beast Figari knew so well how to render, caught in its shrill, echoless protest, as if drowning in a sea of endless grass. There are landscapes given their scale by the placement of zinc-white estancias, the square-cut, low ranch-houses, like sugarblocks against the unlimited horizon, alone and locked.
There is a beautiful series of dances, traversing the wheel of the pericón nacional, in a buttery dusk or moth-like moonlight, under groves of lanterned oranges, or inside the wings of a ranch courtyard, in open fields, or in enclosed town-hose patios, tiled and dripping with bougainvilla. One almost hears the insistent plucked guitar, the scuff of heels and the clapped accompaniment of the quadrille, with its processional, wind-mill figures - a kind of gaucho polonaise.
Another rich sequence is devoted to intimate domestic interiors, some from the colonial epoch, but the most impressive laid about 1840, panels of musical evenings with ladies of the Epoca Federal in crinolines, shawls and high tortoise-shell combs, their ample décoletage repeating the sweep of the winged rosewood sofas, and the symetrical damask window drapes, all in rose, red scarlet, crimson,- the colors of the dictator Rosas which even the animals were forced to carry. The women are shrewdly indicated, part gossip, part matriarch, parrot, or witch, as they push forward their eligible or ineligible daughters, buzzing behind stiff fans, dozing through interminable parties, primping hideously before long cheval-glasses, or sitting in low rockers, taking the citron-scented sunlight in their patios, wains-coated with Talavera tile.
Some have thought of Figari as a Latin-American Gauguin of the local negroes. Indeed many of his finest compositions are occupied with the manners of the black people who had wondered down into Uruguay from Brazilian slavery, even before the days of the early republic, and who stayed on as a doomed, fantastic, enclosed colony, domestic servants for the rising class of shippers and merchants of the port. Their brilliant clothes and strange private rituals at their weddings and wakes, are mocked in a half-tamed jungle shadow, the elegant provicialism of their exiled masters. Nows, one can search for a dozen negroes in all fo Uruguay*. There cannot be two hundred left in Argentina; the climate completed what desease and slavery began. But their world is immortalized in Figari's sardonic series,- the men in their tall crepe-hung beaver hats, women in elaborate turbans, advancing in straggling silhouette relief of scarecrow cementeries, followed by mangy pink and black cats and curs. Or lurking in doorways, to emerge en fête as atavistic kings for one day in the year, or dancing their candombe to a battery of huge African painted calabash drums*, beaten high up on a balcony, above a court, filled like a fluttering pool with magenta bandannas and animal gestures. Figari's negroes are less static than Gauguin's South Sea people; in a way less decorative, less exotic, more actively real. Their dyed plaster walls are spalshed with intense semi-transparent washes. Figari always painted on an absorbent carton, or cardboard panel, not in gouache but in oil, a dry, richly flaked impasto, thinly laid on but entirely satifactory. The Negro series approximates, in its fierce clash of orange, purple, pink and coffee, the almost aromatic vibration of the transplanted African atmosphere, not fixed in an idealized flat-pattern but fresh and living in air, as a suddenly remembered incident from a miraculous and all but forgotten childhood.
Certainly his pictures are nostalgic, but it is not merely their nostalgia that moves us. After all, to our colder northern eye, there is no personal connection - splendor of his rotting calcimine, his cracked cerise plaster, ruined tiles and grass oceans - it has nothing to do with any lost youth of ours. It is rather that Figari manages to convince us of the validity of his time and place by his pictorial insistence, and he makes an alien antiquity live for us in the intimacy of his specific, assimilable fragments. Through him, we absorb history not in anecdote but by atmosphere. One of these fragments is unforgettable; seen in the sequence showing the spectacular variarions of the assassination of Facundo Quiroga, the hero of Sarmiento's classic biography, "the Caudillo of ferocious splendor" in Mitre's phrase, who still kindles the criollo lyric genius - that same Facundo who rode to meet death in the fine poem of Jorge Luis Borges, mountd on the box of a mailcoach. Figari fixes him in a flurry of lather and horse-hoofs spilled over the pampa grass, the coach hauled up short, the driver sprawling against the reins. The sky is a storm-promising sunset, heaqvy green clouds brooding over the bloody sundown action. It is almost cinematic. One can easily imagine the next sequence, the windy plain's night with its cotton-fleece rinsings swirling around the acid moon, a lone hound baying, the lone horseman in flight from the ubiquitous loneliness of the cooling murder.
Figari's most-loved light is dawn, dusk or moonlight, a crepuscular minor vibrance, whose harsh green-whites and acrid blues are the solid indicators of porous tree-trunk of ranch-house wall. He liked a shadowless time of day, or the pale luminous flare of a single lantern giving slight relief to muslim dancers in the white-wased yard, or under the muted glow of olive orange-trees in the sage green eucalyptus grove.
He has been likened to Constantin Guys, but perhaps a North American would think of him more as a southern parallel to Prendergast, who was his contemporary. Both sought a mosaic vibration of textures, close values, textile color and rich powdery surface. As his work will be increasingly revealed to us, we shall be shown one more example of the powerful influence of impressionist methods, in an unexpected quarter, and we will be delighted by another personal and entirely fresh painter from a period that we may have imagined was exhausted of surprise.
*Some mistakes I have called the attention to I consider minor within what I find is an excellent, charming essay. FSF.