Description

This first U.S. retrospective of the work of Armando Rever�n (1899-1954), exhibited this spring at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, introduces the celebrated Latin American artist to an international audience. Well-known in his native Venezuela, but little known outside Latin America, Rever�n deserves to be ranked alongside the great early European Modernists. By the 1920s, he had fused post-Impressionistic idioms with an extremely tactile surface and an almost monochromatic palette, creating unmistakably original paintings that are both mysterious and radical. In addition to Rever�n's paintings, the exhibition includes life-sized dolls and other objects that he and his partner, Juanita R�os, created to fill their secluded Caribbean home. Rever�n's figurative works seem to replicate the perceptual experience of puzzling out forms in shadowy interiors; increasingly over the years, the subjects of these paintings came to be not human beings but his own life-sized dolls. This volume, the first major publication on Rever�n in English, features more than 100 paintings, drawings, and objects, accompanied by texts by MoMA curators John Elderfield, Luis P�rez-Oramas and Nora Lawrence.