Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

/ARTS WEEKLY/VENEZUELA: Museum Takes Fine Art to the Streets

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Sep 28 2004 (IPS) - The staff of the Arturo Michelena Museum here in the Venezuelan capital got tired of waiting for the public to come in and view the paintings hanging on its walls. So they took the paintings to the public, by displaying them on the walls of the surrounding neighbourhood.

The original masterpieces are actually still safe inside the museum, but they have been reproduced as outdoor murals by young artists, transposing paintings of 30 by 40 centimetres in size to new ones measuring three meters by four meters, for example.

"We decided that if the public wasn’t going to come to us, then we would go to the public. This is a new trend in modern museology, promoting integration between the museum and the community," Alejandro Oramas, the chairman of the Arturo Michelena Foundation and director of this novel project, explained to IPS.

Arturo Michelena (1863-1898) is one of Venezuela’s most venerated artists.

During his short life, he created more than 700 works, divided among sketches and paintings. He won a gold medal at the 1889 Paris International Exhibition for his painting "Charlotte Corday". He has been described by some as an Academic artist, by others as "an impressive impressionist".

On Sep. 9, the Museum of the Americas in Madrid inaugurated a show featuring 44 of Michelena’s paintings and sketches. It had been a full century since any of his work had been exhibited there. The Madrid show includes his celebrated sketch "The Broken Lance", a realist portrayal of the Spanish sport of bullfighting.

Michelena was "a technical virtuoso, whose work brims with Romantic nuances. He followed the tastes and fashions of the time to create his own unique style. He blended the Neoclassical tradition and post-Romanticism with the rigour of the French Academic school," declared Spanish Minister of Culture Carmen Calvo, who had high praise for the exhibition.

In Caracas, the museum dedicated to preserving Michelena’s work and presenting it to the public is located in the house built by his family as an expansion of what was once his studio.

It is located in a neighbourhood known as La Pastora, on the city’s north side. Local residents here have succeeded in holding off the advance of high-rise construction that has marked the urbanisation of much of the city, and hundreds of 19th-century houses have been preserved in their original state until today.

La Pastora "has led the way for many years in the struggle to ensure that zoning ordinances and other urban development regulations respect the conservation of its heritage architecture," explained Oramas.

"There are groups in the neighbourhood that have independently organised projects for the creation of murals that contribute to preserving our traditions and national history."

Dotting the streets of La Pastora are murals depicting breathtaking natural landscapes of Venezuela, like the Great Savannah and Guayana Shield. Others are dedicated to Simon Bolívar, the country’s founding father, and to Dr. José Gregorio Hernández (1864-1919), a physician popularly viewed as a miracle worker and the object of almost religious devotion.

One mural, restored with the help of the Michelena Foundation, is a portrait of Dr. Hernández on the street corner in La Pastora where he died, struck down by one of the few automobiles on the streets of Caracas in 1919.

Passersby are frequently drawn to pause for a moment and contemplate these murals. The response to them has been enthusiastic and appreciative, said Oramas.

The Foundation has also recreated a large section of Michelena’s 1813 painting "The Battle of Araure", based on an episode in the war of independence, on the walls of La Pastora.

But the project is not limited to old masterpieces. Another mural is a reproduction of "It All Depends on the Point of View", a modern work by contemporary Venezuelan artist Rolando Dorrego.

Since the neighbourhood is also home to a long-standing tradition of musical groups composed largely of drummers, another of the paintings chosen as the basis for a mural is one entitled "The Drummer", an early piece (1950) by well-known Venezuelan kinetic painter Carlos Cruz-Diez. This particular project was undertaken by the museum as a means of helping to maintain popular traditions, Oramas noted.

The first neighbourhood murals replicating actual works of art were painted by Ian Pierce, a Chilean-American artist. Now the Foundation is seeking out young artists from among graduates of the country’s fine arts schools to continue the project.

While helping these young artists to develop and grow professionally, this initiative will also contribute to the development of a new muralist movement in Venezuela.

There are plans to complete five of these reproduction-based murals this year and another five in 2005. They will mainly feature works displayed in the Michelena Museum, in the hopes of drawing people to view the originals, according to another of the museum’s directors, Héctor Castillo.

The Michelena Museum carries out a wide range of other community-oriented activities. These include cultural seminars for neighbourhood residents and the public at large, weekly meetings to discuss community affairs, and film and photography workshops.

A large room in the museum is devoted to exhibiting photographs of the neighbourhood taken by teachers at the elementary schools of La Pastora. The pictures are particularly unique because they were taken with cameras that were actually hand-made at workshops held in the museum, using empty powdered milk cans.

Similar outreach programmes have begun to be developed by other museums located in working-class neighbourhoods of Caracas, like the Jacobo Borges Museum in Catia (on the city’s west side) and the Alejandro Otero Museum in El Valle (in the south-east).