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(Gerónimo)

(b Caracas, Aug 29, 1920; d Caracas, Nov 3, 2004).

Venezuelan designer, potter, educator, curator, and museum administrator. Arroyo was one of the first professional designers in Venezuela. He graduated in drawing and painting from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas de Caracas in 1938. From 1938 to 1940 Arroyo lived in New York City, where he worked at the Venezuelan pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1939–1940) and assisted Luis Alfredo López Méndez with painting La Vida Venezolana on the ceiling of the canopy of the pavilion. Back in Venezuela, from 1940 to 1946, Arroyo taught art at the Liceo de Aplicación in Caracas. During this period, he taught and also worked as an interior designer (Librería Magisterio (1944) and Gran Exposición Nacional de Industria y Comercio de Maracaibo (1945)). From 1946 to 1948 he studied design and pottery at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, PA.

In 1949...

Museums have played a central role in the cultural life of Latin American countries from independence to the present. Art museums in particular have featured prominently in civic, nation-building discourse throughout the region, with the opening of such museums often occurring concurrently with major economic and political changes. Museums, wherever they were founded, helped shape collective and social understanding; they were the institutions par excellence in which hegemonic cultural realities could be defined and reflected.

In the 19th century, countries across the Americas gained their independence from European colonial powers. The newly founded republics urgently felt the need to distance themselves from their colonial pasts and endeavored to establish and construct new national identities. Latin American artists and governments began a concerted effort to celebrate their independence through arts and culture. Both paintings (the preferred form) and cultural institutions aimed to create and promote a usable past: a history replete with heroes, founding myths, and “indigenous” symbols of patriotism. These founding myths favored large-scale history paintings, portraits of liberators, and romantic landscapes, housed in museums built by local elites and governments who understood cultural institutions (art museums as well as encyclopedic museums) to be ideal locations to enshrine the project of a cohesive national identity....

Set of financial methods, instruments, and business models that are used in the Art market. Important developments since the 1960s include the spreading availability and use of art price information and price indexes (see Art index), the emergence of loans collateralized by artworks, repeated efforts to create art investment structures, and a strong growth in art market advisory services provided by wealth managers and new entrepreneurs (see also Investment).

The first major development has been the spread of art price information and art price indexes over the last half-century. After a few difficult decades, art price levels and public interest in the art market were going up again in the 1950s and 1960s. A number of books on the history of the art market and on art investment that were published around that time—Le Vie Etrange des Objets (1959) by Maurice Rheims, Art as an Investment...

(b Mexico, 1863; d Biarritz, Jan 13, 1953).

Spanish collector. His family was of Basque origin, though he was born in Mexico. After making his fortune in Mexico, he spent the last 40 years of his life in Biarritz, and at his villa Zurbiak he built up a substantial art collection. He had been educated partly in Paris, thereafter retaining a love for France; in 1902 he made a donation to the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. His collection of paintings was built up slowly, and he often consulted with museum curators before purchasing works. His tastes were eclectic, covering many periods of art, and determined more than anything by the quality of a work. Often he bought paintings on behalf of the nation so as to prevent them being lost to foreign countries, as was the case with Antoine-Jean Gros’s Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole (1796; Paris, Louvre). His collection was distributed throughout his villa, but for the most distinguished works, those destined for the Louvre, he had a special gallery built. He was a foreign associate of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and a member of the Conseil des Musées Nationaux. After his death 21 important paintings were donated to the ...

(b Mexico City, Jul 28, 1874; d Mexico City, Mar 30, 1938).

Mexican photographer, journalist, and collector. Casasola initially studied typography before becoming a reporter in 1894. He probably began taking photographs to illustrate his articles and in 1902 traveled to Veracruz to photograph a tour by President Porfirio Díaz. Newspapers that publicly criticized Díaz or his government were often harassed or closed, thus articles and their illustrations often focused exclusively on positive aspects of Mexican life, such as the development of infrastructure, the growth of trade, and the pastimes of the elites living in Mexico City (see Monasterio 2003, 32–41). At the same time, Casasola sometimes photographed scenes of everyday life, traveling, for example, to haciendas near Mexico City to photograph the peasant farmworkers. In these images he took care, lest he attract the ire of the government, to avoid any display of the harsh conditions that characterized life for the majority of Mexicans outside of the capital.

In 1905 Agustín and his brother Miguel were both working as photographers for ...

[CPPC; Cisneros Collection]

Collection of Latin American art based in New York and Caracas. Founded in the 1970s by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and her husband, Gustavo A. Cisneros, the mission of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) is to support art education throughout Latin America, and to promote the region’s vast contributions to the visual arts internationally. To this end, under the auspices of the Fundación Cisneros, the CPPC supports a rich and varied programme of collecting, exhibitions, and publications. The CPPC is organized around five major sub-collections: modern art, contemporary art, colonial art, the work of artists who recorded their travels to Latin America, and the art of the Orinoco region.

The modern art collection includes a great many important works by 20th-century Latin American artists, particularly geometric abstractionists from such countries as Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and the Cisneros’ native Venezuela. This segment of the collection takes on a global aspect, with the inclusion of major European and North American artists whose work relates to the masters of Latin American art. Representative modernists include Joaquín Torres García, Gego, Lygia Clark, Roberto Matta, Hélio Oiticica, Francisco Narváez, and Alejandro Otero, among others....

American contemporary art museum in Miami, FL. The de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space was built and funded by Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz to house their collection of art. Born in Cuba, Rosa and Carlos moved to the USA in 1960. Carlos subsequently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and by 1975 they had moved to Miami. The couple began to collect art for their home; initially focusing on Latin American artists, they broadened their scope to include all contemporary art. Eventually they amassed a collection of over 700 pieces that form an important collection of global contemporary art.

The de la Cruzes regularly opened their Key Biscayne home to the public, and in 2009 they opened the de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space—a three-storey, 30,000 sq. ft multi-purpose facility in Miami’s Design District, designed by the architect John Marquette. While this public art space houses approximately one-third of the de la Cruz collection, annual exhibitions continue to be held at the couple’s home and at other satellite locations open to the public....

(b Quetzaltenango, Jan 26, 1897; d Guatemala City, Jun 1, 1970).

Guatemalan painter, collector, and writer. He began his artistic studies in Quetzaltenango, where he was fortunate to come into contact with the Spanish painter Jaime Sabartés (1881–1968) and Carlos Mérida, with whom he became friends. He continued his studies in Guatemala City and then in Mexico City at the Real Academia de San Carlos, where his fellow students included Rufino Tamayo, Roberto Montenegro, and Miguel Covarrubias. He returned briefly to Guatemala only to leave for Europe. He studied in Madrid at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and from 1924 to 1925 lived in Paris. He returned to Guatemala City in 1927 and in 1928 became director of the Academia de Bellas Artes. By then he had developed a style derived from French Impressionism, although he gradually moved toward a more naturalistic style, perhaps in response to the taste of his clients.

Garavito generally painted in oils on a medium or small scale, concentrating on the beautiful Guatemalan landscape, of which he can in a sense be considered the “discoverer.” His preferred subjects were the mountains, volcanoes, and lakes of the Guatemalan high plateau, and he was the first to incorporate in his works the Indians in their brightly colored clothes. He was the central figure and teacher of a group of figurative painters and painters working in a naturalistic style, such as ...

(Frank Willis)

(b Chichester, Sussex, 16 Aug 1907; d Xilitla, Mexico, 2 Dec 1984). English patron and collector. He inherited his fortune from his mother and spent it on the arts. He remodelled and redecorated Monkton House (West Dean Estate, Chichester), built for his parents by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with a collection that included the sofa designed by Salvador Dalí, Mae West’s Lips, and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus; Magritte’s La Reproduction interdit (a portrait of James); Leonora Carrington’s Cock Crow; Delvaux’s Prostitutes; Bérard’s On the Beach; Pavel Tchelitchew’s Edith Sitwell; and many other works by Eugene Berman, Ernst, Tanguy, and other artists of the Surrealist and Neo-Romantic circle (see fig.). To occupy his wife, the dancer Tilly Losch, he commissioned Les Ballets 1933, produced in Paris and London; Die Sieben Todsünden by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill; Les Songes by Darius Milhaud, and others, with décors by Bérard, ...

(b Santiago, 1905; d 1999).

Chilean architect, collector, and teacher. His family, in which he was the youngest of fourteen children, moved from Chile to Europe in 1919 in anticipation of Chilean political and social unrest. He had no formal training but learned much from traveling around Europe, attending some private classes and being in the company of adults. He knew the works of Proust, Apollinaire, Gide, and Picasso, and became interested in the arts and avant-garde thought, familiarizing himself with the Bauhaus, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and others. He decided to become an architect, and on returning to Chile studied architecture at the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (qualified 1928), where teaching still followed Beaux-Arts methods. His first work was done in the practice of his cousin Jorge Arteaga, who passed on a commission to design the Edificio Oberpaur, Santiago (1929), reputedly the first work of contemporary architecture in Chile. The six-story department store and office space was influenced by Erich Mendelsohn’s expressionistic style. Characterized by its continuous “wrap-around” windows, the Oberpaur building was also the first in Chile to have ...

Term for the return of lost or looted cultural objects to their country of origin, former owners, or their heirs. The loss of the object may happen in a variety of contexts (armed conflicts, war, colonialism, imperialism, or genocide), and the nature of the looted cultural objects may also vary, ranging from artworks, such as paintings and sculptures, to human remains, books, manuscripts, and religious artefacts. An essential part of the process of restitution is the seemingly unavoidable conflict around the transfer of the objects in question from the current to the former owners. Ownership disputes of this nature raise legal, ethical, and diplomatic issues. The heightened tensions in the process arise because the looting of cultural objects challenges, if not breaks down, relationships between peoples, territories, cultures, and heritages.

The history of plundering and art imperialism may be traced back to ancient times. Looting has been documented in many instances from the sack by the Romans of the Etruscan city of Veii in ...

[Chucho]

(b Guadalajara, Oct 10, 1882; d Mexico City, Aug 5, 1977).

Mexican painter, sculptor, and collector. He led a very curious life, surrounded by the antiques that he collected. In Guadalajara and later in Mexico City he produced what he called his ‘smeared papers’: sheets of India paper painted with washes of brilliantly coloured aniline dyes that he prepared himself, with the occasional addition of silver or gilt. Horses and cockerels were his favourite subjects, but he also painted exhausted girls, bleeding Christs, angels, demons and angel–demons, skulls, clowns, prostitutes, circus performers, monks, doves, and flowers. His painting has a very particular charm, inspired by popular and colonial art, the aesthetic value of which he was instrumental in promoting. Though influenced by Georges Rouault and by Marc Chagall (whom he met in Mexico in 1942), he was one of the most original figures in 20th-century Mexican art.

(b Oaxaca, Aug 29, 1899; d Jun 24, 1991).

Mexican painter, printmaker, sculptor, and collector. He is one of a select group of Mexican painters who attained international reputations in the 20th century. Opposed to the ideological current represented by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, Tamayo was involved with an aesthetic search detached from nationalism and more interested in addressing pictorial and aesthetic questions. He was born in Oaxaca, a region noted for its traditions and indigenous groups, its Pre-Columbian art and highly colored popular art, all of which, together with Tamayo’s travels to New York and Paris where he experienced the impact of artists such as Picasso and Jean Dubuffet, produced a highly original appropriation of the popular, the “primitive,” and the modern. Tamayo, with his painting and declarations of the need for artistic independence, became a model for a new generation of painters in the 1950s and 1960s who broke away from the Mexican school of painting....

(b Juchitán, Oaxaca, Jul 17, 1940).

Mexican painter, sculptor, textile designer, printmaker, and collector. He grew up in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, an area that was rich in legends, rites, and beliefs springing from a strong Zapotec tradition predating the Spanish conquest of Mexico. He began to draw and paint at a very early age, studying first in Oaxaca, where he produced linocuts in the graphic workshop run by Arturo García Bustos (1926–2017). In 1957 he moved to Mexico City to attend the Escuela de Diseño y Artesanía of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. After holding his first solo shows of gouaches and prints in 1959 in Fort Worth, Texas, and Mexico City, he moved in 1960 to Paris, where until 1963 he studied printmaking under Stanley William Hayter. While continuing to work within Western traditions, he became interested in the art of Asian cultures and in ancient Mexican art, especially in those forms that were not officially sanctioned....

[Saenz de Santa María, José Marcos]

(b Veracruz, Mexico, April 25, 1738; d Cádiz, Sept 4, 1804).

Spanish priest and patron. He came from a family of hidalgo (noblemen) originally from Rioja, whose wealth derived from trade with South America. After a period articled as a clerk to a foreign trader in Cádiz, the Marqués was ordained a priest in 1761. He spent a short time in Madrid, where he claimed the naked figures on the ceilings of the Palacio Real were too upsetting for him to contemplate, before returning to Cádiz and settling there. His religious life and his artistic patronage became closely linked to the church of Nuestra Señora del Rosario and particularly to a penitential cult conducted in an underground cavern adjacent to the church. The Marqués acquired a plot of land above the cavern, improved it and between 1793 and 1796 built over it a spacious elliptical chapel, designed by the City Architect, Torcuato José de Benjumeda (1757–1836), in the classical style. No expense was spared to enrich the interior with sculpture, paintings, marble and porphyry. Subjects relating to the Mass were depicted in a series of five semicircular paintings for the pendentives and two stucco medallions. ...

( fl Rome, 1562–90).

Italian painter and cartographer of Lombard birth. Little is known of his early life or career before his first documented commission in Rome in December 1562 for the design of maps in the Terza Loggia of the Vatican Palace for Pope Pius IV. It is unclear whether he came to Rome for this commission or whether it was awarded after his arrival. He worked on this project until September 1565, at which time he also painted a scene of the concluding session of the Council of Trent—his only known figurative work—on the walls of the same loggia. During his career he worked for a variety of prestigious patrons in addition to Pius IV, including Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Pope Gregory XIII.

Vanosino played a key role in the development of cartography in early modern Italy. The advancement in map-making was largely due to the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia in 1406...