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Description: From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of...
~My first trips to the Caribbean occurred when, as a graduate student, I traveled to Puerto Rico to see the distinguished collection of European art at the Museo de Arte de Ponce. At the same time, I was introduced to the art of Francisco Oller, a painter whose work I had never seen in person but had admired in photographs. I was fascinated by the points of...
PublisherYale University Press
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Acknowledgments
My first trips to the Caribbean occurred when, as a graduate student, I traveled to Puerto Rico to see the distinguished collection of European art at the Museo de Arte de Ponce. At the same time, I was introduced to the art of Francisco Oller, a painter whose work I had never seen in person but had admired in photographs. I was fascinated by the points of both convergence and divergence from the art of his European contemporaries, with whom he was in contact throughout most of his creative life, as well as by his establishment of what I took to be a specifically Puerto Rican expressive idiom. Later travels to the other Hispanophone, Francophone, and Dutch-speaking islands of the region further awakened my interest in the Caribbean as a center of creativity that resulted from its unique location as a true crossroads of cultures from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe.
During my initial travels, I made the acquaintance of colleagues who would become professional and personal friends, and whose work on Oller, José Campeche, and other artists from Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean have marked scholarship in the area’s art history in a fundamental way. Marimar Benítez and the late Haydée Venegas were preparing their monumental 1983 exhibition, Francisco Oller: Un realista del Impresionismo (Francisco Oller: A Realist-Impressionist), for the Museo de Arte de Ponce, a show that later traveled to New York, Springfield, Massachusetts, and San Juan. The groundbreaking work of Benítez and Venegas, whose generosity and collegiality have been of great importance to my own efforts, established a foundation for many other studies of the art of Oller. At the same time, the distinguished art historian and artist Osiris Delgado Mercado (who generously offered me assistance and advice during the research for the present volume) published his monograph on Oller, Francisco Oller y Cestero (1833–1917): Pintor de Puerto Rico, which contained a wealth of interpretation and documentation on the life of the artist. All three of these colleagues have been critical in awakening interest among a new generation of scholars in the career of Oller and art in the Caribbean during the last decades of the nineteenth century.
The late Dr. René Taylor was director of the Museo de Arte de Ponce in the 1980s and 1990s, and his work on Campeche and other artists of the period of interest to me was also inspirational, as was his personal interest in my research projects.
Although I had written essays on Oller and other artists from the region over the years, the idea of writing a longer piece on Caribbean art from a historical perspective occurred to me only after preparing a paper for a conference in honor of my dissertation advisor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, Jonathan Brown. Brown, one of this country’s most distinguished scholars of early modern Spanish and colonial art, was being honored in the spring of 2008 with a symposium in which all the papers dealt with his own area of study. I chose to research Oller’s painting The School of Master Rafael Cordero (1890–92), a quintessential image of pedagogy and a work that fell within the colonial era in the Americas, as it was painted in the early 1890s, when Puerto Rico (and Cuba) were still under Spanish domination. Continuing my research on Cordero led me to consider undertaking what would become this book. I want to reiterate my gratitude to the mentoring and collegiality of Jonathan Brown, now my colleague at the Institute of Fine Arts, by dedicating the chapter on Rafael Cordero to him.
Another distinguished Puerto Rican artist-scholar, Antonio Martorell, has also served as an inspiration with his artworks based on Oller’s most famous painting, The Wake (El Velorio) (c. 1893), as well as his recent book that analyzes this monumental image from many original vantage points. I wish to cite, in addition, other Puerto Rican scholars for their important texts on a variety of aspects of the island’s art history. They include Arturo Dávila, Enrique García Gutiérrez, and Teodoro Vidal.
Many people must be acknowledged for their encouragement, advice, and expertise. Listing every scholar, critic, collector, or friend whose insights I admire and who has been valuable to me during the process of writing this book would make these acknowledgments go on for too many pages. At the risk of inadvertently omitting many individuals who have been influential for this project, the following list comprises those persons who have had a direct impact on this text: Gerard Aching, Gérald Alexis, Agustín Arteaga, Richard Aste, Valerie Balint, Tim Barringer, Miriam Basilio, Rebecca Parker Brienen, Taína Caragol, Mark Castro, Ramón Cernuda, Carmen Correa, Maud Duquella, Rafael Ferrer, Katherine Manthorne, Flavia Marechal, Carmen Melián, Wayne Modest, Sarah Montross, Linda Nochlin, Mario Paniagua, Dr. and Mrs. Eduardo Pérez, Todd Porterfield, Jennifer Raab, E. Carmen Ramos, Arlette de la Serna, Emily Sessions, Juanita Solano, Susanna Temkin, Susana Torruella Leval, Evelyn D. Trebilcock, and Carmen Ana Casal de Unanue.
In am indebted to Max Antonio Mischler, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of New York University, for his expertise on the social history surrounding the Spanish–American War and the political career of William McKinley. His collaboration on Chapter 6 has been invaluable, and this book would be much the poorer without his intervention.
Two of my graduate students at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, Blanca Serrano and Jason Dubs, have provided invaluable practical and technical assistance for which I am extremely grateful.
The anonymous readers of this manuscript from Yale University Press must also be thanked for their enthusiasm and for their many helpful suggestions.
Many institutions in Puerto Rico—especially the Ateneo Puertorriqueño, the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, the Museo de San Juan, the Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, and the Museo de Arte de Ponce—have been generous with their resources and visual materials. A number of museums and collections in the United States and Europe have been equally helpful, and I am very grateful to them.
At Yale University Press, I am deeply indebted to Katherine Boller, Heidi Downey, Patricia Fidler, and Sarah Henry for their care and encouragement, and to Laura Hensley for her careful copy editing of the manuscript.
For financial assistance, I acknowledge the generosity of the Office of the Dean of Humanities and Dean Lauren Benton as well as the Humanities Initiative at New York University, and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art.
My partner, Clayton C. Kirking, has, as always, provided the greatest source of support, allowing me to carry on with the work that resulted in this volume. Whatever value it may have is due in large part to his insights, kindness, and patience.
Acknowledgments
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