More than a century has passed since the first and only retrospective dedicated to one of the most important painters of Argentine art, Eduardo Sívori. That exhibition, held in 1919, was a fair tribute to the man who, together with his friends and colleagues of the generation of 1880, contributed a sense of modernity and professionalization to artistic activity in our country.
One hundred years later, The Museum of Fine Arts inaugurated the exhibition “Eduardo Sívori. Modern artist between Paris and Buenos Aires” which, almost as a reparation, had the intention of “gathering his pictorial and graphic work, all that we have found so far, with the purpose of beginning a reasoned cataloging of his vast production.” This is what his curators explained in the presentation, Laura Malosetti Costaone of the most prominent specialists in Argentine art, and Carolina Vanegas Carrascodirector of the Espigas Center, an institution that has the largest documentary collection on the artist.
The set of works that can be seen today in the Museum is made up of around 200 works including paintings, drawings, watercolors, engravings, photographs and documents and personal objects of Sívori and represents an exhaustive tour of the career of a central creator within our artistic tradition.
Life of an artist
Born in 1947, into a wealthy family of Genoese merchants, Sívori had the opportunity to paint by vocation, without pressing economic needs. However, together with other young creators of the time, he gave a boost to artistic activity, fundamental for the development of the discipline in the country, as explained by Laura Malosetti Costa in her book “The First Moderns” (FCE ).
Together with his brothers, Alejandro and Carlos, and figures such as Eduardo Schiaffino, they founded the Sociedad Estímulo de Bellas Artes. The latter was the first director of the National Museum of Fine Arts, an institution that the same group of artists encouraged to create in 1895. Both Sívori and Schiaffino were trained in Europe. Sívori remained several years in Paris, during which he studied at the Colarossi Academy. While he lived in the French capital, he participated in his famous Salon, with paintings that were well received. Returning to Buenos Aires, his painting focused on the Pampas landscape and its social activity, on teaching and the promotion of institutions that collaborated with the growth of local artists. For example, in addition to the creation of the aforementioned organizations, he participated in the nationalization of the Academy of Fine Arts and organized the National Salons of Artists, among other achievements.
He died in 1918, consecrated by the affection and admiration of his students and the younger creators who surrounded him.
Different styles
“The Maid’s Awakening” (“Le lever de la bonne”), his most famous work and one of the most emblematic of Argentine art, is one of the central points of the retrospective. The painting, which was presented at the Paris Salon in 1887, caused the same scandal in France as it did in Buenos Aires, when it was exhibited at the Sociedad Estímulo. The image of a poor, naked woman, exposed in all her “misery” and “vulgarity” (as critics of the time called her) caused more aesthetic than moral astonishment, but it also demonstrated the great technical virtues of Sívori. Now, in the Museum of Fine Arts, the result of recent studies carried out on the work is also exhibited, which discovered previous stages of the painting and previous decisions by the artist before reaching the final result.
From the same Parisian period, a time in which Sívori was interested in reflecting a social universe excluded from the bourgeois world, are other paintings that make up the exhibition such as “La mort d’un paysan” (“The Death of the Sailor”), “Sans famille” and the two fragments that once made up the painting “Alouette de barrière (Suburban Lark)”.
Another group of paintings that are part of the exhibition are portraits. Although it was not the type of work that Sívori preferred, throughout his career he received many commissions from institutions to carry them out. He also portrayed people very close to him due to family and emotional ties. One of the most notable paintings within this theme is the portrait of Lucía Gasc Daireaux, wife of her favorite student, Mario Canale, and daughter of his great friend Godofredo Daireaux, of whom a portrait is also exhibited. Images of his wife, Matea Vidich, and his self-portraits complete this group of paintings, along with a discovery: the portrait of Juan B. Ambrosetti, first director of the Ethnographic Museum. It was located while the exhibition was being prepared, thanks to the 1919 exhibition catalogue, on one of the walls of the Ethnographic Museum. The painting did not have a signature, so it was unknown who the author was. It is now exhibited for the first time, along with the rest of Sívori’s work.
The landscape of the pampas
“I want to paint an immense, immeasurable, frightening pampa,” declared the artist in a report from 1896. In the search for that austere and barely colorful image of the Pampas landscape, the greatest efforts of his work were directed. “And without a doubt he achieved his goal in those immense and stripped-down horizons of many of his oil paintings, but above all in those small-format works in which he worked with spots of color, in watercolor or in monochromatic inks, seeking the effects of light. in the immense plain. Large oil paintings, watercolors, gouaches, drawings, notebooks and photographs from which he was inspired to create some of those pieces,” explain the curators.
Some personal objects, photos of the artist and designs for publications complete this great exhibition that rescues unknown aspects of Eduardo Sívori and highlights the value of a life dedicated to transmitting the essence of art.
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