Djelloul Marbrook

Good artists always see the same things we see in uniquely different ways. But once in a great while an artist completely re-imagines the world. It’s not a godlike act, it’s a necessity. It’s the only way such an artist can come to terms with what he sees.

Armando Reverón (1889-1954) was such an artist. There are two poignantly contrarian aspects to his career:

— instead of working in glamorous venues like Paris and New York, navigating webs of critics and peers, this Venezuelan artist (inset) lived and worked in a small Caribbean village, Macuto; and
—he belonged to the schizophrenic caste, a much discriminated against group of people who have often been deprived of their dignity and rights by a society only beginning to understand them.

Given these seemingly disqualifying circumstances, he created and enchanted a world apart into which we now have a view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

The central facts in Reverón’s life seem to have been his experience of women, particularly his companion, Juanita Rios, and his schizophrenia. Women enabled him to explore the shadowy and haunted fastnesses of his listening, hallucinatory mind in behalf of the greater purpose of his art. Women were his collaborators.

My own meditations, as I navigated the human currents inside MoMA, jostled by self-important cellphone exhibitionists, followed two courses:

—we know next to nothing about madness, and whatever it is, it’s perfectly capable, along with what we call talent and inspiration, of giving us grandeur and enlightenment; and

—why don’t men give it a rest and turn over management of world affairs to women? We need women’s coping skills in this data-rich environment. They’re not as impressed as men are by idealogical popinjays. It seems unlikely women will make a bigger mess than men have made. But of course we all know it’s not about that, don’t we?

There’s a whiff of caricature in Reverón’s majas and odalisques, or is it perhaps a ghostliness, as with an after-image? The artist isn’t doing all the work here; Juanita and the other women share his sensibility. They clearly apprehend his impulses. This artist in his paintings and sculpture celebrates the otherness of things.

His self-portraits arrest not just a moment of recognition but a kind of sorrow at having to inhabit such a paranoid zone. Wearing a straw hat or a top hat, he is crowned with thorns and he has the look of a man who knows nothing ends well.

—DM