Armando Reverón

Armando Reverón (born May 10, 1889, Caracas, Venez.—died Sept. 18, 1954, Caracas) was a Venezuelan painter known for his impressionistic paintings of landscapes and nudes.

As a child, Reverón contracted typhoid fever. During his isolated recovery, he began to play with dolls, an activity that later proved to have a central influence on his art. He entered the Academy of Fine Arts of Caracas in 1908, when academic painting still dominated the curriculum. In 1911 he won a prize that enabled him to study in Barcelona and later Madrid, where he stayed until 1914. Before returning to Venezuela (1915), he briefly visited France and stopped again in Spain. During his European period, Reverón adopted the Post-Impressionist style that he would use throughout his life.

On his return to Venezuela, Reverón encountered a changing artistic scene. Several European artists were in residence, including Russian painter Nicolas Ferdinandov, whose dark palette and nocturnal imagery would influence Reverón. About this time Reverón began what is known as his “blue period,” for the blue tones that dominated his work as well as his intense use of light and shadow. In The Cave (1920) he depicted two seminude women almost engulfed in bluish darkness; only their exposed skin glows white in an otherwise dark and mysterious image. In 1921 he moved with his companion and model, Juanita Ríos, to the coastal city of Macuto, where he lived in primitive circumstances and began to build his fantastic home, El Castillete (“The Little Castle”).

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In 1924 Reverón began his “white period,” during which he often painted the coastal landscape of Macuto bathed in harsh sunlight. In some works, such as White Landscape (1934), his imagery is almost completely abstract—bare white traces on an off-white ground. During this period he experimented with materials, sometimes painting in tempera on paper bags and on burlap sacks.

Mental illness, including schizophrenia, plagued Reverón throughout his life, and in 1933 he suffered a nervous breakdown. His “sepia period” began in 1935, and by 1937 he had begun to construct life-size adult dolls, which he named and used as models. Influenced by Francisco de Goya, he made a series of impressionistically rendered nudes he referred to as Majas, such as The Creole Maja (1939). In Self-Portrait with Dolls (1949) he painted himself, staring out at the viewer, in front of two of his dolls dressed as ballerinas with their arms held or tied above their heads.

Toward the end of his life, Reverón’s output declined with his mental and physical health. In 1953, the year he won Venezuela’s National Prize for Painting, he entered a sanatorium in Caracas, where he died the following year.