Why Hostile Venezuela Agreed to Lend Its Reveróns to the U.S.

At a time when relations between the United States and Venezuela are at low ebb, no small degree of skilled cultural diplomacy was needed to pull off a show that borrowed a large number of works by Armando Reverón from the Collection Fundación Museos Nacionales, Caracas. Juan Ignacio Parra Schlageter, president of the Proyecto Armando Reverón, the Caracas group dedicated to disseminating knowledge about the artist's work, told me why the hostile Venezuelan government allowed the the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition:

We explained to the authorities that museums in American are private institutions. It didn't mean they were lending to the U.S.; they were lending to MoMA. Also, John [Elderfield, the show's curator] is totally cosmopolitan; he's English by birth.

Good thing he's not from Texas!

There's another interesting backstory to this show, but to get it in full, you'll need to go to the February issue of ARTnews. There you will find an article by Elderfield, "In a Doll's House" (not linked online), in which he describes his "good fortune" in having visited Reverón's secluded studio compound, El Castillete, in November 1999. It was destroyed by mudslides the following month. ARTnews reproduces one of Elderfield's photos, which "is almost certainly the last record of where Armando Reverón lived and worked." Definitely a case of being in the right place at the right time.

As the show's catalogue discusses, films exist of the eccentric hermit working in his doll-adorned hideaway. My one regret about the current exhibition is that MoMA doesn't show these. Both his paintings and his life have been reframed for this show, to install him as a respectable member of the modernist fraternity.