Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Proyecto Armando Reverón. This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared.

Provenance
Nelson Rockefeller, New York (acquired circa 1951).
Dr. Jorge Ruiz del Vizo, Carabobo (gifted from the above).
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1995.

Literature
J. Calzadilla, Armando Reverón, Caracas, 1979, no. 518 (illustrated p. 348).

In Autorretrato, Armando Reverón presents himself ensconced in an otherworldly, fantastical construction. A modern-day noble savage, Reverón was both an insider and outsider, trained in the academic tradition, yet also the creator of his own persona. In the present work, the expressionistic undertones reveal a glimpse into the artist's internal spirit, mysterious and supernatural, comparable to those self-portraits by Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. As John Elderfield eloquently stated:

"Undoubtedly, there has not been an artist in all of Latin American art who is, at the same time, as spectral and retinal as, paradoxically, Reverón. He painted what he saw in a ghostly register, in both meaning of the word: what is left of the world as a specter before the potency of light or the uncertainty of shadows, and what is left of desire faced with the instability of its objects – concrete and carnal bodies, beautiful or wrinkled, raw more than nude, confined in seclusion, sleep, or distance"
(J. Elderfield & L. Pérez-Oramas, Armando Reverón, New York, 2007, p. 101).

Armando Reverón was born in Caracas in 1889 as an only child to a wealthy family. With no interest in raising a child, his parents sent the young boy to farm for another couple from Valencia. Secluded and prone to illness, Reverón sought comfort in art. As a teenager, he studied painting in Caracas, enrolling at the Academy of Fine Arts. His performance earned him the opportunity for a scholarship in Europe, where he traveled to Spain and then to Paris, consuming himself in the French avant-garde scene. It was his time in Madrid that impacted the young modernist's spirit the most. Captivated by the masterpieces of Goya and Velázquez, Reverón frequently spent time in the workshop of Moreno Cabonero, the extravagant painter and teacher of Salvador Dali. Upon his return to Venezuela, Reverón suffered his first nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was the same year – 1917 – that Venezuela's repressive government declared artists enemies of the state, dismantling the Circulo de Bellas Artes, the exclusive anti-academic group of which Reverón had just joined.

A year later, he met his life partner, Juanita Rios, with whom he fled to the small fishing village of Macuto on the Caribbean coast. Here, the couple built El Castillete, or the Tiny Castle. Beginning as two huts with woven palm-frond walls, the home eventually grew to include a pool, a Gaudí-esque chapel, monkeys, parrots, dogs, the walls of the huts growing higher each year. Tourists would come to watch the artist work, dressed in loincloths and feathers, wildly dashing and jabbing at the canvas.

In the early 1940s, Reverón suffered a psychological crisis resulting in confinement at the San Jorge Santorium. When the artist recovered and returned to El Castillete, he turned his attention to drawing, using chalks, charcoals, and water-based paints, either on paper or board, never returning to painting outdoor landscapes or live models. Reverón made most of his painting supplies himself, including brushes, canvases and coconut tree frames. Not wanting to use real people as models, he and Juanita turned to making life-size dolls to serve as mannequins. Together, they created a backdrop for Reverón's delusional yet theatrical universe, resulting in the artist's final and most expressionistic period – his figurative stage.

In the 2007 Reverón retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, there was an important group of the late Self Portraits by the artist, many of which were exhibited for the first time. The publication for the exhibition stated: "Reverón turned to self-portraiture several times in his career, but never as consistently as he did from 1947 to 1951, years during which he created seventeen of these images ...This self portrait production coincided with a time of increased production of figural works...These portraits were made inside El Castillete, and in the background...are Reverón dolls" (J. Elderfield & L. Pérez-Oramas, op. cit., p.181).

While the specific period during which Reverón utilized these dolls cannot be delineated, one can sometimes decipher which figures in Reverón's portraits are based on the homemade mannequins. In the present work, a full-length figure is seen to the left of the artist's head, feet dangling. Reverón sometimes hung his dolls in this position, tying wire to the rafters of the ceiling, extending it up from their heads. While they hung, Reverón then composed drawings of them.

In Autorretrato, Reverón presents himself without a beard and shorter hair, a much cleaner presentation in comparison to other known self-portraits of the artist, in which he often sports an unruly beard, curly and unkempt hair with a top hat. In the background, Reverón includes his dancing dolls – a figural compression of a tangled interaction of body parts. Executed through a masterful use of color, with hints of pale blue that highlight opulent effects and monochromatic whites, blank areas of paper, the composition borders on abstraction. As Elderfield described:

"The coarseness of these objects, which sometimes reaches the limits of caricature, does not mitigate their ghostly status: they are the ghost of chalices, crowns, faces; they are the masks of things. As in a nightmare or dream, their boarders enlarge the contours of the real beings they represent... In contrast to most of the luminist tradition in the West, the light that blurs history in Reverón's work – the same one that veils the rottenness of the world – also leads painting to its body, its matter, its thickness"
(J. Elderfield & L. Pérez-Oramas, op. cit., p.102).

Never before exhibited and fresh to market, Autorretrato is one of only 17 self-portraits that Reverón created during his final years. Executed in 1947, the present work is inscribed 'MÍTEATRO' or 'My theatre' alluding to Reverón's need to control his own spiraling emotional and mental state.

Around this time, Reverón was exhibiting frequently. An article in the journal Visión from 1951 describes his growing international popularity: "The Caraqueños – although Reverón almost never visits the capital – are now competing to acquire his works. Among North Americans, he has few but very faithful friends, like Nelson Rockefeller, who when he steps onto Venezuelan soil, habitually makes his first visit to the strange workshop of Reverón, and, like a religious rite, drinks the coffee in conchs and in gourds that Juanita, as the woman of the house, offers him" (J. Elderfield & L. Pérez-Oramas, op. cit., p. 182).

The present work is further distinguished by its important provenance. It hails from the collection of Nelson Rockefeller, who acquired the work circa 1951. As special assistant to president Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, Rockefeller played a vital role combating the spread of Communism during the Cold War, bringing the United States' influence to countries spread across Latin America. The famous industrialist settled in Venezuela, deciding to build a house on the 6,700-acre estate of Monte Sacro. The farmland, otherwise known as "sacred mountain," once belonged to Simón Bolíva, the Venezuelan national hero who inspired Hugo Chávez to launch a socialist revolution. When Rockefeller sold his estate, he gifted the drawing to the buyer of the land – Dr. Jorge Ruiz del Vizo, where the drawing remained until 1995 before entering a private collection.