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| Hermenegildo Bustos (1832-1907), A Family Group |
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| Hermenegildo Bustos, Self-Portrait, 1891 |
Larry brought in a lot of farm paraphernalia to sell at his table at the local flea market on Sunday. When the gates to the schoolyard were opened at 10 a.m., his regular customers rushed in to eagerly pick over his latest wares – an old harness of some sort, a big, sharply pointed hook, tools of all kinds, brightly colored patchwork quilts that might have been horse blankets. Larry is short on provenance for his collectibles. One guy spent a couple of dollars on what looked to be a giant corkscrew -- a wooden bar handle at the top of a narrow, two-foot-long screw. Maybe it was a hand-made drill or something. I thought that would make a great item to bring to an art reception when all the freeloaders are waiting for someone to open another bottle of wine. “Here, let me open that bottle for you.” The stuff was all rusted and covered with dust from centuries of disuse. What do New Yorkers want with this junk? I don’t know. One no-nonsense guy, whom Larry announced to all as having grown up on a farm, seemed to know what all the stuff was once used for and he quickly purchased several items for $2 here, $2 there. Larry isn’t in the business to strike it rich. And he gives his regular customers such great bargains that he might as well give the stuff away. It seems he enjoys the social aspect of the market as much as the selling part, as long as he can cover the fee and a little extra for his customary space right in front of the Columbus Avenue entrance gate. Some of his regulars, including me, give him bric-a-brac that we don’t want anymore and he, in turn, obligingly gives us “special discounts” on things. There is a fair amount of wheat among the chaff, and I’ve picked up some pretty nice objects to use for my still life setups at the lowest prices by far in the current flea market industry.
Larry also brought in a stack of back issues of FMR magazine, a very elegant, glossy art publication that I had never really paid much attention to because of its high newsstand price and the notion I’ve always had that it was a little too high-brow esoteric for my rather plebian tastes in art and culture. I browsed through the issues and decided to buy one from 1985, the January/February issue, which had a couple of articles that looked interesting. Larry asked for $2 and I paid him that amount, but not before my questioning gaze caused him to say, “Is that too much? Give me $1.” Good old Larry. As I later learned, back issues of this magazine are collectible, and Larry could probably sell them for a few dollars more, at least. I wonder if he knew that all along. Maybe he’s just kidding around when he says he knows nothing about the stuff he sells.
One of the articles in this issue of FMR was an exhaustive essay setting forth the author’s contention that Hermenegildo Bustos (1832-1907), a now legendary Mexican Indian painter, was a true “autodidact” when it came to painting portraits. I am always quite skeptical when I read that an artist who paints decent portraits from life and not from photographs purports to be a self-taught artist. Painting a lifelike portrait without the help of some art instruction seems impossible, and runs counter to the experience of the great portrait painters, all of whom studied with teachers in their youth. In order to create a convincing illusion of three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface you have to learn about color, values, linear and atmospheric perspective and other fundamentals of painting and drawing. And you have to watch somebody else paint to fully understand how to handle the tools of the trade. But the “self-taught” painters, and many trained artists who should know better, slavishly copy photographs to “create” their flat and generically colored portraits, and the public is none the wiser.
It’s my impression that most of today’s artists who claim to be self-taught admit to at least having taken “one or two” workshops, or having watched “one or two” videos, or having read “one or two” art instruction books. For that matter, what exactly is closely studying the paintings of artists in museums to learn how to paint if not being taught how to paint by those artists! But of course that study in and of itself precludes you from ever experiencing that life-changing, miraculous moment when the master casually but expertly brings a nascent form to life on canvas with one sure stroke of a fully loaded brush. I love that old saying, “He who is self-taught has a fool for a teacher.” But I guess some people put a premium on hearing that their favorite creative artist is “self-taught,” whatever that really means when you examine the claim closely. Does a self-taught composer listen to music? Does a self-taught painter look at pictures? Give me a break! I think the term is a meaningless conceit that merely impresses some and irritates others, such as yours truly. Oh, you can be all the self-taught you want if all you do is copy photographs. But that activity will by no means get you into painter’s heaven in company with Gainsborough, Reynolds and Van Dyke. And for that matter, we all develop our mature art on our own, so maybe every last one of us should claim to be “largely self-taught.” That should take care of the matter once and for all.
At any rate, I was curious to learn more about the provincial portrait painter Hermenegildo Bustos, who was virtually canonized in a brilliant essay called “I, a Painter,” written by Octavio Paz, (1914-1998), the Mexican writer and Nobel laureate. Paz was certain that Bustos produced his portraits in the remote town of La Purisima del Rincon in central Mexico without benefit of any art training. The work of Bustos was unknown until the 1930s when scholars and others started to take notice of it. Paz writes that Bustos was the proverbial jack-of-all-trades in the town, and quite a local celebrity, it seems, considering all the legends that surfaced regarding his myriad talents and “caustic humor.” Paz writes that Bustos “proclaimed that there were only three notable people in this world: the Pope (Pius X), Porfirio Diaz, the dictator of Mexico, and Hermenegildo Bustos, painter and know-it-all.”
Bustos has gained a pretty impressive reputation in posterity from the small, painstakingly painted oil portraits he created of local citizens of La Purisima, which Paz described as a bustling community of 16,000 in the 19th Century, with a flourishing crafts industry, merchants, a primary school, an orchestra and an amateur theatrical group directed by the priest.
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Hermenegildos Bustos, Dolores Hollos, 1864, 14x10 in.
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Museo Alhondiga, Guanajuato,
Mexico
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Museo Alhondiga, Guanajuato,
Mexico
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Museo Alhondiga, Guanajuato,
Mexico
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Museo Alhondiga, Guanajuato,
Mexico
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Most of Bustos’s portraits show the exact same three-quarters view of the face, while a few are full front views. Paz notes that some of Bustos’s portraits have a vague kinship with the penetrating likenesses of Northern Renaissance portraits. However, he believes they more closely relate to the Fayum mummy portraits of ancient Egypt. I also think they are akin to the portraits of the so-called “itinerant” portrait painters working in America in the 1700s and early1800s, who were also considered self-taught. The above-mentioned portraits tell you, with such an economy of means, all you really need to know about the human face. They capture the intensity that Paz and other writers ascribe to the portraits created by Bustos. One big difference between his work and the Northern Renaissance and itinerant American portraitists, however, is in the flesh coloring. Painters like Robert Campin (1375-1444), Hans Holbein the Younger (1407-1543) and Ammi Phillips (1788-1865) obviously painted their subjects from life because they all captured vividly the true flesh color you see in nature. And there were no photographs to copy. Bustos’s later paintings, in particular, have monochromatic flesh color, with no sign of the warm and cool colors seen in nature that, together with proper values (light to dark shades), create the illusion of a living, breathing presence on canvas. This lack of natural flesh color is evidence that he wasn’t studying his subjects from life. His portraits are also indiscriminate in detail, like a photograph.
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| Fayum Mummy Portraits, Encaustic on Wood, L. Pushkin Museum, R. Unlocated |
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| Robert Campin (1375-1444), Portrait of a Woman, 1430, Oil on Wood, 15 ¾ x 10 5/8 in., National Gallery, London |
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Hans
Holbein the Younger, Sir Richard Southwell, 1536, Oil and Tempera on Oak, 18.7
x 15 in., Uffizi, Florence
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Ammi Phillips, George Greenwood
Reynolds, 1829, San Diego Museum
of Art
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And you know what? From only seeing Bustos's portraits in reproduction, I think photography is the elephant in the room. His most precise portraits look a lot like the photographs made by early portrait photographers, whose sitters were obliged to hold stern, “look straight ahead” attitudes during the long time it took to expose the photographic plate. The Museo Alhondiga in Guanajuato, Mexico, the town where Bustos was born, has a collection of 49 of his paintings. They look very photographic on the museum’s website. And many of the paintings, including his very precise 1891 self-portrait, are in the oval format commonly used by early portrait photographers, a rare format for a traditional portrait painter working from life. Here’s one example of such a photograph, taken by Romualdo Garcia (1852-1930), who operated a successful photography studio in Guanajuato. His photos are also on view in the museum.
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| Photo by Romualdo
Garcia (1852-1930) |
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| Romualdo Garcia, Alhondiga and Mummy Museum, Guanajuato |
The uneven quality of Bustos’s work may be the result of his painting a few portraits from a drawing or memory, and, less likely, from life in his reportedly small atelier early in his career, which would indicate that he may have had some artistic training and didn’t get all his information just from an art book or two. But the later works seem too photographically precise to be created just from memory or a line drawing of the subject. A couple of the monochromatic studies ascribed to him in the museum appear to be copies from photographs that were ready to be glazed with color.
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Museo Alhondiga, Guanajuato,
Mexico
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Some scholars were told anecdotally that Bustos did study painting for a short, unhappy time with an academic master in the nearby city of Leon. Paz quotes another critic as saying some of Bustos’s paintings show evidence of a long apprenticeship. But Paz is unconvinced for several reasons, among them the work’s inconsistency and the lack of documentation about such training. Paz believes that Bustos was indeed the amateur painter that he always claimed he was. “Bustos’s excellence in portrait painting and his weakness in other painterly techniques derive from his not having had formal instruction,” Paz concludes. “Bustos draws the most complex and mysterious subject – the human face – perfectly, but he simply cannot manage a body, a grove of trees, three books, a glass, or a lamp on a table…He eliminated backgrounds, painted no interiors or exteriors, and reduced his models to their essence: the face.” And Paz makes note of the fact that in the golden altar of the parish church, Bustos signed a painting: “Hermenegildo Bustos, amateur painter without master at the age of seventy-two.” In my opinion, taking the time to make such a notation seems a bit suspect, perhaps his way of getting back at some early painting instructor who may have “done him wrong.”
Paz goes on and on with some high praise for Bustos’s presumed visual memory and drawing excellence. “As he painted, Bustos would follow the mental outline of his drawings: his hand painted while his memory drew.” I think Paz is unrealistic in his praise of the drawing ability of Bustos. It takes little skill but a lot of patience to copy a photograph exactly. Bustos did not produce a whole lot of paintings, and he is believed to have taken a lot of time with each one. I do admire, though, his bold, firm line work on some features of his portraits -- the outline of the eyes, the line separating the lips. Was this his own conception, or did he copy the style of some other artist from that master he may or may not have studied with, or from some reproduction in a book. Perhaps he picked up some of it by studying religious icons or other paintings in the local churches. You don’t get that secure, confident line from a photograph.
In 1990-91, five of his paintings toured the United States as part of the exhibit, "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries," which I saw at The Metropolitan Museum of Art without taking any special note of his work at the time. Reviewing the exhibit at its last stop in Los Angeles, Christopher Knight wrote in The Los Angeles Times that Bustos “is the most important Mexican painter of the 19th Century. If you've never heard of him--well, don't be surprised. A year ago, few in the United States had. Bustos's reputation has been rather like the proverbial stone dropped into a pond. At its center, the splash was dramatic, while its ripples have been slowly expanding in larger and larger circles. Finally they've reached our shores.”
So was Bustos indeed self-taught or did he learn some fundamentals from an instructor? Did he ever actually draw or paint a sitter from life? Did he copy photographs? I dunno. Another of many art mysteries. I’m not a very good detective and this research into the “Twilight Zone” is getting a little tiresome, although I suppose it’s my own fault for being curious. As I noted, all of his portraits are small, and a lot of them are in the oval format common to early portrait photographs. Those ovals he painted are very photographic in detail. In addition, the heads of his portraits are usually too big for the shoulders. Maybe he just did very careful, slightly enlarged drawings of the face from photographs, emphasizing line, and then hand colored them with glazes.
And contrary to what Paz wrote, I can say from experience that in the art schools, students readily achieve success in painting a clearly human face from life after only a couple months of practice, although without Bustos’s effective use of line to delineate features. That stylistic treatment is a bit too early for beginning art students. Nevertheless, the face is what we know best and we often paint for quite some time on all the rest as poorly as Bustos did.
What does it matter whether Hermenegildo Bustos was self-taught or not? He managed to record for posterity some interesting faces of people who resided in a remote village of Mexico in a bygone era. Photographic likenesses, whether actual photographs or copied in paint from photographs, may not be heavy on drama and high aesthetic art, but they serve as a valuable visual record of past generations. The circumstances of his life seem more interesting than his paintings. But that’s often the case with these hitherto unrecognized “self-taught” artists who eventually attract media attention long after they are dead and buried.
