Oswaldo Guayasamín (1919-1999) was an influential Quechua painter from Ecuador. Guayasamín used art to communicate the violence, oppression, and poverty of which he was witness. Guayasamín often depicts human figures. His work probably gained such a wide scope of recognition because it feels both highly personal and universal. It communicates universal human emotions of pain, grief, anger, and love — but also the unique conditions and experiences of indigenous Ecuadorians. His style is identified as a part of the Expressionist and Cubist movements.
Guayasamín was born in 1919 in Quito, Ecuador. His father was Quechua and his mother was Mestiza. He was the eldest of ten children. Guayasamín was interested in painting from a young age. He started to watercolor when he was 6 and shifting to oil when he was 10. “As he had already been expelled from six different schools for what his teachers considered a lack of academic talent, he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts [in 1932, at age 13] against his father’s wishes.”
His early was characterized by these artistic developments, and at the same time, it was marked by personal loss and political violence. Guayasamín’s mother died a premature death during his childhood years. Later, in 1932 (the same year he started art school) an armed conflict exploded between then president Neptalí Bonifaz Ascázubi’s far-right base and leftist paramilitary groups who sought to overthrow him. This coup sparked a four-day period of intense violence. During this time, Guayasamín witnessed a stray bullet hit and kill one of his best friends. This event would inspire the painting below, Los niños muertos (The dead children).
This painting was featured in Guayasamín’s “first exhibition in 1942 [which] stirred considerable controversy in the artistic community, as the majority of his works contained critical social and political undertones.”
Having graduated from The School of Fine Arts in 1940, Guayasamín’s career was already in full speed ahead. Soon after graduating, “Nelson Rockefeller visited Quito and was so impressed with Guayasamín’s art that he extended him an invitation to visit the United States, where the artist spent seven months visiting museums.” Soon thereafter, in 1943, Guayasamín traveled to Mexico where he met Diego Rivera and studied under José Clemente Orozco. As we can see, from the beginning of his artistic career, Guayasamín was recognized internationally for his talent, and through his travels gained a broadend international perspective. On his way back from Mexico to Ecuador, Guayasamín traveled through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. The injustices that he witnessed during this tour inspired the first peiod of his artistic career, called Huacayñán (A Quechua word that roughly translates to “the trail of tears). It spanned from 1946 to 1953. The two paintings below were produced during this period of his artistic production, during which he created one mural and 103 pictures. He “depict[s] the misery and injustices suffered by racial and ethnic groups, particularly indigenous people, in Latin America. The works portray the cultures, feelings, traditions, identities and religions of these people and attempt to give them a voice.” The figure of Prisonero (1949) is fairly typical of the bodies that Oswaldo renders: thin, showing signs of poverty, with both the face and hands showing the anguish of the figure.
The next period of his artistic production is referred to as La edad de la ira, or The Age of Rage, which spanned roughly from 1953-1993.
The art that Guayasamín created during this middle period of his career was extremely politically and emotionally potent. He expressed his outrage and grief at many of the horrors of the 20th-century, such as the series of dictatorships that sprung forth in Latin America, the disappearings, the continued repression of indigenous peoples, the Vietnam War, and more.
For example, the image to the left, one of Guayasamín’s most famous, was painted in 1973 in direct response to the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile. Guayasamín admired Allende greatly and dedicated this painting to Allende, and to “the theater director and musician Víctor Jara as well as Guayasamín’s close friend, the poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda.”
Guayasamín not only dedicated some of his paintings to specific political events and figures, but he also tried his hand at portraits. In 1996, he painted a portrait of Rigoberta Menchú, the famous K’iche’ activist from Guatemala.
The later period of Guayasamín’s career is called Ternura (Tenderness). Between the years of 1988 until 1999 when Guayasamín passed, he created about 100 paintings all belonging to this collection. These paintings were all dedicated to his deceased mother. Most of them depict a mother and child embracing. During these later years, Guayasamín shifted his focus, creating these more personal paintings. Like the paintings from earlier in his career, these paintings are centered around people and have his recognizable emotional potency. However, the emotions that Guayasamín conveys shift from angry outrage to a loving melancholy.
All paintings by Oswaldo Guayasamín, courtesy of Fundación Guayasamín.
Sources:
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/oswaldo-guayasamin-art/
https://as.vanderbilt.edu/clas-resources/media/Guayasamin.pdf
http://www.artnet.com/artists/oswaldo-guayasam%C3%ADn/
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/oswaldo-guayasamin-art/
https://www.wikiart.org/en/oswaldo-guayasamin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian_Civil_War
https://www.capilladelhombre.com
