- Argentina - Portal público de noticias de la República Argentina.
Quinquela Martín is Argentina’s most popular painter. His work, his neighborhood and the people have turned him into an important personality of the history of the Boca.
“Don Pedro de Mendoza 1835, Museo de Bellas Artes de La Boca, Complejo Cultural Benito Quinquela Martín” (Don Pedro de Mendoza street 1835, Boca’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Benito Quinquela Martín Cultural Complex). The address is the correct one: in the heart of the Boca neighborhood and on the avenue named after the founder of the city of Buenos Aires. There, on the land the painter himself bequeathed to his neighborhood subject to strict instruction as to its use, stand a museum and a school.
His workshop functioned at the feet of Caminito. From the large window on the third floor of the Museum he used to spy on ships, shipyards and stevedores; there most of his paintings were born. Although he reminisced with great nostalgia and smiles his almost seven years at the “Casa de los Expósitos” (today the Casa Cuna), his childhood was painted in the grey color of the attire of the monks and the walls of the orphanage. The display of the colors, the lights and shadows of his paintings are the exact contrast to his somber childhood.
With this virtue of rubbing elbows with the most humble and the upper class at the same time, in his paintings he gave shape to the people and their work. In spite of the criticism he had to contend with during his entire life, and even after his death, Quinquela is one of the most beloved characters of the art world and the country. In 1925, then president Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear (1922-1928) sent him to France so that Paris might pass judgement on his work. In Europe he made the acquaintance of Benito Mussolini, who became fascinated with his work, bought more then ten of his paintings and even offered him a blank check for his Crepúsculo en el Astillero (twilight at the shipyard), an offer the painter rejected because it was his favorite work.
The painters and personalities of his time considered him to be an art merchant and his work was harshly criticized on account of his pictorial style and his repetitive depicting of ships and shipyards. The Argentine sculptor Enio Iommi went as far as to say that Quinquela did not embody “pictorial culture but pictorial populism”. However, Raúl Lozza – the founder of the Perceptivity school - spoke of La Boca’s painter as “the first step toward populist painting”.
When his image had taken hold he attained a more important place in the art world on account of the quality of his art, rather than on the character he embodied. Víctor Fernández, the curator of the Benito Quinquela Martín Museum asserts the following: “The great difference between him and all the other painters is that he paints like nobody else; the majority of painters resemble one or the other artist, but not Quinquela: A Quinquela is a Quinquela”.
His work has a cultural identity of its own, almost impossible to classify, and this was one of the factors that most worked against his swift acceptance. The authenticity of his style and the simplicity and beauty of his work made and make him not only an inimitable creator but also a unique personality.
