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Art of Colombia

Colombian art has 3,500 years of history and covers a wide range of media and styles ranging from Spanish Baroque devotional painting to Quimbaya gold craftwork to the "lyrical americanism" of painter Alejandro Obregon (1920-1992). Perhaps the most internationally acclaimed Colombian artist is painter and sculptor Fernando Botero (1932).

Pre-Columbian sculpture

Pottery

There is archaeological evidence of ceramic production and sedentary groups living on Colombias Caribbean coast beginning around the year 5940 BCE around the town of San Jacinto. This would place these pottery shards among the oldest ever recovered anywhere. Little is known of these very early Colombians other than that they were hunter-gatherers who adorned their pottery with human, animal, and geometric designs.

Goldwork

The earliest examples of gold craftsmanship have been attributed to the Tumaco people of the Pacific coast and date to around 325 BCE. Gold would play a pivotal role in luring the Spanish to the area now called Colombia during the 16th century .

One of the most valued artifacts of Pre-Columbian goldwork is the so-called Poporo Quimbaya, a small (23.5 x 11.4 cm), hollow, devotional object (used to mambeo or coca leaf chewing ritual) made of gold whose aesthetic harmony, simple elegance, and mathematical symmetry are striking and almost modern.

The Museo del Oro in Bogota displays the most important collection of pre-Columbian gold handicraft in the Americas.

Stone

Roughly between 200 BCE and 800 CE, the San Agustin culture, masters of stonecutting, entered its classical period. They erected raised ceremonial centres, sarcophagi, and large stone monoliths depicting anthropomorphic and zoomorphhic forms out of stone. Some of these have been up to five meters high.

Related to the San Agustin culture were the inhabitants of Tierradentro who created over one hundred and fifty underground tombs, or hypogea; their walls and ceilings were richly decorated with geometric forms recalling the interior of palm huts. Also in the tombs were found funeral urns, bowls, and pitchers.

Modern sculpture

The Colombian sculpture from the XVI to XVIII centuries was mostly devoted to religious depictions of eclesiastic art, strongly influenced by the Spanish schools of sacred sculpture. During the early period of the Colombian republic, the nacional artists were focused in the production of sculptural portraits of politicians and public figures, in a plain neoclassicist trend. Durin the XX century, the Colombian sculpture tried to develop a bold, innovative work, which reach a better understanding of the nacional sensibility.

Painting

Precolumbian period

Colonial period

Painting in the colonial period reflected the power and prestige of the Catholic Church and the Spanish aristocracy in Colombia or as it was then known The New Kingdom of Granada (c. 1548-1717) and later The Viceroyalty of New Granada (1717-1819).

Early Colonial period

Colombian painting in the early colonial period (1530s-1650) was mostly ecclesiastical in subject and based on mannerist, renaissance, and medieval styles, with some minor influence from indigenous culture.

Spanish explorers first set foot on Colombian soil in 1499 and established Santa Marta, the first city and government in the territory of Colombia, in 1525. King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabela of Castille had in 1492 year unified Spain and conquered the remaining Moorish stronghold in southern Spain (Granada); expelled Jews with the Alhambra Decree and continued the Inquisition; and sent Christopher Columbus on his first expedition. It is from this context of reconquista or the Christianizing of the Iberian peninsula that the similarly strongly Catholic colonial project in the Americas might be understood. In this period, Spain and Portugal were the greatest powers in Europe and the most dogged defenders (and enforcers) of Catholicism.

Workshops in Seville produced many of the early paintings sent to Colombia. Colombian artists in this period were mostly considered common tradesmen, like cobblers or coopers. As throughout much of the history of art around the world, these usually anonymous artisans produced work that served the ideological needs of their patrons, in this case the Catholic Church.

The churches and homes of wealthy families in the main towns of Cundinamarca and Boyaca contain some of the oldest extant examples of colonial art in Colombia, mostly in the form of mural painting.

The first colonial-era painter to work in Colombia, or as it was then known as, Nueva Granada, was the Seville native Alonso de Narvaez (d. 1583). He is credited with painting an image of the Virgin Mary (Our Lady of the Rosary) that later became itself an object of devotion, known as Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquira thanks to, as Catholics believe, a miraculous repairing of the painting's fabric. [*]

Baroque period

Baroque art (starting in Rome around 1600), including Latin American Baroque , tended towards emotionalism, an appeal to populism, and large gestures and flowing garments. In line with the Counter-Reformation a generation prior, the Jesuits, an order formed to counter Protestantism, were the first to embrace the Baroque. The major influences on Colombian artists in this period were Spanish Baroque painters like Francisco de Zurbaran (1580-1664), as well as Flemish, Italian, and also Quito and Cuzco influences, through engravings and various original images imported for churches and monasteries.

Another Seville native, Baltasar de Figueroa El Viejo (1629-1667), settled in Bogota in the early seventeenth century and set up an artist's workshop. He and his many descendants would be prolific and would invent a kind of creolized Colombian form of Baroque painting that combined the borrowing of forms and subjects from European engravings with native motifs and decoration. But it would be one of the Figueroa family's apprentices, Gregorio Vazquez de Arce y Ceballos, who would stand out among all painters of the colonial era.

Gregorio Vazquez de Arce y Ceballos (1638-1711) is considered the greatest master of the colonial period. In his lifetime he produced around five hundred paintings, mostly devotional, with a technique that juxtaposed figures taken from paintings by European masters using innovative materials found in the New World. His depictions of the Trinity as a single figure with four eyes and three faces, an innovation unique to Latin America, would be later condemned as heretical in part because they resembled Hindu deities.

The Sopo Archangels is a series of twelve painting, each featuring an archangel engulfed in a tenebrous (cloudy) background. Their figures are life-sized, clad in rich apparel, full of drapes and folds, and are meant to be "read" through their various iconography. Like many depictions of angels, these ostensibly male figures are depicted with soft, feminine faces and round hips. The origin of this series is unknown, as is the artist. It is considered one of the enduring enigmas of Colombian art.

The Virreinato and rococo

The raising of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1717 coincided roughly with the ascension of the Bourbons to the throne of Spain. This period marked a period of resurgence and the first sparks of Enlightenment in Spain. Rococo, a decadent form, replaced baroque as the dominant style. The new viceroy court in Bogota led to a surge in demand for portraits of civilians and clergymen. The leading portrait painter of this period was Joaquin Guttierrez. He depicted members of the aristocracy in frozen forms, surrounded by richly embellished furniture and decoration, and usually printed the subject's name and family title beneath their image.

Republican period

20th Century and modernism

From 1920 to 1940, Marco Tobon Mejia, Jose Horacio Betancur, Pedro Nel Gomez, Ignacio Gomez Jaramillo , Santiago Martinez Delgado y Alipio Jaramillo produced several mural paintings influenced by the Mexican muralists, with neoclassic features and influences of Art Noveau. During the 1940s, a raising internacional disinterest in the Colombian art caused to the local artis to try new ways of expression such as post-impressionism and French scholar style. An example of this is the landscape painter Ricardo Gomez Campuzano and his depictions of Cartagena.

Several art critics point to the 1950s as the time when Colombian art started to have a distinctive point of view, reinventing the traditional elements under the XX century concepts. Examples of this are the Greiff portraits by Ignacio Gomez Jaramillo, showing what the Colombian art could do with the new techniques applied to typical Colombian themes. Carlos Correa, with his paradigmathic Naturaleza muerta en silencio (silent dead nature), combines geometrical abstraction and cubism in a style still recurrent today in many artists. Pedro Nel Gomez, in his Autorretrato con sombrero (1941) (self-portrait with hat) and 1949 self-portrait , shows influences from Gauguin and Van Gogh. Jose Clemente Orozco, in his series about the Barequeras (women extracting gold from the rivers banks) shows strong influences from Cezanne. Alejandro Obregon, is often considered as the father of modern Colombian painting, and one of the most influential artist in this period, due to his originality, the painting of Colombian landscapes with symbolic and expressionist use of animals, (specially the andean condor). In his work is noticeable the influences of Picasso and Graham Sutherland. Currently, some of the most recognized painters in the international scene are Fernando Botero and Omar Rayo.

21st Century

Film

Main article:

Cinema of Colombia

References

Londono Velez, S. (2001). Colombian Art: 3,500 Years of History. Bogota: Villegas Editores.

External links

Gold Museum, Bogota Official site

Virtual museum of Pre-Columbian gold in Colombia

Museo de Bogota Official site

Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota site

Luis Angel Arango Library digital collection

Directorio Nacional de Arte Colombiano[http://www.dnarte.com ]

Museum of Antioquia

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Art of Colombia