Documentary Introduction to the Ángel Ramos and Tina Hills Donation for a Young Institution Like the Museo De Arte De Puerto Ri

Documentary Introduction to the Ángel Ramos and Tina Hills Donation For a young institution like the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR), the bequest of thirty artworks donated by Ángel Ramos and Tina Hills represents both a responsibility and a commitment, a commitment that binds the Museum to continue the visionary, nation-building work done by these two exemplary philanthropists for so many years. Ángel Ramos was a pioneer of modern media communications in Puerto Rico. From a family of few resources and little formal education, he began as a proofreader and layout man at El Mundo newspaper and went on to hold several management positions until, in 1946, he became its editor and owner. His professional career almost literally skyrocketed. Along the way he created publications such as Puerto Rico Ilustrado and Puerto Rico World Journal, owned radio stations, and pioneered television in Puerto Rico. To these accomplishments he added the creation of the Ángel Ramos Foundation in 1958, a philanthropic organization unparalleled in the history of Puerto Rico. Ángel Ramos was also a person of great aesthetic sensitivity, which led him to become a patron of outstanding artists and an exemplary collector. Tina (Argentina S.) Hills took on the responsibilities of the El Mundo family of businesses on the death of her husband, Ángel Ramos, and in 1966 she achieved his dream of completing the establishment of the Foundation that bears his name. Today, after a long career in newspapers, radio, television, and philanthropy, she is the president of the Ángel Ramos Foundation and has also continued, with untiring enthusiasm, to collect works of art from Puerto Rico and abroad. This introduction to the donation of part of the Ángel Ramos and Tina Hills Collection does not pretend to be a detailed study of each of the works, but rather an attempt to document their value. In doing this, we have quoted from critics, journalists, and historians who have commented on the works, and we have also drawn on statements which, while not directly referencing the art, testify to its importance. Documentary sources such as these are fundamental to the assessment of any collection, and are the basis for future curatorial investigations. The significance of each of the thirty works donated by the Ángel Ramos and Tina Hills Collection allows us to retrace some of the history of the plastic arts in Puerto Rico in the twentieth century, for in some way each one represents an important moment in the career of the artist who created it. A Spanish Legacy: Ángel Botello Barros, Alejandro Sánchez Felipe, and Rafael Seco We begin with the ten works by Spanish maestro Ángel Botello Barros (1913–1986), all essential in understanding Botello’s career. They have been shown in the most important exhibits of the artist’s work and published in catalogs, art journals, and the national and international press. Botello visited Puerto Rico for the first time in 1941. He had lived in the Dominican Republic for a year at the time, in exile from his native Spain for political reasons. Here on the island he showed his work at the University of Puerto Rico and at the Casino de Puerto Rico. About this latter exhibit, a newspaper article of the time had the following to say: Ángel Botello Barros has come to Puerto Rico to exhibit the canvases he has painted during his exile on the island of Santo Domingo [sic]. He also brings, as a souvenir or testimony of his own land, several landscapes of his native Galicia. If we put these landscapes side by side with these more recent canvases, we are struck by the artist’s technical and spiritual evolution and his very different responses to such distinct geographies.1 One of those Galician landscapes the painter brought over with him is Berbés de Vigo (1935), a work in which the influence of Impressionism is explicit, the brushwork is loose, and the palette bright. Botello was not looking for realistic effects; instead, the painting is an attempt — and a happy one — to capture the atmosphere of the place, without going deeply into its particulars. The landscape is extremely foreshortened: a right angle of bushes that barely lets the viewer see a group of houses. In front of the vegetation there is a clear brook, a silvery ribbon, in which the trunks of the trees are reflected. It is a nostalgic impression, a timeless memory of a beloved place. As the article quoted above indicates, Botello’s work, under the influence of his new surroundings, changed a great deal in one year. But it was not to be the Dominican landscape that captivated the young painter, but rather the landscape of Haiti, a country he visited before his visit to Puerto Rico, and one that would mark his future career. In 1941, Botello, accompanied by a good friend, a collector of his work, Gonzalo de Ulloa, Peru’s chargé d’affaires in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, visited Haiti. There Botello found, more than in the Dominican Republic, a land that reminded him of those he’d imagined in his youthful dreams. As a child in Vigo, watching ships set sail for remote seas, Ángel had dreamed of running across the warm sands of tropical beaches. Botello once confessed to the critic E. W. Palm that when he was a boy he hadn’t wanted to go to Italy or Paris, the usual destinations for almost all budding artists, but rather, he’d longed to visit the tropics. Profoundly moved by what he’d seen in Haiti, he resolved to return to that country as soon as he could. Haiti was to leave on Botello an indelible mark, and exercise a decisive influence on both his personal life and his art.2 Untitled (Haitian Mountains) [ca. 1945–46] is one of the landscapes done in Haiti that demonstrates this surprising change. The contrast with the works done by Botello in Spain is dramatic, and not due just to a simple brightening of the color palette — actually, if we compare the two, the new works are darker. Botello minutely explores a new geography, he observes it carefully from above, a newcomer’s respectful distance that demarcates its differences. Botello’s concern is to capture the new forms, to accustom himself to them. This exercise in familiarization will gradually give way to other interests. Beyond the beauties of the Antillean landscape, Botello was profoundly impressed by the people and local customs of the island — in the case of Haiti in particular, by anything relating to the rituals of voodoo, which seem to have triggered a creative period lasting from the mid-forties to the late fifties. Cuban critic José Gómez Sicre was responsible for Botello’s soubriquet “the Gauguin of the Antilles,” which referred to the challenge faced by the young artist exiled in the Antillean tropics: Botello Barros has been driven from his land by outside forces. His involuntary exile has created in him a passionate love for the exotic. This forced voyage to the Antilles must have planted in his obvious youth a purpose, a prophetic sense, à la Gauguin, that makes him see the place with that same simplicity as the visionary of Tahiti. [. .] Botello has begun his career almost in the warmth of Gauguin standing before a teeming, dangerous tropical land. He finds himself passing through his stage of expectation in the face of a powerful light, and it has seemed to him best to begin with those balanced contrasts of color.3 2 Three works from this period are part of the donation, all untitled and undated. For stylistic reasons we can date them to the mid-forties. In the case of the painting often referred to as Voodoo, we are in the presence, as the title indicates, of a ceremony, and the figures in their trancelike state are possessed by the spirits. But beyond the impact of the scene, what impresses us is the new way the figures are portrayed. Botello creates his own figurative style of human anatomy. His negroid figures with their angular faces, pointed red noses, elongated feet and hands recall the stylization of the Egyptian profile. Botello, like the modern painters of his time, reinvents the primitive world. In a large-format work like Girls on the Beach (1947), we see not only the influence of Gauguin but also that of the father of the Impressionists, Édouard Manet, due to the subject- matter, and especially that of Henri Matisse and Fauvism. This painting is one of the most successful portrayals of Botello’s vision of the tropics. It is a classic of exoticism, in which the color and sensual sinuosity of the figures arrest the viewer’s attention. Without question, two of the most important works in this donation, belonging to Botello’s Puerto Rican period, are those commissioned by Ángel Ramos for the El Mundo building: View of San Juan Bay and Flora of Puerto Rico (both 1946). In the catalog for the Botello retrospective at the Caixavigo Cultural Center in Spain, Marimar Benítez talks about these masterworks in the following way: A short stay in Puerto Rico in 1946 impelled [Botello] to create the extraordinary murals Flora of Puerto Rico and View of San Juan Bay. They were commissioned by his friend, journalist and businessman Ángel Ramos. View of San Juan Bay portrays the panorama seen from the roof of the El Mundo building, the newspaper owned by Ángel Ramos. Botello turns the landscape of mountains in the far background into islands scattered across the bay. He transforms the profiles of the buildings around El Mundo into lovely cubic forms, which seem to lean out, as though wanting to touch the water.

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