Page 349 - Arte e Historia

Art and History

at the Banco popular dominicano visual arts collection

of the masters of modern art and emerging youth…. Any-
way, as the saying goes: «There is plenty of fabric where to
cut» in the extraordinary collection of the Banco Popu-
lar, amassed during half-century history of sustained pa-
tronage.

In our case, the argumentative gaze of a Dominican
art historian, does not consist of a sequential tracing of
generations in ascending and successive periods, but in
the perspective that allows us to discern those genera-
tions based on the specificities of the works of differ-
ent creators in differentiated contextual periods. With
our selective perspective we aim to demonstrate that
there is a relationship between artists, created works,
history and the treasures of Banco Popular, from the
precursory representation of a 1900s icon, «The Moor»
by Arturo Grullón, synchronizing later on the decade
of 1920, where the youthful self-portrait of Morel Yoryi
heralds a modern painter with distinct works during his
productions from 1930 to 1979, the date of his death.
We don’t visualize this master’s paintings in a single
or unique gaze with generational inscription in the
third decade of the twentieth century, but in relation
to works by other artists who, like him, expand the top-
ics or reorient the discursive styles, as in the cases of
Celeste Woss y Gil, Hernández Ortega, Guillo Pérez,
Ada Balcácer…

This way we find generational interrelationships and
pronounced dissent between established teachers and
emerging artists, and from the emblematic works of each
other. With this visual dialogue, we try to demonstrate
the dialectic plurality as well as the unity, recognizing the
overall flavour of Dominican art that recreates the land-
scape and the native population, forest and flora, racial
distinctions, still life and many signs of our antillanía or
Caribbeaness. Dominican Republic ‘s art is a creation
tree with many branches, blooms, seeds, sprouts and a
wide shadow that does not block the tropical light, nor
suppresses the hurricane winds, neither the ineffable
time of our national life.

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