A Tale in Twos - Two Paintings

 "La vuelta del malón" by Ángel Della Valle

  

On the walls of the national fine arts museum in Buenos Aires hangs the masterpiece painted by Ángel Della Valle.  The blunt title "Return of the raiders" is appropriate for the blunt message.  It was painted to be exhibited in Chicago in 1892 during the 400-year anniversary celebrations of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas.  It won an award at the exhibition and was hailed as the "first truly national work of art" upon its return to Buenos Aires.

The first shock is the immense size of the canvas on which the painting is rendered.  Everything that follows is also acutely honed to inspire shock and emotion.  It is dawn and the raiders are returning from their hunt.  The sky occupies almost half the canvas, punctuated only by the demonic countenance of the raiders and the religious artifacts they have plundered.  On the lap of one of the raiders is slumped a comically comely maiden, so out of place in the painting that one cannot help but be drawn to her.

The political context of the painting is instructive.  In 1875, Minister of war Adolfo Alsina declared an intent to bring Patagonia within the Argentinian fold to "to populate the desert, and not to destroy the Indians".  A system of fortifications where built to protect cattle and other valuables from the natives, while at the same time occupying native lands and inflicting suffering.  After Adolfo's death in 1878, the pretense about not destroying Indians was dropped.  Adolfo's successor Julio Argentino Roca declared:

"Our self-respect as a virile people obliges us to put down as soon as possible, by reason or by force, this handful of savages who destroy our wealth and prevent us from definitely occupying, in the name of law, progress and our own security, the richest and most fertile lands of the Republic."

Needless to say, his campaign was controversial even in its own time.  The painting was part of an enormous government effort to manufacture consent for the campaign.

Views on the painting have changed.  So have the views about the native populations.  "We have since changed our minds", said our guide rather sorrowfully, "but only after we had killed them all."

Sin pan y sin trabajo, Ernesto de la Cárcova

Just down the hall from Angel's painting, hangs a less celebrated work of more modest size.  It was painted in 1893, only a year after Angel's giant.  The title "No bread and no job" tells a different story of the same time.  Almost concurrent with Roca's conquests was another tale - one of deprivation and hunger.  It captures a worldwide trend that was to explode in the revolutionary communist movements less than 15 years out.

There is a vulnerably dressed woman here as well, but the context cannot be more different.  A delicate infant sucks at her emaciated chest.  The husband, his chair leaning at an odd angle, has his fists clenched.  He is staring at the closed factories with chimneys conspicuously devoid of smoke.  An axe lies on the table, its edges gleaming.  Will the fists clench the axe for work or for war, asks the painting.  The world is at a crossroads.

It reminded me of Dicken's stories of poverty and deprivation in the London society, at the time with the English ruled half the world.  How was this even possible?  Does empire skew the distribution of plunder to such an extent that even the nominal beneficiaries cannot rise above penury?

Sin pan is a reminder that is relevant to this day.  Empires exist not for the benefit of nations or its conquering people, but for the greater enrichment of the rich among them.  Collectively the two paintings also tell a tale of bigotry triumphing over necessity.  It is a drama that gets played out in a hundred ways in our times as it has in times past.  One hopes civilization helps overcome human nature that seems to condemn us to either having a calamity inflicted on us, or to grind out a living in poverty.