Artist Xul Solar, influential friend of the Argentine writer Jorgé Luis Borges, has been become increasingly well-known and is the subject of a highly regarded exhibition devoted to the artist at the Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art.
The exhibition also includes Xul Solar’s copies of Magick and paintings influenced by Thelema.
“There are paintings of alternative universes, cities floating in the sky or on lakes, creatures that are half-man and half-airplane, angels, pyramids and whatever else came to him in his reveries… Occult sciences, the kabala, astrology, the I Ching, the tarot, Aleister Crowley – they all flow together along with his vanguard tendencies.”
Mystical visions of Argentine artist
By Larry Rohter The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2005
BUENOS AIRES The Argentine writer Jorgé Luis Borges, who was perhaps his closest friend, once described him as “our William Blake.” Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari, who called himself Xul Solar, was indeed a visionary, painter and poet, but only now, 40 years after his death, is the full scope of his imagination being fully appreciated.
A flurry of books about Xul Solar, often pointing to his importance as an influence on his more famous friend Borges, has been published in recent years. But the real breakthrough may be represented by a new and rapturously received exhibition devoted to the artist at the Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art, known as Malba.
The show contains 130 works by Xul Solar, who died in 1963 at age 75 – mostly small watercolors, some of them being exhibited publicly for the first time. There are paintings of alternative universes, cities floating in the sky or on lakes, creatures that are half-man and half-airplane, angels, pyramids and whatever else came to him in his reveries.
The exhibition, titled “Xul Solar: Visions and Revelations,” opened here in June and will continue through Aug. 15. In September, it will travel to São Paulo and, early next year, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston for what will be Xul Solar’s first individual show ever in the United States.
“When it comes to Latin American art of the 1920s and 1930s, people tend to think of the Mexican muralists and Frida Kahlo and stop there,” said Mari Carmen Ramirez, the Houston museum’s chief curator of Latin American art.
Xul Solar, by contrast, “is not the kind of artist who is easily absorbed into the fine arts milieu of any country,” she said, because he did not conform to a single medium or pattern of expression.
Recognizing Xul Solar’s growing stature, the Houston museum recently acquired three of his works. The most celebrated is “Jefa,” a 1923 watercolor of a woman’s head adorned with cat’s whiskers and surrounded by arcane symbols. Critics regard it as the culmination of an especially fecund period of the artist’s 50-year career.
Xul Solar’s art has usually been viewed as part of the Latin American avant-garde of the early 20th century. But the curator of the Malba show, Patricia Artundo, has chosen to give equal weight to the mystical and spiritual aspects of his work; the first painting visitors see on entering the gallery is a painting Xul Solar did of his own horoscope in 1953.
“His was a spiritual search, but not in a straight line,” Artundo said. “Occult sciences, the kabala, astrology, the I Ching, the tarot, Aleister Crowley – they all flow together along with his vanguard tendencies and play a role in his desire to unify Latin America on a spiritual basis.”
Critics and art historians often compare Xul Solar to Paul Klee, whose work he saw and admired during the dozen years he spent in Europe before returning in 1924 to Argentina. Like Klee, Xul Solar often included letters, numbers and other symbols in his paintings. The color schemes the two artists adopted were often similar too, as was the underlying spirit of their work and their interest in primitive and archaic art.
“There is a lot of kinship in their formal visual language, their refusal to paint in a traditional way and in the almost childlike quality of Xul Solar’s work, the way he uses schematic figures like the sun, the moon and snakes,” Ramirez said. “He absorbed German Expressionism and Paul Klee as his starting point,” he continued, “though what he did with them later was very different.”
In addition to the paintings, the exhibition contains tarot cards painted by Xul Solar, a pair of masks and several objects he invented.
These “heirlooms from another cosmos,” as he once referred to them, include a harmonium with three rows of colored keys and a board game he called “pan-chess,” using a board with 13-by-13 squares (instead of the standard 8-by-8).
At a panel discussion here in early July, Jorge Schwartz, a critic and professor of Spanish-American literature at the University of São Paulo, talked of Xul Solar’s “desire to make corrections,” citing pan-chess and the artist’s plan to modify soccer to use up to five balls simultaneously.
But Xul Solar also tried to improve his native tongue by inventing two new languages, Neo-Criollo and Pan-Lengua, that he incorporated into his work, Schwartz said. One of his many notebooks, written in Neo-Criollo, is on display as part of the exhibition. Many of the paintings were also given titles in Neo-Criollo, or Neo-Creole, a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese with a smattering of English.
The artist’s playfulness with language extended even to the Xul Solar pseudonym he adopted while living in Europe, at the suggestion of an Argentine friend and fellow painter who thought his real name too ponderous for an artist. Though based on his birth name, Xul Solar can be interpreted to mean “solar light” or “light from the south.”
Many of the works in the exhibition are on loan from the Xul Solar Museum here, which opened in 1993, one floor below the apartment where the artist lived for most of his adult life. The museum contains the largest collection of his paintings, along with much of his correspondence and manuscripts.
“Xul used to say that he painted reality, the reality of his own visions,” said Jorge Natalio Povarche, director of the Xul Solar Foundation, which runs the museum, and the artist’s dealer during the later stages of his career.
“Other painters were easier to read, and that is why so much of his work ended up here,” Povarche said. “There was no market for him because they didn’t understand him.”
Borges was a frequent visitor to the apartment at 1212 Laprida Street, arriving for breakfast and then, if conversation had taken wing, returning to his own apartment for lunch with Xul Solar in tow. In the living room of Xul Solar’s apartment is a pinkish-purple chair that only Borges was allowed to use.
Xul Solar was a dozen years older than Borges and introduced him to some areas of esoteric literature. But those who knew them described their relationship as one of intellectual equals.
“It is too bad that videotape and audiotape didn’t exist in those days, because recordings of their dialogue could have enriched culture the way that their letters do,” Povarche said. “Some of their conversations were conducted at such a high level, were so dazzling, that anyone listening in would be left almost in a state of levitation.”
During Xul Solar’s lifetime, few of his works were sold. He did illustrations for some Borges books and for magazines that the writer edited, but he earned a living mainly as a translator of books in Italian, German, English and French.
As Artundo noted, “One of the most peculiar things about him is that he had more friends who were writers than artists, and most of them were younger than he.”
Xul Solar appears as a character or is referred to in several novels and stories, the most notable being Borges’s “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “A Universal History of Infamy.”
“A man versed in every field of knowledge, curious about everything arcane, father of writings, of languages, of utopias, of mythologies, a guest in hells and heavens,” was the way Borges described his friend in an essay he wrote while Xul Solar was still alive. After the artist’s death he added: “Predictably, Xul Solar’s utopias failed, but that failure is ours, not his. We have not known how to deserve them.”
BUENOS AIRES The Argentine writer Jorgé Luis Borges, who was perhaps his closest friend, once described him as “our William Blake.” Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari, who called himself Xul Solar, was indeed a visionary, painter and poet, but only now, 40 years after his death, is the full scope of his imagination being fully appreciated.
A flurry of books about Xul Solar, often pointing to his importance as an influence on his more famous friend Borges, has been published in recent years. But the real breakthrough may be represented by a new and rapturously received exhibition devoted to the artist at the Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art, known as Malba.
The show contains 130 works by Xul Solar, who died in 1963 at age 75 – mostly small watercolors, some of them being exhibited publicly for the first time. There are paintings of alternative universes, cities floating in the sky or on lakes, creatures that are half-man and half-airplane, angels, pyramids and whatever else came to him in his reveries.
The exhibition, titled “Xul Solar: Visions and Revelations,” opened here in June and will continue through Aug. 15. In September, it will travel to São Paulo and, early next year, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston for what will be Xul Solar’s first individual show ever in the United States.
“When it comes to Latin American art of the 1920s and 1930s, people tend to think of the Mexican muralists and Frida Kahlo and stop there,” said Mari Carmen Ramirez, the Houston museum’s chief curator of Latin American art.
Xul Solar, by contrast, “is not the kind of artist who is easily absorbed into the fine arts milieu of any country,” she said, because he did not conform to a single medium or pattern of expression.
Recognizing Xul Solar’s growing stature, the Houston museum recently acquired three of his works. The most celebrated is “Jefa,” a 1923 watercolor of a woman’s head adorned with cat’s whiskers and surrounded by arcane symbols. Critics regard it as the culmination of an especially fecund period of the artist’s 50-year career.
Xul Solar’s art has usually been viewed as part of the Latin American avant-garde of the early 20th century. But the curator of the Malba show, Patricia Artundo, has chosen to give equal weight to the mystical and spiritual aspects of his work; the first painting visitors see on entering the gallery is a painting Xul Solar did of his own horoscope in 1953.
“His was a spiritual search, but not in a straight line,” Artundo said. “Occult sciences, the kabala, astrology, the I Ching, the tarot, Aleister Crowley – they all flow together along with his vanguard tendencies and play a role in his desire to unify Latin America on a spiritual basis.”
Critics and art historians often compare Xul Solar to Paul Klee, whose work he saw and admired during the dozen years he spent in Europe before returning in 1924 to Argentina. Like Klee, Xul Solar often included letters, numbers and other symbols in his paintings. The color schemes the two artists adopted were often similar too, as was the underlying spirit of their work and their interest in primitive and archaic art.
“There is a lot of kinship in their formal visual language, their refusal to paint in a traditional way and in the almost childlike quality of Xul Solar’s work, the way he uses schematic figures like the sun, the moon and snakes,” Ramirez said. “He absorbed German Expressionism and Paul Klee as his starting point,” he continued, “though what he did with them later was very different.”
In addition to the paintings, the exhibition contains tarot cards painted by Xul Solar, a pair of masks and several objects he invented.
These “heirlooms from another cosmos,” as he once referred to them, include a harmonium with three rows of colored keys and a board game he called “pan-chess,” using a board with 13-by-13 squares (instead of the standard 8-by-8).
At a panel discussion here in early July, Jorge Schwartz, a critic and professor of Spanish-American literature at the University of São Paulo, talked of Xul Solar’s “desire to make corrections,” citing pan-chess and the artist’s plan to modify soccer to use up to five balls simultaneously.
But Xul Solar also tried to improve his native tongue by inventing two new languages, Neo-Criollo and Pan-Lengua, that he incorporated into his work, Schwartz said. One of his many notebooks, written in Neo-Criollo, is on display as part of the exhibition. Many of the paintings were also given titles in Neo-Criollo, or Neo-Creole, a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese with a smattering of English.
The artist’s playfulness with language extended even to the Xul Solar pseudonym he adopted while living in Europe, at the suggestion of an Argentine friend and fellow painter who thought his real name too ponderous for an artist. Though based on his birth name, Xul Solar can be interpreted to mean “solar light” or “light from the south.”
Many of the works in the exhibition are on loan from the Xul Solar Museum here, which opened in 1993, one floor below the apartment where the artist lived for most of his adult life. The museum contains the largest collection of his paintings, along with much of his correspondence and manuscripts.
“Xul used to say that he painted reality, the reality of his own visions,” said Jorge Natalio Povarche, director of the Xul Solar Foundation, which runs the museum, and the artist’s dealer during the later stages of his career.
“Other painters were easier to read, and that is why so much of his work ended up here,” Povarche said. “There was no market for him because they didn’t understand him.”
Borges was a frequent visitor to the apartment at 1212 Laprida Street, arriving for breakfast and then, if conversation had taken wing, returning to his own apartment for lunch with Xul Solar in tow. In the living room of Xul Solar’s apartment is a pinkish-purple chair that only Borges was allowed to use.
Xul Solar was a dozen years older than Borges and introduced him to some areas of esoteric literature. But those who knew them described their relationship as one of intellectual equals.
“It is too bad that videotape and audiotape didn’t exist in those days, because recordings of their dialogue could have enriched culture the way that their letters do,” Povarche said. “Some of their conversations were conducted at such a high level, were so dazzling, that anyone listening in would be left almost in a state of levitation.”
During Xul Solar’s lifetime, few of his works were sold. He did illustrations for some Borges books and for magazines that the writer edited, but he earned a living mainly as a translator of books in Italian, German, English and French.
As Artundo noted, “One of the most peculiar things about him is that he had more friends who were writers than artists, and most of them were younger than he.”
Xul Solar appears as a character or is referred to in several novels and stories, the most notable being Borges’s “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “A Universal History of Infamy.”
“A man versed in every field of knowledge, curious about everything arcane, father of writings, of languages, of utopias, of mythologies, a guest in hells and heavens,” was the way Borges described his friend in an essay he wrote while Xul Solar was still alive. After the artist’s death he added: “Predictably, Xul Solar’s utopias failed, but that failure is ours, not his. We have not known how to deserve them.”