Armando Reverón (1889 - 1954) was an artist who only became known in his native Venezuela in the 1950s, shortly before his death, and has remained largely unknown outside of Latin America. In fact, the current Armando Reverón exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art is the first retrospective of his work in a North American museum. The accompanying Web site is organized into 8 sections providing examples of his landscape and figurative paintings, painted both from models and life size dolls. There are also images of the dolls that Reverón created to be the subjects of his painting, and three self-portraits, 2 of which show Reverón with his dolls. Many of his paintings were done on untreated burlap, and, especially in his landscapes, the paint sinks into the fabric to become ghostly and almost invisible; in Hija del Sol, 1933 it is possible to see printing that was on the burlap before it was painted. The website also includes pictures of El Castillette, the compound Reverón constructed and lived in for most of his life, near the town of Macuto on the Caribbean Coast. El Castillette became the Museo Armando Reverón in 1974, but was washed away in a mudslide in 1999.
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