Julio Alpuy, “Construcción con hombre rojo (Construction with Red Man), 1945, painted wood, 73 1/2 × 36 × 9 inches. Museum purchase funded by Roy and Mary Cullen, Roy W. Cullen, Melinda J. Cullen, Robert L. Cullen, Meredith T. Cullen, and Dana and Hana Harper in memory of Katherine “Susie” Cullen
Picking a favorite among the works in the MFAH is a bit like jumping in a haystack before realizing that it’s mostly needles. Behind the shower curtain facade on the Kinder building and in the mastaba of Rafael Moneo’s Beck building lie treasures untold. Choice is difficult and strategic: Beauty contests such as this can end in wars, as Helen of Troy’s legend illustrates, and I have enough wars affecting too many friends on my plate of emotions already. Pinpointing a favorite presents another kind of mental strain. There aren’t enough books written on the physics and the metaphysics of our attraction to artworks. Let me roughly sketch the expanse of potential modes of attraction: a desire to be with the work might not equal a desire to think about it, and obsessive reappearances of a particular painting or sculpture in the consciousness might not cohere with its merits that one has previously calculated. If Jean-Luc Nancy thinks that painting is the art of the bodies, because painting is, in essence, skin, it follows that a particular artwork’s draw must somehow align with how one feels around the bodies, including their own. The last couple of centuries did much to complicate the relationship between the depicted body and the observing body, but a series of psychological syllogisms could find a way through any ready-made conundrum. The question is, are you driven enough to recognize your body image and your projections onto other bodies in a given work?
Let’s start small. Strategically, the choice can be broken down in simple steps. As an encyclopedic museum, MFAH caters to a wide palette. If you wake up in the morning longing for Tintoretto’s walnut honey colors and tricky foreshortenings, MFAH’s got you (as an aside, my religion holds that a museum with Tintorettos and a city with sycamores can’t be all that bad). If it’s Egypt you’re after, or the Impressionists, a selection’s always up that satisfies the urge just enough. But the standout field, the area that makes MFAH unique, is, of course, Latin America. From the painted 18th-century screen with a view of Mexico City to Grupo Mondongo’s laborious accumulations of Play-Doh, the panorama of that region is unparalleled in detail, filling all of post-colonial history’s nooks and crannies. Those were the artists I spent the most time with during my two years in Houston, and it must surely be that my favorite hides in those three exceptional centuries.
Up until about 4 p.m. on Tuesday, November 26, I was pretty confident that I’d squared in on a work I’d like to nominate as my favorite in all of the MFAH. But at that moment I was struck by a sense of unconscious misdirection. My first choice was Julio Alpuy’s Construcción con Hombre Rojo (1945), a prime example of Uruguayan Constructive art made by the pupil of Joaquin Torres-Garcia who succeeded the master in managing his ground-breaking taller (studio).
The work is several planes of painted wood, in default Constructivist trifecta of colors: red, black, and white. A man stands tall atop a parapet with the letters A, B, C spread through it, a simple cityscape behind him. Though the composition is clear and readable, Alpuy orchestrates the rhythm of color and form expertly. The roofs of the buildings on the left are cut diagonally as if to suggest two-point perspective and, consequently, movement. Smaller elements animate the tableaux: a red arrow points in the direction opposite to the man’s gaze; a wheel emerges from the parapet to introduce yet another kind of motion, circular this time. The totality of the “Red Man” plays like the insides of a watch, conveying the commotion of an industrial port city similar to Alpuy’s native Montevideo.
The work is also a manifesto. According to Alpuy’s biographers, Torres-Garcia asked his pupil to create a piece that conveys the very character of the taller. Exhibited at their own Salon des Independents at the Association of Postal and Telegraph Workers after none of the artists of the taller were chosen for the national exhibition, the work is militant in its centering of the artistic figure at the intersection of modern forces of production and transport.
The contrast between the wood’s rugged, unpolished texture and an evidently clear and complex lines of sight is Alpuy’s specialty. He insisted that he’s nothing without Nature, with a capital N, and pushed his students to work with industrial precision. As his student remembers, “Alpuy would go from one student to another like a bulldog, marking each important point with a cross: “Erase this and measure it again! Compare this with this! Erase this and start over! Look at the model again! How many times does the apple fit in the top part of the bottle?”.
Apart from being an important and remarkable piece, this choice makes personal sense. I could point to common pools of artistic thought that made Constructivist creation such a viable, virile field in Torres-Garcia’s taller through pointing to the original Russian Constructivists, and through that link forge a sense of belonging to a field of shared world-building, become older, historically, by signifying my physical vicinity to a culture that provided the blueprint for industrial optimism of so many avant-gardes after. I could to take my place among the Forefathers. And let out a satisfying “We have been here before!” And a patronizing “What a forceful variation of an existing style!” Alpuy’s “Red Man” situates me, the choice-maker, in a Transatlantic community of moderns. Makes me, in a very straightforward way, more powerful.
And that’s when my unease on that rainy day in November comes in. Actually, I’m obsessed with a very different work, I belatedly realize, after researching Alpuy for a week or so. I suppressed that piece in favor of the “Red Man” — and this is where a psychoanalytic explanation is the most precise. Jacques Lacan thought that “resigning one’s own desire usually happens for the best of reasons, for the good; but for the good of whom? He contrasts the ethics of desire against what he calls the ethics of the service of good… Such a morality of good is also the morality of power, as the authorities will always say, “Let us keep working and, about the desire, you may wait seated”.
Jorge de la Vega, “Images,” 1966, possibly clear plastic doilies, melted plastic, muslin fabric, blue marbles, and oil paint, 63 7/8 × 77 1/4 inches. Jorge and Marion Helft Collection, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment
Did I want to stomp out my desire for Jorge de la Vega’s ludic chaos with Alpuy’s humanist order? De la Vega’s Images (1966) is Alpuy’s polemical opposite, though the artist was not engaged in a direct argument: the Other Figuration, or New Figuration group that de la Vega was part of had its own selection of 1940-50s Constructivists to argue with in Buenos Aires. His is a generation that slowly familiarized itself with American Pop and Pierre Restany’s New Realism through magazines and travel (de la Vega went to Paris in early 1960s and had a teaching job in New York State for a few months in 1965). They held deep affinities with Dubuffet’s art brut and Neo-expressionism of CoBRA, where bodies extended in all directions and spilled over their confines. The artists faced the growing mountains of trash, artificial detritus, and explosive marketing that the industrial production, lionized by the Constructivists for decades, began to produce in increasing volumes. Looking at Images feels like the spectacle of a rat scurrying off with a perfectly fine slice of pizza in the pouring rain.
It also hooked me from the first time I saw it, submerged in one of the darkest corners of MFAH, a location perfect for its subject: oily, slinky reptile creatures adrift among balloon shapes, trying to petrify you with their widescreen Hollywood smiles. Their mugs prophesize Instagram filters where the person’s eyes and mouth take up most of the face, leaving out the nose for comical effect. The painting belongs to Bestiario, an extensive series of “schizobeasts” or “anamorphic conflicts”, as the artists called them. It was probably satire, for de la Vega became known at the end of his short life as a composer of biting allegories in the form of popular song. Alternatively, it’s a very different way to interact with urban complexity. Where Alpuy strikes a pose of the almighty engineer, at the center of movement, probably projecting himself into the “Red Man’s” confident posture, de la Vega sees the city’s unseemly flow, ripe with microbes, advertisements, and deceptive sexuality of fleshy grins. Alpuy, to follow Nietzsche’s distinction, is Apollonic, committed to Nature and Reason, labor and public good, while de la Vega is Dionysian, mixing low culture with the literal gutter. The only overlap between them is the shape of a guidon flag, employed by both, but to very different ends.
But that may be yet another misdirection. After all, de la Vega’s painting is way more physical and messy. If it could smell, some of the stink would certainly be pheromones. To direct desire towards it is almost stating the obvious. Shapes that dangerously flicker between sexuality’s simplest manifestations and uneasy biomorphic extensions, echoing in their primal wetness the murky depths of longing, hold a mirror to desire. Should a game of favorites be so predictable?
Ah, I give up, and, utterly confused, toast to another hundred years of the MFAH, provided Houston does not sink or burn next summer.
Julio Alpuy’s Construcción con Hombre Rojo (Construction with Red Man) is on view in gallery 205 of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building.
Jorge De la Vega’s Images is on view in the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, Atrium Floor 2.
