227

BOULTON AND THE APPRECIATION OF THE PRE- HISPANIC WORLD

IN VENEZUELA

Alessandra Caputo Jaffe

In his continuous dedication to promoting the art of Venezuela, Alfredo Boulton found
in the country’s pre-Hispanic world the essence of those aesthetic values that gave birth to
what, for him, constituted a regional cultural tradition. Boulton thus opened up a space
in the pantheon of the arts for archaeological objects discovered in Venezuela, objects
that until then had been ignored in that country and that remained unknown—and
disdained—by a large segment of the population. For many, including Boulton, it was
not an easy task to accept within the category of art those works from unfamiliar cultures
that differed from the recognized “great civilizations” of Mesoamerica and the Andes.
Boulton looked with admiration, but also some perplexity, upon these motley, abstract,
and enigmatic forms. While Boulton intuited in these works authentic aesthetic value, he
examined them from precepts rooted in Western culture, which did not correspond to the
artistic notions and visual logic of the pre-Hispanic cultures themselves.
Certainly, archaeology (and, in general, anthropology) and art history share several
objects of study in common, such as artifacts made from different materials and forms,
decorated with graphic marks, figurations, and paintings referring to multiple symbolic
contents. However, to this day, archaeology looks with some suspicion on contributions
made from the discipline of art history, on account of its seemingly unscientific and
rather speculative character in terms of the interpretation of the meanings behind these
objects and phenomena. In addition, private collecting and, above all, excavations carried
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out by amateurs often pose a direct threat to the correct archaeological reconstruction On the other hand, Boulton had a privileged relationship with collectors and art
of the past. Such actions remove the works from their context, a context that is essential patrons who, like him, acquired pre-Hispanic art. His notebooks contain an extensive
for understanding them, especially when one is researching cultures without logographic record of the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of collectors, as well as drawings
writing systems. of the various pieces he studied, to which he added descriptions of the pieces’ physical
Nevertheless, due to the negligence of state policies and scarce institutional interest in characteristics and musings on their meanings. Boulton’s rapid pencil sketches (fig. 11.1)
Indigenous groups from Venezuela, private collections became the main repositories guar- are reminiscent of those made by primitivist artists of the European avant-garde, such
anteeing the preservation of this cultural heritage. Within the institutional sphere, Indig- as Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, of archaeological and ethnographic pieces
enous material culture found in Venezuela was mostly confined to museums of scientific from Africa, the Americas, and Oceania that were housed in German museums. Both in
interest, such as the Museo de Ciencias Naturales of Caracas, or museums devoted exclu- Boulton’s sketches and those of the primitivists, one glimpses an intuitive approach to an
sively to the preservation of archaeological collections. The entry of Indigenous objects unfamiliar world in which the imitation of features through drawing tries to appropriate
into art museums—for example, into the Galería de Arte Nacional in Caracas—has been the evocative power of these figures.
overdue and much thornier, despite the fact that institutions including the Museo de El arte en la cerámica aborigen de Venezuela (The art of Indigenous ceramics
Bellas Artes de Caracas from early on possessed collections of Egyptian art and Chinese in Venezuela), published in 1978 with a layout by the artist Jesús Rafael Soto, brings
ceramics. Thus, one of Boulton’s greatest contributions would be precisely to begin situat- together photographs taken by Boulton and his collaborator Oscar Ascanio of magnifi-
ing pre-Hispanic art as an object of artistic interest in an institutional context.¹ cent pre-Hispanic pieces.5 With this work, Boulton made the aesthetic appreciation of
The complicated relationship between collecting and archaeology can be observed
throughout Latin America; however, the Venezuelan case was aggravated by the country
having been considered, until the second half of the twentieth century, a “peripheral” or
“marginal” region in the context of the development of Indigenous cultures. Neverthe-
less, Venezuela began to gain importance with the work of archaeologists such as José
María Cruxent, who from the middle of the twentieth century on started to carry out
organized and systematic excavations throughout the country, making extremely relevant
findings for those times that also challenged the migratory theories established until then
by the North American academy.² In addition, there was growing awareness that the
regions that today make up Venezuela constituted in the pre-Hispanic past a zone of
confluence between cultures of the Andes, the Amazon, and the Caribbean, serving as a
site of dynamic interethnic relations.³
Boulton acted as a diplomatic mediator between the collectors of pre-Hispanic art
and the archaeologists who analyzed such works scientifically, both of whom barely con-
verged, or did so only reluctantly. On the one hand, he maintained a close friendship with
Cruxent, particularly during the 1951 expedition to discover the headwaters of the Ori-
noco River, during which Cruxent sent Boulton rolls of film and photographs by plane
to be developed and Boulton offered Cruxent photographic and filmographic advice.
In their correspondence, one notes the enormous interest Boulton maintained over the
years in Cruxent’s archaeological and ethnographic enterprises—so much so that Boulton
harshly reproached Cruxent for moving to Paris in 1964 to devote himself to art instead
of continuing his research in archaeology.4

Fig. 11.1 Alfredo Boulton (Venezuelan, 1908–95).

Libro de apuntes #1 (Sketchbook #1), ca. 1970s,
ink on paper, 21.6 × 43.2 cm.
Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2021.M.1.
230 C A P U TO J A F F E B O U LT O N A N D T H E A P P R E C I AT I O N O F T H E P R E - H I S PA N I C W O R L D I N V E N E Z U E L A 231

pre-Hispanic cultures in Venezuela available to a lay public. His publication would also pre-Hispanic past. This idea is repeated
garner international acclaim, as it was accompanied by an exhibition at the Musée de not only in El arte en la cerámica abori-
l’Homme in Paris, titled Chefs-d’oeuvre inconnus du Venezuela (Unknown masterpieces gen de Venezuela but also in other essays
from Venezuela), which displayed Boulton’s photographs along with some original pieces. published in the Venezuelan press.9 While
El arte en la cerámica aborigen de Venezuela is a large-format book-object, in which the the contemporary Indigenous people rep-
masterpieces of pre-Hispanic art are depicted with a suggestive visual style, adding drama resented for Boulton the idea of the “sav-
via the black-and-white photographs, the play of light and shadow, and the fact that the age” or “primitive man,” the pre-Hispanic
pieces appear generally oversized with respect to their real sizes (they generally measure resembled the most refined of medieval or
between 5 and 40 cm high). Nevertheless, through his lens Boulton did make an attempt Renaissance artisans. In this sense, Boul-
to capture the arcane and inexpressible spirit that he perceived when observing the pieces. ton attempted to “de-primitivize” the pre-
In the text, one can appreciate Boulton’s fascination with the delicacy of the graphic Hispanic Indigenous groups by making
markings and the level of abstraction in the visual logic of those who created these works. them appear as artists equivalent to those
Similarly, Boulton highlights the workmanship and finesse of the pieces, recognizing that “cultured” and “civilized” individuals of
some reached the same level of technical mastery and symbolic complexity as the best Western tradition: “In identifying [a pre-
Inca or Mesoamerican traditions, in addition to the fact that some of these are among the Hispanic Indigenous person] we must
oldest ceramics in the Americas, dating from around 2,000 BCE. exchange the image we have created of him
Although it was highly appreciated by the general public, Boulton’s work was criti- of loincloth, bow, and arrows, for that of
cized precisely for its distance from the archaeological discourse and its lack of scientific the sophisticated potter of Tacarigua, the
rigor.6 In Boulton’s defense, however, I should note that he mentions in El arte en la artist of Camay, and the sculptor of Quí-
cerámica aborigen de Venezuela the existence of the main archaeological studies published bor. Let us change his figure in the sense
up to that time, such as Miguel Arroyo’s 1971 catalog, produced in collaboration with of presenting him as a unique product,
Cruxent, which demonstrated an approach centered on scientific and historical data.7 instead of showing him on the verge of
Nevertheless, the criticism exemplifies the difficulty Boulton had in creating a focus of irrationality,” argued Boulton in a press article.¹0 In contrast, the Indigenous world of the
interest from the field of aesthetic appreciation without being judged as Eurocentric by present lacked “any message of artistic quality at all,” according to Boulton.¹¹ Suggestive
the anthropological guild and without his interest in pre-Hispanic art being regarded by in this regard is his anecdotal foray into ethnographic photography when he visited the
the art world as a marginal and capricious digression from his career as a promoter and Piaroa communities of the Parguaza River in the 1950s (fig. 11.2), in which he showed
patron of the arts. In fact, the resistance to exhibiting pre-Hispanic art in institutions interest in human features and natural sites without paying any attention to the rich
devoted to Western art would be a difficulty that Boulton would not be able to over- material culture (such as basketry, body painting, ritual paraphernalia, masks, and feather
come. Not until 1999 did such an exhibition take place in Venezuela. That year, El arte art), which abounded with complex visual languages. Indeed, for Boulton, it was not
prehispánico en Venezuela (Pre-Hispanic art in Venezuela) showed at the Galería de Arte Indigenous cultures that ensured continuity with the pottery—and therefore artistic—
Nacional; the exhibition was curated by Miguel Arroyo and Lourdes Blanco, with scien- tradition; rather, it was mestizo culture.¹²
tific consultation by the archaeologist Erika Wagner, and it represented the fruitful result It is true that when Boulton poke of pre-Hispanic art, he referred to it in terms of
of an interdisciplinary collaboration between art history and archaeology.8 a (capitalized) Beauty inscribed in an enlightened and academic tradition, which under-
In any case, if Boulton could be reproached for anything, it would be for not having stood aesthetics as the study of idealized Beauty at the service of the logos. Today, it goes
been able to find a continuity between the pre-Hispanic past and Indigenous contem- without saying that these societies operated with worldviews, ideologies, and visual logics
poraneity in Venezuela. For him, the arrival of the Europeans meant an almost total very different from those of the Western tradition, and that they cannot be understood
erasure of all pottery traditions—and, therefore, of the visual and technical logic of the using the same parameters and value judgments. That said, despite his biases—which

Fig. 11.2 Alfredo Boulton (Venezuelan, 1908–95).

Indios Piaroa de El Parguaza (Piaroa Indians
from the Parguaza), 1950, gelatin silver print,
25.4 × 20.2 cm.
Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2021.M.1.
232 C A P U TO J A F F E PA RT 3 P L AT E S 233

were undoubtedly Eurocentric—Boulton did manage to identify numerous relevant

aspects of the Indigenous Venezuelan symbolic world. For example, he realized that the
female statuettes found around Lake Valencia were possibly representations of women
with great hierarchical power, and that they went far beyond being mere reifications
of fertility.¹³ Ultimately, through his gaze, it can be said that Boulton arrived at a place
common to all aesthetic experience: the intuitive capacity of grasping the magnificence of
human creation, even if it is from a context very different from one’s own.

Notes

This essay was translated from the Spanish by David
Sánchez Cano.
1 Other art patrons and promoters were also involved
in presenting pre-Hispanic art this way. See, for
example, Miguel Arroyo, El arte prehispánico de
Venezuela (Caracas: Fundación Mendoza, 1971).
2 Excavations at Taima-Taima in the state of Falcón
made between 1957 and 1976 identified human
remains dated to between 12,000 and 11,000 BCE.
At that time, this was the oldest date for human
settlement in the Americas, contradicting the pre-
vious theories that placed the date at approximately
8,000 BCE. See Ferrán Cabrero, José María Cruxent:
El espíritu de la materia (Caracas: Ediciones IVIC,
2009). See also Julian Steward, Handbook of South
American Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution, 1948); and Gordon Willey, “The Early
Great Styles and the Rise of the Pre-Columbian Civi-
lizations,” American Anthropologist 64 (1962): 1–14.
3 Irving Rouse and Jose María Cruxent, Venezuelan
Archaeology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1963); and Betty Jane Meggers and Clifford Evans,
“Lowland South America and the Antilles,” in
Ancient South Americans, ed. Jesse D. Jennings (San
Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1983),
287–335.
4 Alfredo Boulton to José María Cruxent, 6 May 1964
(addressed to 30, Rue Augereau, Paris VIIe), Alfredo
Boulton papers and photographs, Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles, 2021.M.1. I thank Idurre
Alonso for providing the scanned documents, due
to the impossibility of accessing them during the
pandemic.
5 Alfredo Boulton, El arte en la cerámica aborigen de
Venezuela (Caracas: S.p.A. Antonio Cordani, 1978).
6 Miguel Acosta Saignes, “Sobre la estética de una
cerámica,” El Nacional (Caracas), 15 July 1979.
7 Miguel Arroyo, ed., El arte prehispánico de Venezuela
(Caracas: Fundación Mendoza, 1971).
8 The catalog produced for this exhibition, moreover,
offered a “state of the question” of the most recent
archaeological discoveries, with contributions from
diverse specialists in this field; see Miguel Arroyo,
Lourdes Blanco, and Erika Wagner, eds., El arte
prehispánico de Venezuela, exh. cat. (Caracas: Galería
de Arte Nacional, 1999).
9 Boulton, El arte en la cerámica aborigen, 54, 17,
respectively.
10 Alfredo Boulton, “Lo Precolombino venezolano
como expresión artística,” El Universal (Caracas),
2 January 1977, 3.
11 Boulton, El arte en la cerámica aborigen, 17.
12 Boulton, El arte en la cerámica aborigen, 17.
13 Boulton, El arte en la cerámica aborigen, 17.

P LAT E 115
Alfredo Boulton (Venezuelan, 1908–95).
La Blanquera, No. 72: San Carlos, cuarto donde Bolívar
planeó la estrategia para Carabobo (La Blanquera, no. 72:
San Carlos, the room where Bolívar planned the strategy
for Carabobo), gelatin silver print, 40.6 × 40.6 cm.
From the series Los llanos (The plains).
Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2021.M.1.