The essay “Reverón descansa en Juanita,” written by the Argentine art critic Marta Traba (1923–83), who lived in Colombia, is an important document in the historiography of the Venezuelan artist. In this essay, Traba discusses one of the recurring themes in Armando Reverón’s painting—his portrayal of women, expressed mainly in portraits of his wife Juanita, the dolls he made, and the female nude.
In her essay, Traba does not describe the painter’s artistic language; on the contrary, she doffs her art critic’s hat in order to discuss the iconography of Reverón’s painting based on his perspective of the female world, trying to identify the emotional motivations that led him to portray Juanita, over and over again, as a “mother,” “wife,” and “protector.” Traba associates Reverón’s repeated portrayals of the female world with the visual narrative in the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s movie Cries and Whispers, which explores the difficult relationship between two women. Traba also discerns a connection between Reverón’s relationships with women (including his mother, Dolores Travieso, his cousin, Josefina Rodríguez Zocca, with dolls, and with his own wife, Juanita) and the characters in Arcadia, the novel by the Italian writer Cesare Pavese.
“Reverón descansa en Juanita” is an exhaustive essay replete with references to works, dates, anecdotes, and biographical notes about Reverón, but has no time for observations of a psychoanalytical nature. Traba roundly rejects the typical approach taken by some Venezuelan critics who insist on reviewing Reverón’s work from a psychiatric perspective as, for example, in the case of Héctor Artilles Huerta and José Ángel Báez Finol.
This essay examines the painter’s subjective point of view, his female referents, and El Castillete, the place that Reverón built and inhabited for 34 years “away [in Traba’s opinion] from the hostility of the civilized world.”