In this essay, the Argentine art critic Marta Traba, who lived in Colombia, makes one of her major contributions to the understanding of the work of the painter Andrés de Santa María (1860-1945) when she considers him within a Latin American context. She discusses the fact that Santa María (who was born in Bogotá) had little connection to his country, basing her analysis on her study of the artists Pedro Figari (1861-1938) and Armando Reverón (1889-1954), both of whom, like Santa María, could be considered “uprooted.” Traba concludes that Figari and Reverón “through their exile and their work expressed their rejection of the pleasant bourgeois mediocrity and underdevelopment promoted by those in power” in Uruguay and Venezuela, respectively.
There are two editions of the book Historia abierta del arte colombiano [Open History of Colombian Art] (whose manuscript appears to have been written in 1968): the first was published by the Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia [La Tertulia Museum of Modern Art] in Cali in June 1974 (some copies are undated.) The second (dated) edition was published in Bogotá in 1984. The contents differs from one edition to the other. There are several chronological errors in the first one (1974) that Traba assumes can be traced to the art historian Eugenio Barney Cabrera. One of the errors concerns Santa María’s stay in Colombia; the Cali edition claims that he was there until 1897, when in fact he lived there until 1899, a fact that Barney Cabrera himself later corrected.
Traba wrote the manuscript of her fourth chapter three years before the first great exhibition of works by Andrés de Santa María at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá in 1971. Many of his paintings were shown at that exhibition for the first time in Colombia, which would have provided Traba with new readings and chronological data (see “Definición de Andrés de Santamaría y su obra” [Definition of Andrés de Santamaría and his Work], doc. # 1094316 and “Andrés de Santamaría y su época” [Andrés de Santamaría and his Period], doc. # 1098646).
When he was two years old the Colombian painter Andrés de Santa María was taken to live in England, Belgium, and France. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Paris and only lived in Colombia for two brief periods, during which he was a professor and director of the School of Fine Arts in Bogotá (now the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia [National University of Colombia’s School of Visual Arts]). In 1904, his work was discussed in terms of the first debate in Colombia on Impressionism (see “El Impresionismo en Bogota I” [Impressionism in Bogota I], doc. # 1080092 and “El Impresionismo en Bogotá II” [Impressionism in Bogota II], doc. # 1079572). In 1911, Santa María settled in Brussels, Belgium, where he died on April 29, 1945. In all those years he never returned to Colombia (see “Andrés de Santa María (Galería de Arte)” [Andrés de Santa María (Art Gallery)], doc. # 1094300).