In this article, the artist and cultural promoter Roberto Pizano writes about the solo exhibition of work by the Colombian artist Coriolano Leudo Obando in Bogotá. This was the first show in which Leudo had shown his painting. Pizano writes about the religious theme he sees in the paintings and notes similarities with works by certain European artists, such as the triptych by the Belgian artist León Fréderic titled The Ages of the Worker, among others.  

In the 1920s, the artist and intellectual Roberto Pizano Restrepo (1896−1929) was one of the major and most influential supporters of the Spanish realist style of painting of such artists as Ignacio Zuloaga (1870−1945), and he was a fierce detractor of European avant-garde art, especially Cubism and Futurism. Pizano said things like: “Paris is an open door to every madness in art”. As a staunch conservative, Pizano helped shift Colombia’s perception of the international epicenter of the visual arts from Paris to Madrid. In this new scenario, an artist working in a “costumbrista” realist style, like Coriolano Leudo Obando (1886−1957), who had trained at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, fit exactly into Pizano’s vision of the new local model. Leudo’s painting La madre tierra therefore became a key work in helping to elucidate the resistance to avant-garde modernism in Colombia.

Leudo’s opposition to contemporary European avant-garde art was hailed by Pizano in an article that was published in the magazine Cromos, 309 (June 10, 1922), in which he claimed that the artist created La madre tierra “out of his imagination [and painted it] while looking at it in its natural state. There is nothing like it in the decadent French school.”  

Pizano’s words certainly underscore his apparent ambiguity; on the one hand he championed traditional artistic languages associated with the so-called “españolería” [Spanish] and “costumbrismo” styles (both of which were the most regressive styles at the time) while dismissing more avant-garde experimentation. Pizano’s criticism, expressed in articles and reviews published in local magazines, therefore helped to delay the arrival in Colombia of a thoroughly modern artistic language. 

On the other hand, Pizano’s contribution as a cultural promoter (as director of the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Bogotá and founder of the Museo de Reproducciones Artísticas) was—in view of the subsequent modernization of Colombian educational and cultural institutions—a crucial one. He brought to Colombia the first pedagogical museum collection (now known as the Pizano Collection); he lobbied for the construction of a building to house the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Bogotá and its museum (the first one in the country devoted specifically to art); and he introduced remarkable pedagogical reforms in that institution.