In this text, art critic Carlos Raygada asserts that Vinatea Reinoso is one of the “most refined and legitimate proponents” of “genuinely Peruvian painting.” The author makes reference to the most outstanding work in the reigning pictorial Indianist movement, led by José Sabogal; he mentions as well artwork that addresses racial psychology by Camilo Blas, and the work of Julia Codesido, Laura Zegarra, Carmen Saco, Teresa Carvallo, Manuel Pantigoso, and Francisco Olazo, all of whom became interested in that theme thanks to Sabogal. In the case of Vinatea Reinoso’s work, Raygada argues that “the culmination of an intention deeply rooted in pictorial nationalism is honed and becomes aristocratic, affording the artist a place of honor in Peruvian art.” If Sabogal and Blas’s most outstanding work is their depictions of human types, Vinatea Reinoso’s is his landscapes. His vision of the landscape is informed not only by his native Arequipa, but also by trips to Cuzco and Puno, Lake Titicaca, and colorful sierra markets, which have yielded a euphoric use of color in his art. Vinatea Reinoso even takes an interest in the criollismo of the Peruvian coasts. As a caricaturist with a keen sense of comic deformation, his vision is quick and sharp.

This article by art critic Carlos Raygada on Jorge Vinatea Reinoso’s painting was written on the occasion of the artist’s death.

While Vinatea Reinoso was not one of José Sabogal’s direct disciples, his work was influenced by Indianism. From the time he was a child, Vinatea Reinoso was interested in drawing; at the age of thirteen, he made his first notebook of caricatures and, in 1917, his first solo show of caricatures was held at the Vargas Hermanos photography studio in Arequipa. Like many artists from the outlying provinces of Peru, he moved to the capital—in his case, in January 1918—where he soon began making illustrations for a number of publications. In October of that same year, his first solo show in Lima was held at Librería Rosay. Two years later, he joined the staff of Mundial magazine, eventually becoming its artistic director. Meanwhile, in 1919, he enrolled in the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA), where he studied with Daniel Hernández, Spanish sculptor Manuel Piqueras Cotolí, and painter José Sabogal. In 1920, a show of his work (caricatures, landscapes, and sketches of indigenous themes that reflected the nationalist sentiment at the ENBA at the time) was held in the Estudio de Fotografía Rembrandt. Unlike the deliberately crude—and widely acclaimed—work of Sabogal and his group, Vinatea Reinoso’s mature production on the indigenous theme was marked by technical refinement obtained, undoubtedly, from study with Hernández.

[Other texts on Vinatea Reinoso include Luis Eduardo Wuffarden and Natalia Majluf’s Vinatea Reinoso. 1930–1931 (Lima: Telefónica del Perú, 1997)].