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)].