After remarking on painter Ricardo Grau’s career in Europe, Carlos Raygada praises the maturity of Ricardo Grau’s work evident “in the sobriety of form and color essential to the work on exhibit.” The palette in Grau’s production, Raygada argues, is not an end “but a means to reach certain expressive intentions”; color serves “a strict purpose as language to translate doggedly pursued emotions.” The critic deems that chromatic frugality a characteristic of the times, stating that color “is, in certain ways, an element that replaces the sharpness of lines”—unquestionably one of the defining aspects of painting of the day. Raygada provides an overview of the most important works on exhibit, mainly portraits and landscapes—some of the most recent of which had been produced in Peru.

In this text, Carlos Raygada comments on the Ricardo Grau exhibition at the Instituto de Música Bach in Lima. 

Born in Bordeaux, France in 1907, painter Ricardo Grau returned to Lima permanently in early 1937 after having studied at the École Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, as well as in the private studios of painters André Favory, André Lothe, Fernand Léger, and others. Characterized by conservative figuration, his technically sound work formed part of the rappel à l'ordre that emerged in France after World War I. In Lima, that formalist and cosmopolitan approach to painting—one that, despite traditional language, timidly incorporated some avant-garde resources—was seen as an antidote to the Indianism advocated by José Sabogal at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA). Grau played an important role in the I Salón de Independientes, where opposition to Indianism was first expressed publicly by a diverse group of artists not bound by an overriding agenda but, rather, by interest in providing an alternative to the ENBA. It was at Grau’s first solo show, held the following month, that he consolidated a leading position in a movement to renew the local art scene. While Carlos Raygada (1898–1953)—the only intellectual of the day to work consistently in art criticism—read that show in solely formalist terms, radical critics of Indianism like Luis Fernández Prada (1917–73) saw it as an authentic renovation; they believed the show put the local scene in synch with new developments in international art without the thematic restrictions and deliberate technical crudeness of the “Peruvian School” advocated by the Indianists.

[For additional information, see in the ICAA digital archive the following articles: Juan E. Ríos’s “La pintura contemporánea en el Perú” (doc. no. 1293275); Raúl María Pereira’s texts “Ensayo sobre la pintura peruana contemporánea (doc. no. 1293152) and “Consideraciones sobre la pintura peruana” (doc. no. 1293103); Carlos More’s “Ricardo Grau ha demostrado con su exposición ser el mejor representante de la plástica en el Perú” (doc. no. 1146600); Ricardo Grau’s “Lo que nos demuestra la Exposición de pintores chilenos: qué es lo que de ellos podemos aprender” (doc. no. 1146583); Luis Fernández Prada’s “Ayer se inauguró una exposición de gran aliento” (doc. no. 1144189); and Froylán Miranda Nieto’s “Elogio en forma de fusta” (doc. no. 1144173)].