In this essay, Marta Traba presents a broad overview of contemporary sculpture. She bases her report on the writings of Werner Hoffmann, Gillo Dorfles, and Jean Clarence Lambert, who provide a breakdown of the various movements, trends, and artists working in this genre. Once she has introduced these three “frames of reference” in the field of art criticism, Traba discusses the work of the Dutch-born Venezuelan sculptor Cornelis Zitman, whom she considers to be of great importance within the Figurative and Symbolist movements in contemporary Venezuelan art because he is uninvolved with the dominant trends among the local avant-garde. Traba describes the salient physical traits of Zitman’s female figures (flat aboriginal faces, prominent abdomen, thin figures, and malicious expressions), and refers to their symbolic, ambiguous sensuality. Traba also analyzes their mythical qualities, and concludes that, despite the fact that it is modern, Zitman’s work is actually a form of traditional sculpture.      

This essay was written by the Argentine writer and critic Marta Traba (1923–83), who lived in Colombia, and published in the catalogue for the first retrospective exhibition of works by the sculptor Cornelis Zitman (b. 1926) at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas in 1976. This was the first time that Zitman showed his sculpture in Venezuela; his two earlier solo exhibitions—at the Galería de Arte Contemporáneo (1958) and at the MBA/Sala Mendoza (1968), both of which were in Caracas—only included his drawings and paintings.

Traba’s essay is of great value at a critical level because it reflects one sector’s opinion concerning the limited support for Figurative art in Venezuela, thus rejecting the criteria governing contemporary art, in which “small cultural elites” position Kinetic art as the country’s “official art.” She suggests that Zitman’s sculpture is not more enthusiastically received for the simple reason that it is not “in vogue.” Twelve years later, Boeli van Leeuwen would openly criticize this essay in the one that he wrote for the exhibition of the Dutch-born Venezuelan sculptor’s works at the XIX Bienal de São Paulo (Boeli van Leeuwen, “El mágico mundo de Zitman...”), published in La representación de Venezuela para la 19ª Bienal de São Paulo (1987), (Caracas: CONAC, MBA, 1988). In his essay, van Leeuwen describes Traba’s effort as a “sad essay,” especially because of her banal view of Zitman’s sculpture’s sensuality. Despite its controversial nature, Traba’s can be considered the most important essay written in Spanish about Zitman’s work, both in terms of content and length, since it appeared a year before the essay written by the gallery owner Dina Vierny for the catalogue Cornelis Zitman (Paris: Galerie Dina Vierny, 1977) about the successful exhibition in Paris, which was published (untranslated) in French.   

On the subject of the artist’s Figurative sculpture, see the study by the West Indian writer Boeli van Leeuwen in “El mágico mundo de Zitman: una mujer como un continente” [doc. no. 1167797].