On the occasion of Bernabé Michelena’s exhibition at the Subte de Montevideo (1939), Emilio Oribe, the writer and co-founder of the AIAPE (Agrupación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores), conducted a lecture in which he discussed the Uruguayan sculptor’s work. This is a transcript of that lecture, in which Oribe underscores the artist’s visual unity in his drawings, reliefs and, especially, sculptures that express the intelligent sensitivity of his refined works over a long period of time (1910–39). Oribe applauds Michelena as an artist who, having visited European museums (that have their own historical adherences and adoptions), chose not to transfer any of what he saw onto his own work. He therefore sets the sculptor on an elevated, historical, aesthetic plane where figurations can be applied to the social contexts of the present.    

The essayist, poet, and journalist Emilio Oribe (1893–1975) was a founding member of AIAPE (Agrupación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores), the Uruguayan anti-fascist, independent cultural organization. He held various intellectual positions in Uruguay, including permanent columnist at AIAPE magazine. He also lectured and kept in close contact with visual artists. In this particular lecture about the work of the sculptor Bernabé Michelena (1888–1963), he explains that the artist was schooled in 1939, partly in Uruguay and partly in France at the academy run by students of Augusta Rodin. The author discusses the work Michelena has produced since 1910, comparing it to the work that was produced during periods of maximum formal simplicity in the universal history of sculptural art: Ancient Egypt, Phidias (Greece, 490–431 BC), the Italian Renaissance of Donatello (1386–1466), and French artists of various periods, such as Jean Gijon (1500–ca. 1564), Charles Despair (1874–1946), and Aristide Maillol (1861–1940). Oribe establishes a consistent thread linking the history of art with Michelena’s contemporary dialogue. He highlights the artist’s restrained, ascetic sculpture that possesses a formal clarity that sets it aside from baroque exaggerations (associated with the chaos of passion). The author recognizes the aesthetic line in Michelena based on intelligent sensitivity and a particular tension that is expressed as a blend of accidentalist naturalism (that hews to sensitive experiences) and a distant abstraction of a formal, syncretic, classical nature. He describes Michelena’s sculpture (and drawings and reliefs from the exhibition) as chaste and simple serene forms as befits the technique, the materials used (bronze and marble), and especially their intelligent artistic sensibility. In his critique, Oribe reflects on aspects that sculpture does not have: color, movement, and sound, which is why form here is everything: there is nothing to make one think of anything except the ideas involved. Oribe does not hesitate to associate this sculptural work with artists of his own literary calling, such as Julio Herrera y Reissig, Delmira Agustini; and with contemporary critics and writers whose busts Michelena exhibits: Enrique Casaravilla Lemos, Alberto Zum Felde, and the painter Carmelo de Arzadun (1888–1968).