Horses. Cordoba, 1916.

Oil on canvas. Measurements: 67 x 90 cm. This work was part of the "Fernando Fader" exhibition that was held in 1988 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. This is item 54 of the catalogue, pg. 105.


Two horses rest in the sun in front of a pond. One of them, white, is saddled. The pair of dark and white horses is a recurring motif in Fader's compositions. We find them in Tierra mansa (1919), El pellón negro (1916, in the National Museum of Fine Arts) and Crossing the hill (c. 1918). Most likely they are Fader's own horses, which he portrayed plein air in the days and evenings of Cordoba. Our oil painting is a magnificent example of his mature period, called Cordoba, which began in 1916 when he moved to that province in search of a more benign climate for his weakened lungs. Displays a handling of color typical of impressionism. Observe the light blues and greens in the shadows of the horses, the intense blues, the pinks on the ground. The rendering remains realistic, but the color composition is complex, vibrant, making full use of sunlight contrasts; while the brushstroke is loose and thick impasto.


Fernando Fader (Bordeaux, France, 1882- Loza Corral, Córdoba, Argentina, 1935), son of a German naval engineer and a French mother, trained as a painter in Munich and under the tutelage of Heinrich von Zügel, where and with whom he assimilated Germanic Impressionism. Back in our country, his first exhibition in 1905 was a watershed in the history of national painting. José León Pagano wrote in this regard that “With him a stage of national painting began positively. Nothing unites him to the nucleus that precedes him. There is a hiatus: a decisive cut between two links. That is why some men from that nucleus were so frugal in their estimative ways. Fader perceived another world and expressed himself through other means. Those had gone through impressionism without noticing its strong wave of renewal. Fader vibrated in her”. [1] A good example of those first impressions of Fader's new art is the review written by Yofrua –pseudonym of the Frenchman Godofredo Daireaux- and published in La Nación on July 26, 1906 after his second show in Buenos Aires. There we read that “most of these works are simple sketches; what induces us to look for him camorra...”. [2] And he went on to say that Fader preferred “a four-stroke sketch to any finished and perfect painting”. Even Cupertino del Campo, in a laudatory and extensive note on July 12 in the same newspaper, had stated that "they are, for the most part, sketches." [3] Undoubtedly, the new style picked up and matured by Fader in his formative years in Germany, as well as arousing attention, was disturbing. Del Campo continued in his note to the aforementioned exhibition at the Salón Costa, that “Fader... knows how to say a lot, sometimes everything, with four or five determined and fair brushstrokes. Many of his paintings appear, seen from a distance, laboriously completed works; You can see an infinite number of details and subtleties of color that you would think had been obtained with glazes. One approaches; he sees that it is a paint squad and laughs. (...). On the rigorous and scientific construction of the work of art, respecting the drawing, the anatomy, the chiaroscuro and the harmony of the general intonation, there is something that floats: the soul of the artist”.


In 1907, together with the artists Pío Collivadino, Carlos P. Ripamonte, Cesáreo Bernaldo de Quirós, Alberto María Rossi, Justo Lynch, Arturo Dresco, among others, he formed the group “Nexus”. That same year he delivered a speech in which he would overturn his particular vision, "Possibilities of a national art and its main characters." In 1910 he moved away from painting to focus on a hydraulic engineering company that led him to financial ruin. He returned triumphantly to painting with an interior that would bring him the First Prize at the National Salon in 1914, the oil painting Las manilas. Two years later he moved to Córdoba, where he will live and produce for almost twenty years.


Notes:

1. José León Pagano, The art of the Argentines, Buenos Aires, author's edition, 1937.

2. Yofrua, Fine Arts. Quaranta, Larravide, Fader; in "La Nación", Buenos Aires, July 26, 1906, quoted by Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales in Fernando Fader. Work and thought of an Argentine painter. Santa Fe (Granada) Buenos Aires. Institute of America - Cedodal. 1998.

3. José Bálsamo (Cupertino del Campo), Fader Exhibition; In "La Nación", Buenos Aires, July 12, 1906, Illustrated Supplement No. 202. In Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, 1998.



S.O.XXII - LMMMM
AUTHOR FERNANDO FADER

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