Around 1920, as A young artist, Reveron moves to a solitary spot by the Caribbean sea, in the Venezuelan shores. He seems to be heading against the stream. While his contemporaries pursue an ideal of progress, he produces a unique work that ends up placing him among the most significant figures of modern Latin American art.  The videos above include a movie trailer depicting his life in Macuto alongside his muse Juanita. His docuemntary and self portrait was filmed in 1953, a year before his tragic death in a Caracas mental institution.

By this time El Castillete had some new residents: a set of life-size stuffed dolls that Reverón and Ms. Rios sewed from cast-off burlap sacks. Almost all female, they were used as models for paintings, though to Reverón they seem to have been more than mere props. Like statues of Roman Catholic saints in Latin America, they were treated as family.

Reverón'sHe set up a cafe for them to relax in; he gave them musical instruments, a telephone, a tinfoil mirror, a bat-winged costume and a cage full of songbirds, all handmade from paper, tape and other grade-school materials, and all on view at MoMA. He designed their outfits and assigned them names: Niza, Serefina, Teresa, Josefina, Graciela. He expressed intense, contradictory feelings for them, protective, reproachful, domineering and erotic. Collectively they were a cross between a play group and a harem. They probably looked a little creepy when new, and now they're like tattered mummies, a macabre sight.

Their presence makes the late paintings particularly eerie. In some the figures really look like dolls, with inert bodies and garish faces. In others they look like sexualized women, their anatomical details fetishistically rendered. (Reverón, Ms. Rios said, would paint from dolls, but give them her skin.) The confusion about what "real" means in this work is compounded in a series of late self-portrait drawings, in which the dolls loom up from behind the artist's Christlike head, like an army of adamant, blank-faced angels, as if aggressively crowding his space and thoughts.

Mujer con Mantilla

By the time Reverón died in 1954, he was famous as a Latin American modernist pioneer. He was also romanticized as a second Gauguin or van Gogh; maybe he was inviting such comparisons in his self-portraits. He was touted as both insider and outsider, academically trained but self-developed, the creator of a persona that in the end he was unable to live without. El Castillete survived as a relic of that persona until it was destroyed in a mudslide in 1999.

Marina

MoMA has given solo shows to only four Latin American modernists. Why should Reverón be one of them? On the surface at least he exemplifies cultural stereotypes that art historians are trying to move beyond, the Latin American artist as an exotic: instinctual, irrational, primitivizing, in tune with nature, fantasy-driven, "spiritual," indebted to — rather than in control of — European forms.

Mujer Frente al Espejo

Maybe there were practical reasons for the choice. Several of the paintings in the show, organized by John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the museum, belong to Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a MoMA trustee with a fabulous Latin American collection, including the largest number of Reveróns in private hands. The important point is that MoMA is pushing ahead in an effort to expand its definition of modernism to include the world. We may quibble over how it proceeds, but the forward, outward movement can only be good. And Reverón is part of it, in a magnetic, bizarre and haunting show. He is an artist I think you will be glad to know.