An Extraordinary Life

The art world considers Alfredo Boulton one of the most important champions of modern art in Venezuela and a key intellectual of the 20th century.

He was a pioneer of modern photography, an art critic, a scholar of Venezuelan art, and a patron and friend to many of the great artists and architects of his time.

Still, he is shockingly underrecognized, or else completely unknown, outside his home country.

To remedy this, Getty has organized Alfredo Boulton: Looking at Venezuela, 1928–1978, an exhibition that celebrates Boulton’s many dimensions and accomplishments. The show explores his photographic production, close relationships with key modern artists of the period, and influence on the formalization and development of Venezuelan art history and criticism.

The exhibition draws extensively from the trove of papers and photographs in the Alfredo Boulton archive, which the Getty Research Institute acquired in 2020 thanks to a partial gift and purchase from the Alberto Vollmer Foundation. It also includes significant loans—primarily works by prominent artists that Boulton acquired for his private collection. The show offers a glimpse into Boulton’s private life as well, his days filled with loyal friends associated with the world of arts and culture, a strong pride for his country, and numerous trips and adventures enabled by his privileged social status.

“The Exuberant Beauty of Our Race”

Boulton was born in 1908 to a wealthy family in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. In 1925 his parents sent him to study in Lausanne and London, and while there he frequently visited Paris and became acquainted with the artists of the avant-garde. In 1928 he returned to a changing Venezuela—a new generation was engaged in discussions about modernizing the country, which meant taking a stand against Juan Vicente Gómez’s dictatorship. Boulton and his young peers wanted to transform their country by rejecting outmoded styles and embracing the languages of the avant-garde. Over the next four decades Venezuela would become one of the main centers of modernity in Latin America, forming a vibrant artistic scene in which Boulton actively participated.

Boulton’s first photographs from the early 1930s were inspired by European and American examples, particularly works by Man Ray and of Surrealism. Boulton produced close shots, generally of objects, with many musical, artistic, and literary references, as in Essays for a “Braque,” in which he paid homage to the French Cubist Georges Braque. By the mid-1930s Boulton had begun making portraits of local people, such as the models Luis León and Ramón, who posed for artist Francisco Narváez in his studio, and men playing bolas criollas (a Venezuelan version of bocce or pétanque). Through these images Boulton fashioned an idealized Venezuelan archetype based on the concept of belleza criolla, the term he coined to describe, in his own words, “the exuberant beauty of our race”—the result of the mix of the three races present in Venezuela’s population, white, Indigenous, and Black.

Boulton also proved instrumental in creating an integrated visual image of his country; he photographed many Venezuelan landscapes and regions that had never before been documented, feeling compelled to capture what was rapidly modernizing and changing. He moved to Maracaibo in 1937 to oversee the family business and started to photograph Venezuela’s geography. In 1939, for instance, he traveled through the Andean territory with his camera, creating images of landscapes that would compose the first photobook published in Venezuela, Images of Western Venezuela (1940). He consolidated his poetic national vision in 1944 when he launched a new series centered on Venezuela’s Margarita Island and fishermen at work (photographs published in 1952 in La Margarita). And for The Plains of Páez (1950), Boulton traced the footsteps of José Antonio Páez, one of the leaders of independence in Venezuela, documenting important locations in his life. Those photographs show the rural areas of the Venezuelan plains and the llaneros (cowboys) who lived there.

From Artist to Art Historian, but Always the Devoted Friend and Patron

By around 1956 Boulton had abandoned his photography practice to focus on his work as a researcher, art historian, and curator. He then dedicated 40 years of his life to building a comprehensive analysis of the history of art in his country, from the colonial period onward. At the time, there was no prior literature for him to cite or organized archives and catalogues to research. Still, Boulton published more than 60 books, including his groundbreaking three-volume Historia de la pintura en Venezuela (History of Painting in Venezuela), published from 1964 to 1972.

One of his first art historical publications, Los retratos de Bolívar (The Portraits of Bolívar; 1956), studied the iconography of Simón Bolívar, the liberator of Venezuela, who for Boulton represented the country’s highest ideal. The public acclaim for Boulton’s first books earned him admission to the National Academy of History. In 1968 he picked up his camera again to record the pre-Hispanic pottery of Venezuela and in 1978 published a volume about this neglected subject.

Boulton’s circle of friends included some of the most significant artists, writers, and intellectuals of the period. He was particularly close to Los Disidentes, a group of young Venezuelan artists living in Paris who had broken with traditional academic painting in the 1940s and worked in abstract art. Boulton also maintained lifelong friendships with Alejandro Otero, Jesús Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. He considered it especially important that for the first time in Venezuelan history, these artists actively participated in the birth of an international art movement: kinetic art. Boulton saw them as an integral part of the development of Western art, and he supported them by giving them grants, buying their pieces, organizing exhibitions of their work in Venezuela and abroad, and writing articles and books about them.

A great example of Boulton’s vision of Venezuela’s ideal modernity was his house on Margarita Island in the city of Pampatar. Purchased in 1952, it was a colonial construction that he remodeled and decorated with art and furniture by Alexander Calder, Alejandro Otero, and other major artists of his time, creating a fusion of modern art and the country’s history and traditions. Correspondence and photographs in Boulton’s archive portray a man who relished entertaining. When guests arrived, they would receive two small books written by Boulton: La casa, which provided a history of the house using a fictional story, and Copas y platos, a compilation of recipes, with humorous descriptions, for the signature drinks and dishes Boulton and his wife served to their guests.