The Bolivian People 73has the country’s best collection of colonial art, with a few
rooms dedicated to modern artists.
Bolivian art galleries rarely display paintings from
beyond Latin America, but the superb local product
should satisfy one’s passion for great art. Bolivian
artists who find success abroad do not cut ties with
their native art community. We visited Luis Zilvetti’s well
equipped studio in Paris, an artist’s dream. Zilvetti said
that he proudly returns to Bolivia at least once a year
for expositions.
A Painter’s Viewpoint
One of the more eccentric Bolivian painters, also a fi ne poet, is
Edgar Arandia. As we had tea together at a café on La Paz’s El Prado
Boulevard, Arandia summed up his background. “I make lots of
money in Germany, where I go to paint and exhibit, spend it all in
France,” he smiled, “then return to Bolivia to paint, write poetry, and
help fellow artists who are recovering alcoholics.”Arandia says he’s infl uenced by the Mexican line drawings
of José Luis Cuevas, but describes his own contemporary
work as ‘very classical.’ “One always returns to the classics,”
he contends.
Arandia’s first experiences abroad came with exiles
stemming from his anti-dictatorship activities. “I received
the Bánzer scholarship and the García-Meza scholarship,” he
explained, referring to two of Bolivia’s former military dictators.
“I was once wounded in an anti-coup demonstration,” he
grins, “and lived to hear the announcement of my death over
the radio the following day.”
Like Arandia, late Bolivian artist Walter Solón Romero
was exiled several times. When the García-Meza dictatorship
mistook a mural of Bolivia’s woman guerrilla independence
heroine Juana Azurduy de Padilla for a homage to Che
Guevara, he was captured and labelled a subversive. The
mural was the work of his students.
“They demanded to know the names of all the art students
I’d taught and the teachers I’d studied under, and then they
threatened to cut off my hands,” he said.