Art: Nightmare Alley

There were microphones, movie cameras and diplomats. And there were speeches by Venezuela’s visiting President Romulo Gallegos and Foreign Minister Andres Blanco. It seemed more like an ambassador’s tea than an art exhibition. But the paintings—hung by the Library of Congress as a gesture of inter-American good, will—spoke anything but the language of diplomacy. The work of a brooding, hollow-cheeked man named Héctor Poleo, they were fierce and fearful as a prophecy of doom.

Héctor Poleo seems much too young and much too miserable to be Venezuela’s best-known artist. He has been miserable most of his life, and looks old before his time. The son of a Caracas furniture maker, he was a moody boy, blinded in one eye by a childhood accident, and haunted by the memory of a violin teacher mangled by a car near Hector’s house. Héctor spent most of the long, monotonous days of his childhood drawing by himself—in books, on walls, on scraps of paper. Finally his father, who had once hoped to be a sculptor, decided that Hector should become an artist.

Modern Madonnas. For the next few years, Héctor studied in Caracas and Mexico City, watched the great and violent Orozco work, and painted alone in his little Mexico City apartment. “But I tried not to have much Mexican influence,” he says, “because I don’t feel that way.” He learned more from the still and delicate paintings of Giotto and Mantegna.

Today, at 29, Héctor Poleo still paints as if he had taken lessons from some Renaissance master. But his subjects are a modern nightmare. His women, like modern Madonnas, mourn, eyes shut against the world. A disfigured war hero stares numbly out of his canvas, his blind eye patched with paper money, his chest covered with worthless medals of tin, cork, broken combs, and tiny crutches. Poleo’s trees are dead, his earth pocked and parched, his cities mere ruins and rubble. In some paintings, there are no signs of life at all—only tiny ladders down which the human race has fled to escape an atomic war.

In such a world, Héctor Poleo has painted himself as a shriveled, sightless old man, ready for death to snatch him (see cut). In a corner of the canvas, like a bit of an old snapshot, is a tiny picture of Poleo as he really looks. Beneath that hangs one sick eye, freshly torn from its socket, staring, in dumb fascination, from a ruined wall.

Modern Talk. Now living in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Héctor Poleo hears so much talk of war that war has become an obsession. “I worry all the time. Everyone begin to talk about a new war. These people don’t know the true war or else they have inhuman feelings for other people. I believe in a new system.” When friends press him about it, he says doggedly: “I don’t care about a name, but something have to came. My viewpoint is more than political.”

Héctor Poleo argues better with his brush, going off to his studio in the early morning, there to paint for ten hours at a stretch, until he has covered canvas with grief and ruin and death.