Art: From Orphan Boy to President

In the slums of Buenos Aires, one of Argentina’s best-known painters last week opened an exhibition. Thin, baldish, shy Benito Quinquela Martín held his show in the slums because he lived there.

La Boca (“The Mouth”), a bedraggled, crowded, riverside quarter of corrugated iron shacks, docks, fish markets, is regarded by Porteños (colloquial for citizens of Buenos Aires) as the Montmartre of Buenos Aires. There, for many years, Quinquela Martín has painted La Boca’s muscular sailors and barnacled boats, exhibiting his work in a little combination school and museum near his home. When, a few years ago, La Boca jocularly declared itself a republic, it elected First Citizen Quinquela Martín its president.

Painter Martín is a true product of La Boca. A foundling, he was adopted as a child by a coal heaver, Manuel Quinquela. He grew to boyhood with an incorrigible habit of messing up the Quinquela home with coal and charcoal, drawing soot-colored pictures wherever he could find a clean space. The Quinquelas finally went to the parish priest about it. The priest bought the boy drawing materials, told him to make his drawings on paper instead. Quinquela Martín, completely self-taught, became renowned throughout La Boca for his drawings; his reputation spread to the smart Avenida Alvear.

Several years ago Quinquela Martín bought a piece of one of La Boca’s slum-strewn blocks and gave it to the municipality on condition that it erect there a school of graphic arts exclusively for La Boca’s moppets. The school was built, named the Escuela-Museo Don Pedro de

Mendoza, after the man who, according to Boca legend, landed at that very spot when he founded the city of Buenos Aires. In a studio on the third floor Quinquela Martín himself painted and directed the school’s activities, agreeing to foot the bills for the museum as long as he lived.

Painter Quinquela decorated the classrooms with high-keyed murals of La Boca’s daily life. Quinquela Martín abhors political propaganda in art, but he painted La Boca’s stevedores, not like bedraggled proletarians, but as big-muscled, heroic men. Said he: “These boys are of poor families. Their fathers are doing hard, menial jobs. By making them into such men, these children will, at least for the moment, forget their poverty and be proud of their fathers.”

The fame of Quinquela Martín’s school spread all over the world. Offers came from Italy and the U.S. asking him to decorate similar schools for workers’ children. But Quinquela Martín declined these offers “not because I would not have been honored and proud. . . . But I feel that such murals should be done by the men of the country itself, expressing scenes and events of the country as only its natives can best know and interpret them.” Today, La Boca’s moppets are even prouder of Painter Quinquela than of their crack football team, “The Boca Juniors.”

Quinquela Martín, a modest man of 50, has never married. Says he:

“Woman is beautiful, but Art is more beautiful. The emotion Art can give you is greater, more profound, ever changing and many-faceted, infinitely more than the emotion that woman can give to man. At least I speak for the artist to whom Art is a mysticism.”