Art: Mexico’s Chucho

Mexico City’s No. 1 doodler last week found himself the center of an artistic cult. Tall, wrinkled Chucho Reyes (pronounced Choocho Ray-ez) is a 58-year-old antique dealer and former art teacher who claims he knows nothing whatever about painting technique (“I don’t paint—I just mess up paper”).

U.S. tourists buy Reyes’ bright, fantastic watercolors almost as fast as he turns them out. Chief U.S. collector is Beautician Helena Rubinstein, who owns over 100 doodles. There are two Reyes works in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art.

Chucho Reyes quickly covers big sheets of Chinese paper with whorls of screaming paint representing prancing horses (see cut), proud cocks, or wooden-faced little angels. To these images, Chucho sometimes adds impressions of Adam & Eve, fallen women or skeletons. All spring from Mexican folklore.

Curious Course. Ten years ago Chucho Reyes set up a school in Guadalajara to train local children in painting, sculpture, bookbinding, glass blowing, dramatic writing, silver and tin work. Reyes himself knew nothing of these techniques, hired no teachers, ran the school in highly unacademic fashion. (“That is why they made such pretty things.”)

He stirred up his pupils by taking them to theaters, whorehouses, insane asylums, wakes, where they startled those present by climbing on chairs or stretching out on the floor to get a novel point of view. Out of this free-style approach came some spectacular work, part of it by artists now nationally known in Mexico. One outstanding Reyes graduate is the water-colorist and engraver, José Maria Servin.

Chucho used to wrap his students’ work in Chinese paper. He began to make careless doodles on the wrappers. These attracted the attention of Diego and Frida Rivera, who often liked the doodles on the wrapping better than the artistry inside. So Chucho tried marketing them, at 5 pesos ($1) apiece. Today Reyes’ swooshing pictures bring 50 to 80 pesos in Mexico, as high as $50 in Manhattan. Chucho sometimes reinforces his doodling with paint splashes, animal footprints or droppings from his two pet doves.