Rómulo Rozo

Rómulo Rozo Peña was a sculptor, born in Bogota in 1899 (some authors confirm that he was born in Chiquinquirá, Boyacá). He lived a long part of his life in Mexico and died in the city of Mérida, Yucatán, in 1964. He was married twice, the first in Czechoslovakia, during his stay in Europe, to Ana Krauss who knew in Paris. They had three children: Rómulo, Gloria and Leticia. His second wife was Manuela Vera, yucateca, with whom he had two children: Marco Antonio and Gloria Antonia.^[1]

Studies

He did his first studies at the National School of Fine arts and afterwards at the Central Technical Institute of Bogota. When he traveled through Europe between the years 1924 and 1929, he studied at the Academy of Fine arts of Saint Fernando in Madrid and afterwards completed his studies in Paris, France, with Antoine Bourdelle, who exerted a big influence on his works. He participated in the Exhibition IberoAmericana of Seville in 1929 where won the Big Prize and the Medal of gold, before returning to America.^[1]

Bachué and Seville

In 1925 he made one of his master works in Paris named the "Bachué goddess generatriz of the chibchas". It was a sculpture created in granite that caused him to receive great recognition world-wide by his odd and exotic reference to the Colombian and pre-Columbian mythology. The work is a reference to the goddess Bachué, mother of the muisca civilisation in their mythology, an unprecedented representation due to the fact that this culture never created an iconography of his deities neither based his beliefs in the cult to the image. The repercussion of the international press to this work converted to Rozo in the artist of greater international recognition until this date, and the scope of his influence would feel prompt in Colombia when the newspapers published images of the "Bachué..." and of the new works made by Rómulo Rozo, in which it mixed his academic knowledge of the western art with his own elements of Latin American native cultures, Asian and African, many of these referents taken of the collections of ancient civilisations in the Museums of Louvre and Trocadero.^[2] In honour of the increasing admiration to the production of Rozo, in Colombia an ephemeral literary movement called The Bachués was created in 1930 that advocated the review of the vernacular roots for the creation of an own art, in opposition to the academic art.^[3][4][5] By the continuity of this influence in the plastic arts, shown in the production of all of the artists of this generation (Luis Alberto Acuña, Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo, Pedro Nel Gómez, Ramón Barba, José Domingo Rodríguez, Hena Rodríguez, Miguel Sopó, Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, among others), the "Bachué, goddess generatriz of the chibchas" by Rozo has been arduously signaled as the foundational sculpture of modern art in Colombia. The recognition obtained by Rozo thanks to this work was another of the factors determinants in that the Colombian government took it into the project of the Pavilion of Colombia in the Exhibition Iberoamericana of 1929 in Seville.

In 1928, Rozo it was hired to make the ornamentation of the building that would represent to Colombia in the Exhibition Iberoamericana of Seville of 1929. Although the building was projected by the Spanish architect José de Granados, Rozo received the structure and reformed the original idea of Granados that did allusion to a baroque church, to turn it into a temple with an ornamental reference to the chibchas gods of the Colombian prehispanic territory.^[2][2][6] Rozo asked the collector of the Bachué to loan the work, so it could be placed in the middle of the building during the year that the event lasted. Around it, Rozo created the figures in plaster and concrete, with clear referents to the cultures Tolima, Saint Agustín, Muiscas and even Mayas. The final result finished being a building sui generis, by the odd beauty between the conjunction of a religious architecture with a decoration without antecedents based in pre-Columbian civilisations. Again the repercussion of the press concluded in an unprecedented success for the sculptor, who decided not to return to Colombia but move to Mexico in 1931.

In spite of the great influence of The Bachué in all the nationalist generation of artists of the first half of 20th century in Colombia, the work disappeared after his participation in Seville. Only in 1998 (68 years after) it was found by the art historian Álvaro Medina, and exhibited for the first time in Colombia in the exhibition "Colombia in the threshold of the modernity", curated by the same researcher.^[7]

During the time the work was missing, a new wave of young artists and the media power of the Argentinian art critic Marta Traba overshadowed the contributions of this generation, condemning it to a second place in the history of the Colombian art that only was reassessed since its reappearance. In spite of his historical value no cultural institution in Colombia showed interest in purchasing it. However, the work is part of the collection of the Foundation Project Bachué, a platform interested in the conservation and gathering of Colombian art .^[8][9]

References