Pedro Nel Gómez

Biography

In 1934 the central hall of the Capitolio in Bogotá held 114 works by Pedro Nel Gómez. The exhibition won him a contract with the municipality of Medellín to decorate the city hall.

He was born on 4 July 1899 in the mining town of Anorí, in the department of Antioquia, to Jesús Gómez González and María Luisa Agudelo Garcés. His childhood was spent in Itagüí, a suburb of Medellín. He began to draw early. His father doubted that painting would earn a living and persuaded him to study engineering; Pedro Nel agreed on condition that he could study art at the same time. He completed his secondary education in 1917 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Medellín, and in 1922 graduated from the College of Mines in civil engineering. In 1923 he moved to Bogotá, where he worked as an engineer and taught, and studied perspective and artistic anatomy with Francisco Antonio Cano. In 1925 (by other accounts, 1924) he left for Europe. According to some accounts he first studied painting in France and the Netherlands, then settled in Florence and attended the Academy of Fine Arts there; according to others, he entered the academy in 1926 and stayed only briefly. In Florence he learned fresco, which he later adapted to the tropical climate of Colombia. Among the works known from his Italian years are the oil paintings “Amazonomachy”, “The Martyrdom of Saint Jerome” and “Anatomy Lesson”; these canvases were shown in Rome at an exhibition of Latin American artists. It was then that he met Giuliana Scalaberni, who became his wife.

In 1930 Gómez returned to Colombia and took charge of the School of Fine Arts in Medellín. The murals in the old city hall, where the Museum of Antioquia now stands, became his first fresco cycle: eleven panels in different rooms. They include “The Empty Table of the Hungry Child”, “The Coffee Dance”, “Matriarchy”, a triptych on labour, “The Dead Miner”, “Anxiety over the Alienation of the Mines” and “The Migratory Forces”. The last of these was in the mayor’s office and showed peasants moving to the big cities. Conservative opinion criticised the subjects; a city councillor, José María Bernal, objected to the murals in both form and content. Gómez’s former friend, the painter Eladio Vélez, intervened in the dispute without supporting him, and the friendship ended in enmity. After this Gómez began to paint the walls of his own house in the Aranjuez district, which he had designed himself. The house later became a museum, opened in 1975, and work on its walls continued almost to the end of his life. There are also frescoes in the building of the Faculty of Mines in Medellín, at the chemistry faculty of the University of Antioquia, in the Instituto de Crédito Territorial in Bogotá and in the Banco Popular in Cali. The 1956 mural for the Banco Popular in Medellín was preserved, after the building was demolished during construction of the metro, in a passage at Parque Berrío station.

He was also an architect. He designed the building of the College of Mines in Medellín (1938), with a parabolic dome of 200 square metres, and the building of the chemistry faculty of the University of Antioquia. He took part in the planning of the Laureles district, drew up a project for the San Javier district and one for the Cementerio Universal. Among his sculptures are carved wooden reliefs, the bronze “Cacique Nutibara” and the marble “Melancholy Gold Panner”.

In 1946 Gómez founded the faculty of architecture at the National University and was several times its dean; for his teaching he was given the title of emeritus professor. In 1944, together with Rafael Sáenz, Débora Arango and others, he signed a thirteen-point manifesto of the “independent artists”. His pupils are said to include Débora Arango, Jesusita Vallejo and Carlos Correa. It seems to me that the teacher’s influence in Medellín is most visible in these names.

Pedro Nel Gómez died on 6 June 1984 in Medellín. In 2019 the National Museum of Colombia held a retrospective, “Pedro Nel Gómez: Relatos de una Nación”.