Sérvulo Gutiérrez

Biography

The first works of his to become known to the public were not paintings. He made vessels in the tradition of Pre-Columbian pottery, and they were so convincing that some experts took them for genuine. When the confusion began, he announced publicly that they were his own work.

Sérvulo Gutiérrez was born in Ica. The sources give his birth date differently: 23 July, 5 August or 20 February 1914. The family was large, seventeen children by some accounts; his parents worked as craftsmen and art restorers. After his mother died he moved to Lima, to the home of his eldest brother, in the Rímac district. He had almost no formal education, and from his youth he tried various occupations: he worked as a waiter and as a labourer on the construction of the Pisco–Castrovirreyna road.

He was also a boxer. He became national bantamweight champion, joined the Peruvian national team and, according to some sources, in 1935 took second place in his weight class at the South American championship in Córdoba, Argentina.

After Córdoba he stayed in Buenos Aires. Painting already held his attention, and for several years he worked and studied alongside Emilio Pettoruti, a well-known Argentine painter. By one account the apprenticeship lasted eight years, while other sources suggest less; it is hard to say for certain, I think. From Pettoruti he kept an interest in sculpture, although he made few sculptures. In 1938 Gutiérrez went to Paris and until 1940 studied painting and sculpture there, without a fixed course. French painting drew him away from an academic manner toward an expressive Expressionism with sculptural outlines. Because of the outbreak of the Second World War he was repatriated to Buenos Aires, and at the end of 1940 he made his way to Lima. In the 1950s he was a prominent figure in the capital’s bohemian circles.

In 1942, for the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Amazon, an exhibition was held in Lima, and his sculptures of Amazon women as archers won first prize. They are now in the Javier Prado Museum of Natural History at the National University of San Marcos.

Around the same time he painted “The Andes” (1943), a nude female figure, heavy and rough-hewn; many regard it as his best picture. Until the mid-1940s his painting is marked by a clean, precise outline, large solid figures and echoes of Indigenism, a movement then in fashion. He rejected academic rules, but he apparently did not join the new European avant-garde movements either.

From 1946 to 1954 his manner grew harsher. He painted with thick, rapid strokes of red, green, blue and black, and scored the paint surface to produce texture. In landscapes of the desert around Ica, with its lagoons and huarango trees, this vegetation became the main subject. “Don Juan” (1952) dates from this period.

From 1955 his subjects turned mystical. He painted the bloodied face of the Lord of Luren and St Rose of Lima; one version of St Rose he made on the wall of a bar. His colour became harsher still, at times in the manner of Fauvism.

Gutiérrez also wrote poems, many of them dedicated to Ica. He died in Lima in 1961; the day is given variously as 21 or 22 July, and 21 May also occurs.