Armando Reverón’s in-depth study of natural light in his renowned white landscapes and his renditions of Venezuela’s industrial ports, made him one of Venezuela’s most important modernists. His studies in Spain under Ignacio Zuloaga and travels in France reflect influences of Francisco Goya, Joaquín Sorolla and the Post-Impressionists.

During the 1920s and 1930s Armando Reverón was already painting the coastal Caribbean scenery of iridescent white and sepia colors. Experimenting with non-traditional canvases, Reverón employed burlap and paper bags, producing a raw texture emulating the visual quality of blinding light. The present lot, Calle del puerto, painted circa 1942, is representative of his iconic modernist style, and perhaps the first artistic portrayals of Venezuela’s increasingly prosperous industrial activity. His depictions of the port and streets of La Guaira would add a degree of perspectival exactitude not present in many of his other works. Precise, darkly rendered lines give the composition an industrial feel, yet the human activity taking place in the town is somewhat undecipherable, a result of Reverón often painting from a distance in a dinghy with loose gestural brushstrokes. Reverón incorporates more color in this expressionist composition, adding blues, ochre and grey, juxtaposed with a characteristic sepia and white. By the 1940s Reverón was regularly exhibiting his work. In fact, Calle del puerto was exhibited extensively in Venezuela and in the important 1956 traveling exhibition Armando Reverón, that started at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and ended in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Reverón continued to depict different scenes of La Guaira until 1945, closing the last period of landscapes he would ever paint.