He was born in 1886 and together with his brothers Celina (1884 – 1963) and Alejo (1877 – 1946), he cultivated the pleasure of collecting works of art and antiques in general, being a scholar who transcended the mere pleasure of gathering beautiful and rare pieces. As a young man he professed his inclination for the arts, training as a painter with the master Reynaldo Giudici in Buenos Aires, and with Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa in Paris and later in Mallorca, displaced by the First World War. There were many Argentines who followed the artistic footprint of the Catalan painter; among them, Gregorio López Naguil, Carlos and Martín Noel, Carlos López Bouchardo, Ricardo Güiraldes and Adán Diehl [1], and already in Puerto Pollensa (Mallorca), and living in an idyllic artistic community, López Naguil and Catalina Vives, Tito Cittadini and Madeleine Caissac Boissin, Ricardo Güiraldes and Adelina del Carril, and González Garaño with Marietta Ayerza. The Mexicans R. Montenegro and J. Enciso were also there.
Diehl was another of the participants and since 1926 he settled on that island where, together with his wife María Elena Popolicio and the financial support of Banca Tornquist, he built a hotel in Formentor, destined to attract a very special tourism, although it soon closed its doors due due to some of its own mistakes and the world crisis of 1929. Already in the hands of a commercial company, it was reopened in 1935, consolidating its presence over time through the benefits of the original project. From the hand of Camilo José Cela, since 1959 Formentor became the "Club of Poets", where two prestigious awards were born, the Formentor and the International, awarded, among others, to Jorge Semprun, Jorge Luis Borges, Henry Miller, Alejo Carpentier, and in a second stage, from 2011 until now, already called the Formentor Prize for Letters, to Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Ricardo Piglia and César Aira, to name just a few of those chosen.
Returning to that germinal group of artists and intellectuals, in 1924 Anglada Camarasa portrayed Marietta Ayerza (1894 – 1975), the wife of Alfredo González Garaño, a painting that is preserved in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. In that same year, Alfredo G. G. was the curator of Argentina's submission to the Venice Biennale, and Anglada Camarasa exhibited her work at the Association of Friends of Art, received by a laudatory review in the magazine Proa, signed by Ricardo Güiraldes.
Her commitment to the arts placed him in a position of relevance; He was a founding member of the Society of Watercolourists, Pastelists and Etchers -so called at the beginning- and of the Association of Friends of the National Museum of Fine Arts (AAMNBA), which he chaired, and a member of the Association of Friends of Art (AAA); He held a seat in the National Academy of Fine Arts (ANBA) [2] since its year of origin, in 1936, and was a member of the Society of Bibliophiles and the Bonaerense Institute of Antiquities, in addition to belonging to various groups of artists and intellectuals. , among them, the so-called “Parera group” that between 1908 and 1930 originally gathered around Alejandro Bustillo's workshop, became interested in Argentine art in permanent dialogue with European art. He was also a member of the group “La Púa”, from which the so-called Martín Fierro derived.
A friend of the Güiraldes brothers, with Ricardo they created the ballet Caaporá, whose designs they both made, and together with Manuel he gave a boost to the sales of Pedro Figari's works. That work was admired by Nijinsky, who had proposed to stage it with the music of Igor Stravinsky, but his broken health watered down the project. “The idea was to bring a Guarani legend to the stage and make the first ballet that would account for a renewed Americanist aesthetic in the light of contemporary art.” [3] From that attempt, the paintings of the costumes, the scenery and decorative objects that would be used are preserved; They were exhibited in 1917 in Buenos Aires, at the Salón de Acuarelistas, and in 1920, in Madrid, awakening in the Spanish critic José Francés a very hopeful judgment: “They are demonstrative proof that Hispanic Americans are going to have a modern art of their own, deeply rooted in national elements. [4]
In his collection, he grouped the School of Paris with pre-Columbian, viceroyalty, African, Asian and Oceanian art, cultivating a Creole cosmopolitanism at the same time as Jorge Luis Borges and Oliverio Girondo, back in the 1920s. It was a new look at Argentine collecting that, although it rescued the Hispanic contributions, also went to the indigenous, to Luso-Brazilian art, to the aesthetic contributions of the rest of Europe, to Eastern art and even to the influences that came from regional creations. In this change of direction we find him together with Antonio Santamarina, Antonio Leloir Martínez de Hoz, John Walter Maghire and Luis García Lawson. Books, furniture, paintings, engravings, colonial and Creole silverware, and other decorative arts enriched these ensembles, which were incorporated into public institutions on numerous occasions. Alfredo G. G. himself donated more than two hundred and fifty pieces to the Museum of Ethnographic Art; there were the works of pre-Hispanic art and of the contemporary indigenous peoples that formed his collection from acquisitions made in Paris and also in Buenos Aires.
In the wide range of interests, he collected paintings and drawings by European artists, such as Amedeo Modigliani, José Gutiérrez Solanas -in the thirties he donated his own works to the MNBA-, Toulouse-Lautrec and Anglada Camarasa, his teacher.
Outstanding bibliophile, in addition to being part of the Association that brought them together in Argentina, in 1938 he was a founding member of the South American publishing house and joined the Editorial Board of Sur Magazine.
With the innovations observed in Europe, he proposed substantial changes in the way of presenting the samples; he did so at the AAA (Association of Friends of the Arts) where he organized numerous exhibitions -in 1932 he presented Estanislao del Campo's Fausto illustrated by Héctor Basaldúa- in a staging that surprised. This expansion of perspectives was also reflected in the individual exhibitions mounted at the MNBA -among them, those of Malharro, De la Cárcova and Rugendas- and presiding over the Organizing Commission of the one dedicated to Impressionism in 1962.
His life story is joined with the most important institutions dedicated to culture and the arts in our country. When the National Museum of Fine Arts moved to its current headquarters in 1932, it promoted the Association of Friends of this house - to which it had belonged since its foundation - and together with Errázuriz, Llobet, Bullrich and others, the purchases by of the Argentine government of two important works -Vahine no te miti, by Paul Gaugen, and Moulin de la Galette, by Vincent van Gogh-, still central today in the exhibition discourse of the largest museum in Argentina.
In his private collection he cultivated a special predilection for works on paper, both watercolors and drawings, as well as lithographs and engravings. With them he formed a legacy that was incorporated into the heritage of the National Museum of Fine Arts, "of undoubted interest for the reconstruction of our historical past, as well as for showing the first artistic attempts made in Buenos Aires with the new technique of lithography, introduced timidly by the Frenchman Juan Bautista Douville and later continued by the Genevan César Hipólito Bacle”, as Adolfo Luis Ribera expressed it in the catalog that in 1979 accompanied the exhibition presented with the title of “Alfredo González Garaño Collection. Argentine / South American iconography, 19th century”. Although Ribera's text mentions Bacle's creations, it is noteworthy that his works do not appear in the exhibition. Perhaps because her heirs -Marietta and Alfredo had no children- decided to keep them, since we now have before our eyes seven of her lithographic plates -exceptionally, all illuminated-, which were part of the series "Trages and customs from Buenos Aires." They came to our art gallery from his collection. [5]
Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa: The Valencian between two lights. National museum of fine arts. Gonzalez Garaño Legacy. Photography: MNBA.
Upon their death -Alfredo died in 1969 and his wife in 1975- the National Museums of Fine Arts and Decorative Arts, the Isaac Fernández Blanco Museum of Hispanic American Art and the National Academy of Fine Arts received their legacies.
Notes:
1. In "The Argentine painter López Naguil" in Atlántida. Argentine weekly illustration, undated cutout. AFLN. Cited in Gregorio López Naguil in the footprint of Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa. By Maria Elena Babino. Magazine of Institutions, Ideas and Markets. No. 68. October 2019.
2. The ANBA preserves the "González Garaño Legacy" with various documents, press clippings, travel notes, photographs and postcards.
3. María Elena Babino: Ricardo Güiraldes and his link with art. Buenos Aires, Paris, Mallorca, an aesthetic itinerary for an Americanist project. UNSAM Publishes, Arts and Letters Collection, Poliedros Series, 2007, p. 27.
4. Quoted in Anales, Buenos Aires, Spanish Cultural Institution, 1948, p. 735. (In María Elena Babino, 2007, op. cit, p. 28, note 42)
5. His brother Alejo de him in 1933 held an exhibition of Bacle's works at the Association of Friends of Art. His collection was dispersed in his time through Casa Pardo.
Other bibliographic sources:
Marcelo E. Pacheco: Art Collecting in Buenos Aires. 1924 – 1942. Buenos Aires. The Athenaeum. 2013.