Alfonso Reyes. México. Circa 1950.

Vintage gelatin silver print with white margin; work dedicated and signed on the front by the writer: “To Virginia Picot and R. E. Montes i Bradley, his friend Alfonso Reyes. 1953”. Measurements: 17.5 x 12.6 cm / 6.88 x 4.96 in. Former Montes i Bradley collection.

Portrait of the Mexican writer, who looks at the camera with the bonhomie that characterized him. Surely responding to a request from his friend and colleague, the Argentine Ricardo Ernesto Montes i Bradley (Rosario, 1905-Buenos Aires, 1976), he dedicated it to the foot and gave it to him. Both had pledged their pen to the destinies of their country; Montes i Bradley had to take refuge in Mexico from 1950, where he developed various cultural activities, frequenting the main intellectual figures of the time.

The son of a general from the Porfiriato, Alfonso Reyes (1889 - 1959), a lawyer, in 1909, together with Vasconcelos, Caso and Henríquez Ureña, he founded the Ateneo de la Juventud, the scene of humanistic debates that criticized the positivist vision. In 1911, at the height of the revolution, he wrote his first book "Aesthetic Questions". Due to the war conflicts and the death of his father, he emigrated to France where he held his first diplomatic post in 1913. A year later he moved to Spain; There he lived for a decade acquiring prestige for his work in the field of literary research, poetry and journalism; he collaborated with Ramón Menéndez Pidal and published essays on the classics of the Spanish Golden Age.

The opening of it with “Vision of Anáhuac”, a text written in Spain and in full longing, was really appreciated years later when in the 50s it was reissued in Mexico, when read by the new generation of writers. Reyes starred in an extensive diplomatic career: Paris, in 1925; two years later he was assigned to Argentina and in 1930 to Brazil, until 1936. In 1939 he founded with Cossio Villegas the House of Spain in Mexico to give asylum to refugees from the Spanish civil war. His vast literary work, his writings on American subjects, and his poems are hailed as achievements of twentieth-century Americanist literature. For Borges, he was the "best prose writer in the Spanish language”.