Carla Witte. Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales
ArtNexus, #120 (Jun - Nov 2023)

The work of Carla Witte (Leipzig, 1889-Montevideo, 1943) takes us through unstable terrains, along pathways of greater uncertainty than assurance. Her oeuvre is abundant and diverse; the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, in collaboration with Museo Agustín Araújo, presents Autenticidad radical (Radical Authenticity), an exhibition featuring eighty artworks that showcase the artist’s great versatility, curated by the scholar María Frick.

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Information about Witte’s life and work is scarce; interest in her oeuvre and research into her life are both recent phenomena. The show under review is a first for the general public, for whom Witte’s art is unknown, and comes as the result of a long research process. That process was made possible by the project “Cultural Legacy and Local Development. A Singular Opportunity: The Carla Witte Collection at Museo Agustín Araújo,” which brought more than ten researchers from three Universidad de la República departments together to collaborate for over two years.

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Among the many unresolved questions, some facts do come through. Carla Witte was a German-born artist who experienced the Weimar era, received a Lutheran education, and emigrated to Latin America. In Germany, she lived in Leipzig and Berlin; between 1905 and 1908 she studied at the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookmaking Technology. In 1923, she arrived in Paraguay, where she lived until 1927. Then she resettled in Uruguay and remained there until her death. Carla Witte committed suicide in 1943.

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Witte’s work encompasses a wide variety of techniques and art forms, occasionally marginal ones, and gives new significance to the place occupied by such genres and disciplines in the history of Uruguayan art. Since the dates of most of her works are unknown, the show is organized along thematic lines: one series about her Paraguayan period; illustrations for the journal La Pluma; portraits and nudes; religious works; works about the carnival; and a selection of silkscreens. Also included is a display of some of Witte’s graphic design work form various Uruguayan brands and companies of the era, among them Radio Carve and the Uruguayan-American Alliance.

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The works visitors encounter at the start of the show are in a post-impressionist mode, with loose and fast brushstrokes in colorful tempera, oil, and pastel. During her years in Paraguay, Witte produced works that focus on the overwhelming density of the local vegetation—half menacing, half idyllic—and feature typical characters evincing the roles and stratifications that dominated local society, among other scenes of everyday life in a still-fledgling nation that had yet to acquire a final shape, in contrast with the large European metropolises she had previously known. In Sin título (carrusel) (Untitled [Carousel]), a tempera work, we find some expressionist features: a certain chromatic distortion (blue-skinned characters, for instance) on a flat, perspectiveless composition.

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However, Witte’s most expressionistic work is a series of ink on paper illustrations, the majority commissioned by Álvaro Araújo, author and translator of several articles for La Pluma, a journal on local literature, art, and science published in Uruguay between 1927 and 1931. Witte made fifteen illustrations for the journal between 1928 and 1931, and her work appeared in six separate issues. Mostly depicting suffering and even torture, these gut-wrenching drawings carry a heavy emotional charge and are made using fast, assertive strokes. In Venganza organizada (Organized Vengeance, 1929), illustrating a translated section of Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” Witte produced a dramatic, vigorous and dynamic scene where one of the characters is being executed by hanging while others contemplate the event, clearly imbued with a component of social critique.

 

Also included in the exhibition is a series of charcoal and pastel portraits that brilliantly resolve figures and expressions in just a few strokes. Using minimal resources, Witte is able to capture the distinctive features of each foregrounded character, setting aside other types of elements. Among her portraits of cultural figures from the period is one of Joaquín Torres García, a referent in Uruguayan art and a contemporary of Witte’s. Another set of works uses the same technique to depict female nudes, presenting shapely, deeply sensual bodies in poses and with gazes that are rather unconventional for the genre, often penetrating and defiant.

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A different matter are Witte’s wood carvings in vastly different sizes, with painstakingly worked textures. Mostly associated with religious themes, these works have oppression, guilt, suffering, and anguish as their dominant subjects. The texture of the wood and the effect of light upon it give each work great dramatic force. This is the case of La voz (The Voice, c. 1938), a sculpture of a man whispering to a woman who in turn gestures with her hands. Hands are, in fact, very much present in Witte’s oeuvre, especially in her religious work, where they appear in a supplicant or praying pose, or as though clamoring for forgiveness.

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Witte’s journey through life was clearly not an easy one. There is a heavy charge of tragedy and pain in her art, but she left behind a vast body of profound and powerful work, deserving of greater recognition.