110: LUISA RICHTER, Portrait Study < A Visionary Eye: Works from the Collection of Clara Diament Sujo, 14 December 2023 < Auctions

Clara Diament Sujo

A Visionary Eye

Clara Diament Sujo was guided by a visionary eye. Over her nearly 60-year career as a critic, curator, collector, and gallerist, she defined a global approach to understanding contemporary art. Thinking in hemispheric, as well as transatlantic terms, she forged a place for Latin American art in the North American and European markets, while bringing leading figures from the United States and Europe into dialogue with artists in South America and the Caribbean. She set out on this path as one of the few pioneering female gallerists in the 1960s, emerging contemporaneously with notable peers like Denise René and Ileanna Sonnabend in France or Eleanor Ward and Martha Jackson in the United States. Her network driven, organic approach to writing and exhibition programing propelled Sujo beyond stylistic categories and national borders. Without such constraints, she crafted a critical and curatorial style across both of her galleries, Galería Estudio Actual, Caracas (1968–1983) and CDS Gallery, New York (1981–2013). Over their combined 45 years of public activities, both galleries cultivated dynamic programing around emergent and established artists from across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. For information on the Galleries’ histories and activities please click HERE.

Thinking in hemispheric, as well as transatlantic terms, she forged a place for Latin American art in the North American and European markets...

Sujo’s transnational understanding of art grew out of the formative experiences of her early life. She was born in 1921 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A daughter of Jewish immigrants, her father ran a successful export fur business. The collections she encountered in the homes of her father’s business associates sparked an initial interest in art. These early encounters flourished when Sujo moved to Chicago in 1943 to take a secretarial position with Abbott Laboratories. While in the city she regularly frequented the Art Institute of Chicago. It was there that she made the acquaintance of Katharine Kuh, a vanguard gallerist in the city who eventually became the AIC’s first curator of modern painting and sculpture. The three years that Sujo lived and worked in the United States solidified a passion for the arts that would carry through the rest of her life.

Upon returning to Buenos Aires in 1946, she attended art history courses taught by the renowned intellectual and critic, Jorge Romero Brest. He was then lecturing at the Fray Mocho bookstore—an informal location necessitated after his forced dismissal from the faculty of the Universidad de La Plata by the Juan Domingo Perón government. Romero Brest staunchly advocated for a turn away from regionalism in contemporary Latin American art in favor of an integration of European modernist theories that tended toward abstraction. His teachings on art left a lasting imprint on Sujo’s own aesthetics.

Sujo’s skillful writing and fluency in multiple languages entered her into a circle of pupil editors and contributors to Romero Brest’s internationally focused journal of modern art, Ver y Estimar (1948–55). She counted among her colleagues, Marta Traba, Damián Bayón, and Blanca Stábile, all of whom wrote and edited texts from a bevy of international contributors from across the Americas and Europe. Along with editing, Sujo translated important works by leading Black authors from the United States, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. The period was an intense and euphoric moment of artistic encounters and intellectual exchanges.

However, with the Perón regime continuing to clamp down on dissent in Argentina, Sujo, her husband Abi, and three children left for Venezuela in 1952. Arriving in Caracas, Sujo settled in a city under transformation. Spurred by an influx of foreign capital from the country's vast oil reserves, and the efforts by the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez to court such investments, numerous large scale urban infrastructure projects were undertaken during the 1950s. The arts were inextricably connected to this stake in modernity. The recently constructed Universidad Central, for example, where Sujo began teaching art history courses soon after her relocation to the city, was designed by famed architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, a disciple of Le Corbusier’s (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) architectural practice. The university design sought to unify art and architecture through sculptural commissions by artists like Jean Arp and Henri Laurens; stained glass windows by Alejandro Otero and Fernand Léger; ceramic tile murals by Mateo Manaure and Victor Vasarely; and auditorium ceiling by Alexander Calder, among other public works.

Aided by her teaching position, Sujo quickly became embedded within the international network of contemporary artists flowing through the country. She forged close relationships with important players within the Venezuelan vanguard of the 1950s, including Otero, Mercedes Pardo, Jesús Rafael Soto, Marisol Escobar, Elsa Gramcko, Carlos Puche, and Victor Valera, to name but a few.

She forged close relationships with important players within the Venezuelan vanguard of the 1950s, including Otero, Mercedes Pardo, Jesús Rafael Soto, Marisol Escobar, Elsa Gramcko, Carlos Puche, and Victor Valera, to name but a few.

Organically, Sujo developed a strong relationship with the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas. The year she arrived in Venezuela, she visited a memorable exhibition of works by Manaure organized by the art historian, critic, and artist, Alfredo Boulton. She joined the Society of Friends of the Museo de Bellas Artes—then chaired by the Czech born, German-Jewish industrialist and leading collector, Hans Neumann—and came to know the institution's director, Armando Barrios. Increasingly in the museum’s fold, Sujo brought with her a hemispheric vision for collecting. She lobbied and shaped the formation of a new collection that would represent the “art of the Americas”. With the backing of the cultural critic, Miguel Otero Silva, Sujo focused on acquiring examples by leading artists in Latin America. Her earliest purchases for the museum included works by Wilfredo Lam, Roberto Matta, and José Clemente Orozco. Sujo’s international focus blossomed as a new generation of Venezuelan cultural leaders and collectors gained influence, including Inocente Palacios, the first director of the Escuela de Artes de la Universidad Central, and philanthropists, Pedro Vallenilla Echeverría and Eugenio Mendoza.

Sujo’s network grew internationally during the 1950s as she continued to shepherd work into the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, while also setting out to write more art criticism. Traveling frequently to New York, she wrote reviews of projects by Latin American artists, including Matta’s 1957 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and the recently completed United Nations murals by Brazilian painter, Candido Portinari. Sujo found a strong friendship with figures like visionary curator Kynaston McShine at MoMA, which under Lincoln Kirstein had been collecting Latin American art through the Inter-American Fund—supported by Nelson Rockefeller since 1942. In her collaborative spirit, she helped facilitate visits by MoMA’s curatorial staff to Venezuela.

From the early 1960s, onward, Sujo was a crucial conduit between the Latin American vanguard and audiences in the United States.

Her role as a conduit between the Latin American vanguard and audiences in the United States continued in the 1960s. Sujo made a sizable contribution to the 1966 Solomon R. Guggenheim exhibition, The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Painting in the 1960’s organized by Thomas Messer. Ever adaptive, the group of artists Sujo selected for the formative Guggenheim exhibition tapped into the emergent current of Informalism in Venezuela specifically, and Latin America broadly. Along with artists like Otero, Soto, Pardo, Gramcko, and Gerd Leufert, she highlighted gestural work by Francisco Hung, Humberto Jaimes Sánchez, Jacobo Borges, and Luisa Richter — the latter two are represented by notable lots in this auction. The catalogue for The Emergent Decade also included excerpts from Sujo’s seminal 1961 article, “Art in Venezuela Today” in which she documented this Informalist countermovement against the geometric impulses that defined modernism in Venezuela in the 1950s. This is exemplified by the fluid movements of color in Pardo’s Untitled (Capricornio), Manaure’s materiality in Abstract Composition, or the stunning facture of Maria Luisa Pacheco’s Megalith.

Mercedes Pardo, Untitled (Capricornio), 1962, gouache on paper; Mateo Manaure, Untitled (Abstract Composition), 1958, mixed media and collage on paper; Maria Luisa Pacheco, Megalith, 1971, mixed media and collage on canvas

While invested in numerous international projects, Sujo nevertheless carried on pushing for greater publicity for the arts within Venezuela. She wrote tirelessly in support of contemporary artists in her orbit. Additionally, she launched a documentary series in partnership with artist and filmmaker, Ángel Hurtado, that highlighted Venezuelan artists ranging from the gauzy plein-air painter Reverón to the ceramicist Tecla Tofano to the realist landscape painter Pedro Angel González. In 1968, her involvement in the contemporary art scene in Caracas coalesced into Estudio Actual, an innovative, at times polemical, gallery, art bookshop, and community space.

Sujo’s visionary eye and international networks generated a remarkable exhibition program for the nascent gallery. Estudio Actual’s inaugural exhibition was of work by Marcel Duchamp, the surrealist titan’s first in Latin America. Sujo immediately trailed that exhibition with a collaboration between Estudio Actual and Galerie Denise René, showing her French counterpart’s roster of Op artists from Europe and Latin America, including Soto, Otero, Julio Le Parc, and Victor Vasarely. She then followed the Denise René project with an exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's work the next year. Continuing her innovative approach, Sujo worked with American artist Harry Holtzman—then the executor of the estate of modernist icon Piet Mondrian—in the reconstruction of the Dutch artist’s 1926 visionary Neo-Plastic design for the library and study of Dresden-based collector, Ida Bienert. The recreated utopian space was first installed at Pace Gallery in 1970 before traveling to Estudio Actual.

Among these exhibitions of artists from the United States and Europe, Sujo continued to showcase individuals at the forefront of contemporary art in Venezuela and the rest of Latin America. Many of the works in this auction came initially through Estudio Actual’s programing. The magic realist scene of Juan Batlle Planas’s Composición, the architectonic drawings of his student Roberto Aizenberg, or hybrid painting/sculpture, Gymnopaedie, by Fernando Maza exemplify Sujo’s strong ties to developments by Argentinian artists. Likewise, the sculptures of Carlos Prada, and Oscar d'Empaire, reflect the younger cadre of artists she carried on supporting within Venezuela. The pioneering work of Estudio Actual bolstered her reputation as a leading expert on contemporary Latin American art. With her finger on the pulse, she was called upon by Sotheby’s Auction House in 1979 to act as a lead consultant on their first major auction of Latin American art. The triumphant success of that auction led Edward Lee Cave, the organizer of the sale, to declare, “The standing‐room‐only crowd witnessed the birth of a new art market.”

Carlos Prada, The Climber, bronze; Juan Batlle-Planas, Composición, 1951, oil on canvas laid to Masonite; Oscar d'Empaire, Soldador de lunas, 1983, mixed media assemblage

Sujo’s success with Estudio Actual translated into CDS Gallery, which she opened in 1981 in New York. The inaugural exhibition, Masters of the Americas, advanced her commitment to a hemispheric vision of contemporary art. With CDS Gallery, Sujo cast light on the work of important historical figures such as Joaquín Torres-García—still relatively unknown to an Anglophone audience—alongside a younger generation of artists working in the Americas, such as Hector Fuenmayor, Ismael Vargas, and Jaime Suárez.

It was her friendships that fostered and generated CDS Gallery’s most notable projects.

Her idiosyncratic eye guided the heterogeneous group of artists CDS Gallery supported. She made space in programing for artists ranging in practice from the enigmatic figuration of British painter, Stanley Spencer, to the politically charged sculpture of Melvin Edwards. It was her friendships that fostered and generated CDS Gallery’s most notable projects. She foregrounded these relationships with her four-part series of exhibitions Artists Choose Artists (1982–86). Through Sujo’s connection with long-time colleague and friend, the influential critic Dore Ashton, she began representing Adja Yunkers, an overlooked painter of mid-century whose approach to abstraction plays with the subtle poetics of form and color. Sujo relied on her extensive network to organize the critically acclaimed 1988 exhibition The Irascibles. Inspired by the 1950 photograph of Abstract Expressionist painters published in Life Magazine, the exhibition at CDS Gallery was remarkable. Guest curated by famed critic and art historian, Irving Sandler, the show drew loans by Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Philip Guston from major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA.

It was her immediate friendship with Hedde Sterne—the lone female painter in that infamous Irascibles photograph—that might best exemplify Sujo’s passionate advocacy for artists and their work. She was first introduced to Sterne by her dear friend, Katharine Kuh. Sujo had long championed women working at the vanguard, including Gramcko, Pardo, Gego, Pacheco, Vera Klement, and Marisol, to name but a few. Committing eleven solo exhibitions to the artist, Sujo celebrated Sterne’s then-overlooked work of the 1950s, while arguing for the importance of her remarkable and relevant paintings of the 1980s and 1990s, several of which are a part of this auction. This dedication culminated in the 2006 retrospective of Sterne’s work, in which Sujo played a critical role even while in her mid-80s.

The range of work in this, a fourth annual dedicated sale—organized by Meredith Hilferty, Director and Senior Specialist, Fine Art for Rago Arts—and representing only a small part of her inventory, is a testament to a life and career defined by breaking down categories and looking beyond borders. Unceasing in her support of the arts, Sujo holds a rarified place in the codification of Latin American art within art history’s canon.

Devon Zimmerman, PhD, Maine, 2023

The organizers wish to thank the art historian Dr. Devon Zimmerman for his original research and accompanying critical essay on the career of Clara Diament Sujo.