Photo: Nic Antaya for the New York Times.
The painting above was one of about a dozen apparently found in a Manhattan dumpster around 1978. The Bolivian painter and engraver Alejandro Mario Yllanes (1913-circa 1960), was a protégé of Diego Rivera.
I read a lot of mysteries, and I know that this true story would make a good detective novel. Especially as it’s about art, which is always a mystery.
Victoria Burnett writes at the New York Times, “Adam M. Levine, director of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, had not heard of the Bolivian painter and engraver Alejandro Mario Yllanes until last summer. Then he saw ‘Lake Titicaca,’ a large 1935 oil-on-burlap of an Andean boatman, at a London art gallery.
“Levine was stunned by the painting of a reed boat on rippling water edged by blue mountains. In May, the Toledo Museum bought the piece to hang at the heart of its collection. …
“That’s a remarkable change of fortune for a painting that, by several accounts, was rescued in the 1970s from a Manhattan dumpster.
“Yllanes (1913-circa 1960) was a protégé of Diego Rivera, the great Mexican artist of populist murals, who championed the bravery with which Yllanes made searingly political works. Yllanes (pronounced ee-YAN-es) was admired — and punished — for depicting the brutal hardship and colorful rituals of Indigenous Bolivians.
“But he left little trace of his life after 1950, leaving a cache of paintings, engravings and documents in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Abandoned by their forgotten maker, those artworks made a decades-long journey from a Manhattan apartment to the home of a sharp-eyed policeman, and, eventually, a French collector’s storage.
“Now, Yllanes is having a renaissance. … The revival has been led by Rachel and Ben Elwes, owners of Ben Elwes Fine Art in London, who learned of Yllanes a few years ago from David Le Louarn, a French client who bought the Manhattan cache in the early 2000s. Le Louarn consigned the work to the Elweses for sale. …
“The Elweses exhibited Yllanes’s artwork in the fall of 2023, kicking off a wave of interest. Museums, mostly in the United States and Canada, have since bought nearly two dozen pieces, for prices ranging from $400,000 to $1.9 million, according to the dealers. …
“Eduardo Costantini, an Argentine collector who founded MALBA, said Yllanes’s paintings ‘could be hung next to any great master of Latin American art.’ In 2024 he bought a mural-like painting by Yllanes, ‘Tragedy of the Indigenous Worker’ (1932), that depicts their struggle; and a 1941 composition of musicians and dancers surrounding a deity of the Aymara, a Bolivian Indigenous group. …
“Yllanes was born into an Aymara family in the mining town of Oruro. By 18, he had been orphaned, worked in a tin mine, dropped out of law school and held his first solo art show. In Bolivia, Yllanes’s political critique earned him fans and enemies. He told a Mexican newspaper in 1946 that he was banished to the Amazon for a year in the 1930s and that in 1941 he was briefly thrown in jail after an incendiary exhibition. Elsewhere, he was celebrated, holding a solo show in Mexico City in 1946 for which Rivera wrote a glowing introduction, urging Mexican artists to take note of ‘Comrade Yllanes,’ who had suffered for ‘the revolutionary assertions expressed in his art.’ …
“The cache of artworks left behind in Manhattan was acquired by Edward Ford, a policeman, and his wife, Teresa, in 1978, according to the Elweses. The artworks spent much of the next 45 years in storage, with the exception of three or four exhibitions in the Hudson Valley. …
“The specifics of how the Fords acquired the works vary.
“Documents prepared for an exhibition of Yllanes’s art at Bard College in 1992 say that Ford was ‘named in the will of a lonely old woman he had often seen on his regular beat’ on the Upper East Side. But no will has ever surfaced. … Another man, Nicholas Clemente, an artist and graphic designer, said … Ford told him he spotted a metal tube filled with rolled artworks in a dumpster outside the Columbia residence.” So what is true?
It’s a long story, with many unresolved questions. Read it at the Times, here.
