Museo Nacional de Arte

Exhibitions

La materia del arte. José María Velasco y Hermenegildo Bustos

01 de Jun 2004 - 31 de Oct 2004

La materia del arte. José María Velasco y Hermenegildo Bustos opened the possibility of addressing an issue that is little dealt with by art museums. It invited different scientific disciplines such as chemistry, physics, optics, conservation and history to dialogue. This combination delivered new interesting results about the deciphering of aspects, till now unknown, of two of the greatest painters of the 19th century in Mexico: Hermegildo Bustos and José María Velasco.

Bustos was an extraordinary popular portraitist who knew how to capture the psychology of his characters with admirable depth, without having studied formal art. On the other hand, Velasco was a painter of a solid academic training, in whose marvelous landscapes hardly appears the man. Along with Bustos and Velasco, the works of the Italian Eugenio Landesio, master of Velasco, were presented. Thanks to Landesio, Velasco was introduced to the study of landscape and perspective in our country.