On books.(F. Luis Mora: America's First Hispanic Master - 1874-1940)(Book review)

Between 1910 and 1930, F. Luis Mora was one of America's leading painters and illustrators. A student the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Art Students League in New York City, he was a protege of William Merritt Chase. His works combine a profound consciousness of his Spanish roots with an ebullient love of urban and country life in the United States. Influenced by Chase and by such Spanish masters as Velazquez and Goya, Mora painted Spanish gypsies, Navajo and Mexican scenes, as well as seascapes, landscapes, and genre scenes of upper middle class life. He also produced straight forward society portraiture--his posthumous portrait of President Warren G. Harding hangs in the White House--as well as murals and elaborate compositions for advertising clients. Beginning in 1891, Mora's work brought him numerous awards, including memberships in a variety of professional societies and status as one of the youngest members of the National Academy of Design.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, of Spanish and French descent, Mora was only eight years older than his Spanish colleague Pablo Picasso. Both artists received their initial instruction from their fathers, Picasso's a drawing master, Mora's the Catalan-born academic sculptor Domingo Mora, whose sixteen life-size caryatids still embellish Boston's John Adams Courthouse. Nevertheless, while Picasso remains the iconic figure of twentieth-century European modernism, Mora never ventured far from the tenets of academic realism, and was already slipping into obscurity by the time of his death.

Lynne Pauls Baron's monograph makes a persuasive case for Mora's reappraisal, for while his oeuvre is uneven, his best work represents a distinctive vision of its time. Certainly Mora's drawings reveal the draftsmanship that attracted commissions at the start of his career. One of his earliest works was a mural, The Awakening of Ignorance (1900), commissioned by the Lynn Public Library in Massachusetts, and still in situ. Though the central figure of an angel in her aureole of light is stiffly drawn, the broad sculptural forms of the prehistoric figures, the rocky background, and the muted palette suggest a late Victorian take on Michelangelo via Frederic, Lord Leighton.

The book reveals the various styles in which Mora worked throughout his career--one with tight brushwork and muted colors, exploited with fine effect in his portraits of his wife, another looser and more brightly colored that lends vitality to his sailing scenes and ...