MoCAArt will be the home of the Mark & Kathryn Ford Collection. Curated by Mark Ford and Suzanne Snider, the collection is in two parts: Modernist and Contemporary Central American masters. The acquisitions commenced in 2008 and continue as important works are available.

The Art Critic, 1976,  oil on board, 46” x 46″

Benjamín Cañas, “the most important painter of the fantastic in Latin America,” according to the art critic Marta Traba, was born in 1933. Like many of the Central American Modernists, he had an extensive education in the traditional skills of draftsmanship, perspective, and portraiture before he began experimenting with abstraction and, later, Surrealism.

Initially, his focus was on architecture, which he studied at the Universidad de San Salvador from 1952 to 1958. Then, at the age of twenty-five, he enrolled in the Escuela de Artes Plásticas to study painting. Meanwhile, he was a member of a community of artists that included the sculptors Enrique Salaverría (1922-2012) and Benajmín Saúl, and the ceramicist César Sermeño (1928-2018). As Cañas’s daughter Antonia pointed out, art was their passion. They would often get together “to draw for a while, to paint, to sculpt, and to talk about art.”

Cañas pursued a career as an architect in El Salvador, the United States, and Guatemala. Like the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, he believed that a building should be in harmony with its natural environment, and that there should be a visual connection between the interior and exterior. Also like Wright, he designed every aspect of his buildings. “He not only designed a house,” said Antonia, “he made the furniture and the art for the walls. He didn’t just build a church, he painted the stained-glass windows, designed the pews, the baptismal fonts, the collection baskets… every detail.”

A notable example is the Iglesia Sagrado Corazón “Don Bosco” in Guatemala City. The exterior of the church itself is in the shape of a cross, with floor-to-ceiling stained-glass windows depicting the Stations of the Cross. The gymnasium of the church’s school is in the shape of a fish.

Designing the decorative aspects of his buildings hastened Cañas’s transition from being primarily an architect to being a painter. From 1962 to 1967, he favored abstraction and worked with earth tones, using mixed media on wood, wood burning (pyrography), and acrylic on copper.

In the late 1960s, when he learned that ancient petroglyphs had been discovered in the Gruta del Espíritu Santo in eastern El Salvador, he began to study Central American archaeology and Maya folklore. He was particularly fascinated by mythology and metaphysical philosophies, and these interests began to show in his paintings – imaginative works that seem both classical and modern, populated by nude figures.

Gradually, Cañas’s palette switched from earth tones to bright reds, vibrant greens, and luminous yellows, and as his work matured, the figures became more and more distorted – bloated or elongated, miniaturized or enlarged, twisted or flattened. But the hands, feet, and facial features were meticulously detailed. It is this attention to detail – and his lively imagination – for which he is most admired.

In 1969, under contract to an architectural firm in Washington, D.C., Cañas moved his family to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, and won a design award for work he did on the Watergate shopping promenade.

At a show in Washington, D.C., Cañas’s paintings sold out. He also sold out at subsequent shows in Paris and Italy. After this string of wildly successful exhibitions, he decided to devote himself fully to being an artist. A commission by Mauricio Álvarez, a fellow Salvadoran who owned a gallery in Miami, Florida, helped to facilitate this. Cañas attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington from 1974 to 1976. The paintings he did at this time were mostly on board and canvas instead of metal. But he continued to use metal in the form of gold leaf, often incorporating it to emphasize specific areas of a painting.

Sometimes characterized as a Magical Realist, Cañas took his figures (deities, satyrs, dwarfs, and nymphs) from mythology, religion, and literature. Several of his pieces, according to his daughter Antonia, were inspired by the writings of Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera. The most common themes were creation, civilization, destruction, evolution, and rebirth.

Interestingly, as Antonia pointed out, “the characters he pulled from mythology were given the faces of people from his own life… so in his mind he was living an epic satire.”

Cañas’s paintings are both timeless and innovative. His best works are breathtakingly beautiful and meticulously painted, presenting impossible figures in improbable arrangements. A leader of the Latin American avant-garde, he represented El Salvador at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1977.

His most prolific period began in 1980. In just seven years, he perfected his quintessential style, creating his largest, his most valuable, and his most desirable works. These works are in the collections of significant art museums in Australia, Asia, Europe, and North and South America, as well as in numerous private collections.

Benjamín Cañas died in Annandale, Virginia in 1987 at the age of fifty-four. Though he spent much of his life in the United States, he is widely known and revered throughout Latin America.

Any celebration dedicated to Modernism ought to have Central America as a guest of honor. We are not talking an honorable mention or a consolation prize, but the seat next to the head of the table. That is the proposition served by the latest exhibition at Delray Beach’s Cornell Art Museum.

Running through July 28, “Central American Modernism” gives due credit to 34 artistic voices who introduced a bold visual language amid political turmoil, social unrest, underdevelopment, and financial disruption. Modernism was the weapon of choice for these master disruptors, who shook their respective homeland out of stagnation with new cultural possibilities. The show focuses on six countries: Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Mostly isolated from the international community, these small countries were slow to embrace Modernism. Once the movement took hold, each bred its own distinctive flavor and stars.