Folk Art

Patrociño Barela Painted Carving, ca. 1945

Appraisal: Patrociño Barela Painted Carving, ca. 1945

Transcript

GUEST: This is one piece of artwork by the wood carver named Patrociño Barela from Taos, New Mexico. And he became world-famous after he started working with the Works Progress Administration, the Art Project, and he worked there for a short period, but they weren't paying him enough, so he became a mule driver. He was illiterate in English, but he was, in my opinion, a genius.

APPRAISER: Now, you lived near the artist?

GUEST: He was my neighbor and my father's best friend. Even at that time, he was world-famous, but he didn't know it and nobody told him. He was the find of the art world.

APPRAISER: That's what the Museum of Modern Art said, I think. That's a, a pretty major statement. He's been considered since then, since the '30s, the leading Mexican American artist, wouldn't you say?

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: Here, the Museum of Modern Art calls him one of the great artists, the great discoveries, during the period. And The New York Times was writing about him. And Time magazine...

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: ...touted his work, right?

GUEST: Right. He lived in a shack.

APPRAISER: He really wasn't making any money from his work, e, even though he's this world-famous guy at the time.

GUEST: He, he made enough money to feed his family.

APPRAISER: Right.

GUEST: He would do a carving, and walk to town, and sell it...

APPRAISER: Wow.

GUEST: ...for $25, $30.

APPRAISER: The thing that's so special is that you knew the artist. It's so powerful. We have this man here, almost like Rodin's Thinker, right? I mean, he's... And this, this kind of gear, right? It's a tool.

GUEST: It's a wrench. A wrench. Which he would have called big responsibility.

APPRAISER: Big responsibility. As a symbolic reference.

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: You have this, this guy with his hand in his head. You have the wrench…

GUEST: He's in a foxhole and this is his helmet.

APPRAISER: So he's...

GUEST: And he's very worried that he's, uh, like, the mechanic of the, of the airplane that he worked on.

APPRAISER: So all this is encapsulated in this one kind of a, a plaque, a three-dimensionalist sculpture. This would have been done probably just, just during the war, probably the 1940s. He died in 1964 in a, in a fire. Nobody ever knew what happened, right?

GUEST: I was a student at the University of New Mexico.

APPRAISER: Okay, yeah.

GUEST: And, uh, every year, I used to come to hunt deer for my family.

APPRAISER: Right.

GUEST: And I drove past about half a, a block from his shed...

APPRAISER: Right.

GUEST: ...where he died, but he... There was no fire when I went through...

APPRAISER: Right.

GUEST: ...going up to Taos Canyon.

APPRAISER: What...

GUEST: When I came back that evening, my father told me that he had died.

APPRAISER: This is an almost Cubist work, but yet he maybe barely knew about Picasso and all these European...