The surprising findings in a historical work by Berni

The surprising findings in a historical work by Berni after the investigation of UNSAM experts

Students and researchers who studied together with the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires worked on the painting Manifestation, the most emblematic of the Rosario painter. Discoveries.
October 13 marked the 40th anniversary of the death of the Rosario painter who once knew how to say: "An artist must live with his eyes open, but never, no matter how pressing reality, he must abandon art." True to his words, Antonio Berni recounted reality and social marginality on canvas, who based his painting on photographs that he himself took of the unemployed, women and the poor.

Manifestation is one of his most famous works, which dates back to 1934 and is part of the New Realism artistic movement. The painting refers to the social mobilizations of the most impoverished sectors of Argentina, going through the economic and social crisis with global repercussions that broke out in the United States, known as the “Great Depression.” In our country, the first military coup led by Uriburu took place. These factors meant a crisis in the agro-export model that increased unemployment.

The analysis work carried out by specialists and researchers from the School of Art and Heritage of the University of San Martín and Malba (Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires) was titled “Manifestation in focus”. In it they propose a dialogue between the past and the present, through a deep investigation into the material, historical and cultural aspects, which results in revealing secrets that the painting keeps on a technical and interpretative level.

To rigorously analyze the work, a series of studies, stratigraphies (sample that determines the superposition of different layers), x-ray, ultraviolet and infrared vision were carried out on the original piece. It was then digitized to elucidate details and close-ups of the faces and expressions. To do this, a robotic camera designed to create gigapixel images was used, which took 45 minutes to take the 886 photographs that make up the highest resolution image ever made of the work.

Demonstration portrays the unemployment that hit the Argentine people unleashed in 1929. The only legible slogan is “Bread and Work”, which does not appear in the foreground, but is lost in the background of the painting, between the faces that are increasingly distinguished. less. The investigation explains that this election means that it is not a workers' strike, because there would be the presence of posters mentioning the working sector. Instead, Berni represented a “hunger march,” which encompasses the entire affected society. The presence of the baby also contributes to this distinction of axes.

Another interesting fact is that Berni appealed to the resource of documentary photography; He used as a source of inspiration photographic records from the archive of the newspaper Crítica and his own authorship to compose the faces of “anonymous models”, but recognizable in their physiognomy and to be versioned as protesters.

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