Ecuadorian literature
Ecuadorian literature, is one of Latin American literature in Spanish and Ecuador is one of countries beginning with letter E listed on Countryaah.
With the prose work of Bishop Gaspar de Villarroel (* 1587 [?], † 1665), Ecuadorian literature experienced its first climax during the colonial period. As one of the few Latin American representatives of the Enlightenment literature, Francisco de Santa Cruz y Espejo (* 1747, † 1795) emerged with his satirical dialogues. The independence we had won found its first poetic transfiguration in J. J. Olmedo’s neoclassical odes.
The late romanticism was represented by Juan León Mera (* 1832, † 1894) with his Indian novel »Cumandá« (1871). The essayist Juan Montalvo (* 1832, † 1889), whose brilliant prose makes him appear as a forerunner of modernism, presented himself as a public conscience. The most famous modernist poets were Ernesto Noboa Caamaño (* 1891, † 1927), Arturo Borja (* 1892, † 1912), Medardo Ángel Silva (* 1899, † 1920). The authors of the »Grupo de Guayaquil« such as Demetrio Aguilera Malta (* 1909, † 1981) or José de la Cuadra (* 1903, † 1941) turned to the country’s social and political problems.
The Latin American avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s was also strongly represented in Ecuador. a. by Hugo Mayo (* 1897, † 1988) and J. Carrera Andrade, who in his later work increasingly devoted himself to social issues.
The following generation, v. a. turned to the design of existential problems, found their representative in the poet César Dávila Andrade (* 1918, † 1967). J. Icaza Coronel and his novel »Huasipungo« (1934; German) represent an essential contribution to the continental trend of indigenism, which took sides against the oppression of the indigenous population.
Well-known contemporary writers include Alejandro Carrión (* 1915, † 1992), Pedro Jorge Vera (* 1914, † 1999), Jorge Enrique Adoum (* 1923, † 2009), Iván Egüez (* 1944), Eliécer Cárdenas (* 1950), Miguel Donoso Pareja (* 1931, † 2015). Several groups of authors such as »Caminos«, »Galaxia« and »Tzántzicos« have appeared in public since the 1960s.
Ecuadorian art
Ecuadorian art, the art in the field of today’s Ecuador.
For the development of the art of Ecuador, which has been independent since 1809, painters coming from Europe, who mostly only stayed temporarily in the country while traveling through Latin America, were of great importance. They captured geography, flora and fauna, as well as life in the country and city, with pictures. They received support from naturalists (including A. Freiherr von Humboldt ; Aimé Bonpland, * 1773, † 1858), who v. a. traveled the country for scientific purposes and provided visual templates. One of these traveling artists was the French Ernest Charton (* 1815, † 1877), who together with Armando Salas (* 1795, † 1860) edited genre scenes from Ecuador in Paris. Salas was one of the most outstanding artists in the country in the first half of the 19th century and stood out through religious pictures and portraits. His son Rafael Salas (* 1828, † 1906), like Rafael Troya (* 1845, † 1920) later, devoted himself particularly to landscape painting. History painting possessed its most important representative in Luis Cadena Jaramillo (* 1830, † 1889), portrait painting in Juan Manosalvas (* 1840, † 1906), who in 1904 was the founding director of the art college in Quito. Joaquín Pinto (* 1842, † 1906) can be considered the most popular painter of the second half of the 19th century with his romantic genre scenes, which often depict the life of the Indians. The painters trained in Italy Alfonso Medina Pérez, Antonio Salguero (* 1864, † 1920) and Luis A. Martínez (* 1868, † 1909) represented academic art.
The San Francisco Monastery in Quito was the seat of an important painting and sculpture school in the 18th century. Its most important representative was the indigenous sculptor Manuel Chili (* 1723, † 1796), called Caspicara, who fused elements of the Spanish baroque with indigenous art. In the following years Domingo Carrillo (* 1810, † 1883) and José Miguel Vélez (* 1829, † 1892) created remarkable, mostly religious works. Commissions for monuments were usually given to artists from Europe. Two artists from abroad were also important as teachers in Ecuador at the beginning of the 20th century: the French Paul Bar in painting and the Italian Luis Cassadio in sculpture.
Modern Ecuadorian art developed late and first came to fruition in the work of the painter Camilo Egas (* 1899, † 1962), who lived in the USA for many years. With him, indigenism gained weight, which was taken up in various forms in the work of other, including younger, artists. They include Manuel Rendón (* 1894, † 1982), Víctor Mideros (* 1888, † 1969), Diógenes Paredes (* 1910, † 1968), Eduardo Kingman Riofrío (* 1913, † 1997) and Oswaldo Guayasamin (* 1919, † 1999), who became the most famous artist and most important artistic representative of Ecuador. Influenced by El Greco and F. de Goya , from P. Picasso and the Mexican J. C. Orozco , he created expressive-realistic epic cycles in paintings and murals that denounce exploitation, oppression and war around the world. The painterly movement of ancestralismo, which is also represented in other Latin American countries with a high proportion of indigenous populations, combines indigenous aesthetics with abstract art. She includes artists such as Aníbal Villacis (* 1927, † 2012), Enrique Tábara (* 1930) and Oswaldo Viteri (* 1931). In the field of abstract art, Manuel Rendón Seminario (* 1894, † 1982) emerged with lyrical-biomorphic forms, the geometrical-constructive dominated with Araceli Gilbert (* 1914, † 1993) and Estuardo Maldonado (* 1930), who is also an important sculptor.
The group Los Cuatro Mosqueteros (The Four Musketeers) was created in 1968 by the protest potential of the worldwide emerging trend of neo-figuration, including Nelson Román (* 1945), Washington Iza (* 1947), José Unda (* 1948) and Ramiro Jácome (* 1948), † 2001) and who is also close to the work of Hernán Zúñiga (* 1948). Mauricio Bueno (* 1939) works more conceptually and multimedia. Gonzalo Endara Crow (* 1936, † 1996) is the main representative of naive, magically realistic painting. Gustavo Cáceres (* 1947) uses a similar, more decorative, stylized formv. a. indigenous myths. The paintings by Marcelo Aguirre (* 1956), Carlos Rosero (* 1952) and Marcos Restrepo (* 1961), to which Celso Rojas (* 1951) is related in the drawing, can be found in the context of Neo-Expressionism and Transavanguardia. Grotesquely realistic features characterize the pictures by Luigi Stornaiolo (* 1956) and Jorge Velarde (* 1960), while the drawings by Miguel Varea (* 1948) are more humorous. Other artists who work in the field of graphics, which is important for modern art in Ecuador, are Galo Galecio (* 1908, † 1993), Nicolás Svistoonoff (* 1945) and Walter Páez (* 1950). There are abstract tendencies in sculpture, e.g. B. Jaime Andrade Moscoso (* 1913, † 1990) and Mauricio Suárez-Bango (* 1953) are geometrically-constructive, more expressive-biomorphic with José Antonio Cauja (* 1953) and Paulina Baca (* 1954), while Jesús Cobo (* 1953) tends towards the figurative. Installation and video are v. a. Represented by Jenny Jaramillo (* 1966) and Larissa Marangoni (* 1967).
