This critical review, written by Antonio E. Monsanto (the painter who later became a teacher), clearly reflects the impact caused by the Romanian painter Samys Mützner (1884–1959) in Venezuelan visual art circles in the 1920s. The influence of Mützner’s work could be described as a conceptual boost to the development of the objectives proposed by the group of young landscape painters who were affiliated with the Círculo de Bellas Artes (1912–17), the pioneers of modern painting in Venezuela. Mützner was one of the three painters—along with Emilio Boggio (1857–1920), who was originally from Venezuela but who trained as an artist in France and spent most of his professional life there, and the Russian painter Nicolás Ferdinandov (1886–1925)—who lived briefly in Venezuela yet had a similarly profound influence on the country’s school of landscape painters.
It should be noted that Monsanto, who was a painter and one of the founders of the Círculo, did not praise Mützner’s use of landscape as an object and theme for his painting. Instead he lauded his purely artistic ideals, his extremely personal view of nature, and his rejection of preconceived notions that were as removed from localisms as from reality; in other words, the formal values and ideas of an avant-garde art. These were very different concepts to those mentioned by the writer José Rafael Pocaterra, who saw in Mützner’s work a call to reengage with the Venezuelan landscape, as he wrote in his article “Impresiones y comentarios. La exposición de Samys Mützner” [see doc. no. 809961], published in the newspaper El Universal, on September 10, 1918.
In 1936 Monsanto was appointed director of the Academia de Bellas Artes, which would subsequently become the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas de Caracas, where he worked as a teacher and trained several generations of Venezuelan artists.