Links in a Chain: El Che in the Work of Freddy Alborta, Carlos Alonso, Arnold Belkin, and Leandro Katz

Abstract

In this text, I analyse some of the affective and political connotations of the reappearance in the twentieth century of iconography around the resurrection of the hero, with a new revolutionary and secular sense. Transiting between the disturbing photograph with which Freddy Alborta captured the last face of Che Guevara, and moving towards some prior images dedicated to the theme of Christian lamentation, and mainly to other works that followed it and were inspired by it – the series La lección de anatomía (The anatomy lesson) (1970) by Carlos Alonso, La muerte del Che (The death of Che) (1973–1975) by Arnold Belkin, and the documentary El día que me quieras (The day you love me) (1997) by Leandro Katz – I analyse here some of the affective and political connotations of the reappearance of the iconography of the hero’s resurrection at different points during the last three decades of the twentieth century, with a new secular and revolutionary meaning.

Keywords:

• Freddy Alborta
• Carlos Alonso
• Arnold Belkin
• Leandro Katz
• survival of images
• iconography of the resurrection
• revolutionary art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Panel 42 is titled “Pathos of suffering in energetic inversion (Pentheus, maenad by the cross). Bourgeoise death laments heroicized. Ecclesiastical death lamentation. Death of the Redeemer. Entombment. Meditation on death”. Panel 45 is titled “Superlatives of the language of gestures. Over-exuberance of self-consciousness. Individual heroes emerging out of the typological grisaille. Loss of the ‘how of metaphor’”. Panel 45 can be found online at the Warburg Library website: https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/panel/45.

2 In her text, “The photographic morgue”, Andrea Noble (2010, 120–139) articulates an extraordinary study of a photograph from the display of Emiliano Zapata’s corpse in 1919, in which she analyses its similarity with the cadaver of Venustiano Carranza and with that of General Francisco Villa. These, in turn, retain remarkable correspondences with the photograph by Alborta on which we reflect here. Nonetheless, in contemporary works that take up this display, like La veróncia by Héctor García (1972) and La Muerte de Zapata no. 2 (1974) by Alberto Gironella, the appropriations and their expressive messages are very different.

3 For the author, this is about previous narrative schemas, both conscious and unconscious, that we construct through experience, memory, and action, which are reproduced and fixed in cultural memory through various mediums, or processes of re-mediation.

4 To cite only a few examples, let us recall Bruzual and Cardona (2007) and Gort (1998).

5 González and Sánchez (1969).

6 Let us recall that while General René Barrientos Ortuño, who became president after a coup in 1964 against President Victor Paz Estenssoro, and was re-elected in 1966, might have orchestrated the capture of El Che in collaboration with the US Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, he capitalised on the fact by justifying it as an act of defence against a foreign invader. He also ordered the massacre of San Juan in order to end El Che’s popularity among Bolivian miners.

7 For a very good study on Carlos Alonso’s relationship to photography, including his series of the Che, see the article by Virginia Castro and Andrés Buhar, “El asedio de lo real. Documento fotográfico en la pintura de Carlos Alonso” (2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dina Comisarenco

Dina Comisarenco Mirkin received her PhD in Art History from Rutgers University in New Jersey, and her Bachelor’s of Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, in Argentina. She is a tenured researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL) and a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores de México (SNI, level 2). In her teaching, research, and curatorial work, Comisarenco specialises in the history and historiography of twentieth-century Mexican Art and Design, in the history of muralism, and in the visual production of women artists, themes that she embraces with an interdisciplinary perspective combining the sociology of art, psychoanalysis, cultural memory, and gender studies. Among her books are: Fracturas de la memoria: un siglo de violencia y trauma cultural en el arte mexicano moderno y contemporáneo (2022), “El olvido está lleno de memoria”: la pintura mural de Arnold Belkin (2019), De la Conquista a la Revolución en los muros del Museo Nacional de Historia (2018), Eclipse de siete lunas: muralismo femenino en México (2017), Las cuatro estaciones del muralismo de Raúl Anguiano (2014), Codo a codo: parejas de artistas en México (2013), Para participar en lo justo: recuperando la obra de Fanny Rabel (2013 and 2017), and Memoria y futuro: diseño industrial mexicano e internacional (2006 and 2019). She has also published numerous articles and chapters in books, catalogues, and prestigious national and international journals.