Adolfo Bellocq and the marginality of Buenos Aires: a visual interpretation of Esteban Echeverría's El matadero

Abstract

This paper explores El matadero illustrated by Adolfo Bellocq (1899-1972), the Argentine painter and member of the so-called Artistas del Pueblo, a group of Argentine painters, engravers and illustrators who reached their peak during the 1920s and who were characterized, among other things, by a social conception of art. The aim was to analyze, through the notions of the illustrator as critic and the tradition of visual representations, how Bellocq dialogues with the literary source to propose a visual interpretation of marginality based on the figuration of members of Afro-descendant communities. It is concluded that from this dialogue derives a visual interpretation that subtly subverts the value that the text gives to blacks and mulattoes, whom it treats as one of the manifestations of barbarism.Keywords: marginality, afrodescendant culture, illustration