According to one of her best friends, Emma Reyes was “that type of fabulous South American who surprises the imagination”. Known in artistic circles as “the godmother of every Colombian painter who comes to Paris in the 20th century”, such as Fernando Botero or Luis Caballero, Reyes exhibited her canvases and murals in various European cities. “I always wanted to be the best painter in Latin America,” she said in an interview published in 1999. Reyes died shortly thereafter, in 2003, at the age of 84, and the attention her work attracted in Paris, New York, Mexico and Rome. It was never repeated in his homeland. “I never existed for official Colombia,” she said, frustrated. But that moment came two decades later, when his personal story gained tremendous traction both inside and outside his country. An internationally successful book and nationally-acclaimed telenovela have given a second life to a great melodrama called Emma Reyes.
“Painting is the only thing that makes me feel alive,” says she, played by Colombian actress Laura Junco in the second season of a telenovela about her life titled Emma Reyes, which aired on Monday, August 14 , launched (already in Spain). not yet It can be seen). Unlike the country’s most successful telenovelas, such as “Ugly Betty”, this series was not produced and broadcast by a private channel, but by a public channel, Señal Colombia, and has nevertheless received wide acclaim: the first season received im Year 2022 15 nominations and 4 India Catalina Awards (the most important in Colombian television). These included Best Telenovela, Art Direction, Camera, and New Actress. It is “Señal Colombia’s most ambitious historical film project in many years,” according to a statement from a channel that rarely manages to air a second season.
Actress Laura Junco as Emma Reyes in the second season of the series.RTVC
Alberto Quiroga, screenwriter of the two-part series, believes that Colombian audiences now want to know more about the artist because “they identify with her story, a life that resembles a soap opera, a melodrama; Emma Reyes’ life was very hard, but she is a very brave woman who turned tragedy into a hymn to life.” Reyes was a woman with an amazing story, for she entered international society – to her friends and acquaintances included muralist Diego Rivera, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and writer Alberto Moravia—although she was born into poverty in 1919.
“We’ve lived our lives on the streets,” Reyes wrote in a letter about her childhood. At that time he lived with his sister, half-brother and mother in one room, in a place without electricity and toilet, in the impoverished south-east of Bogotá. “Every morning I had to go to the dump behind the factory to empty the potty that we all used that night,” he tells of little Emma, who was locked in the dark room some days, other days you was beaten by her mother and was lucky enough to escape rape more than once.
Emma Reyes was abandoned by her mother and ended up in the care of nuns in a convent who taught her much about the devil and sin but little about reading and writing – she was illiterate until her late teens. The first season of the soap opera is about the early years of his life; The second begins when the teenager flees the convent to seek her life as an artist. Reyes traveled to Buenos Aires, to Uruguay, to Paraguay – where one of his sons is said to have been killed in the Chaco War – and finally to Europe.
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Painting by Emma Reyes. Emma Reyes Association
“Obviously, the key to creating the first season was the book Memories by Correspondence, first and foremost,” says Quiroga, the screenwriter, who believes he has read the book more than 10 times. The series would not exist without a powerful book that became an international hit after the death of Emma Reyes. First published in April 2012, Memories by Correspondence brings together 23 autobiographical letters that the painter wrote between 1969 and 1997 to her great friend, the Colombian historian Germán Arciniegas, when she was already an adult and living in Europe, but over a very lively one Memory decreed his childhood in Colombia.
“You will find it strange that I can relate to you the events of that distant time in such detail and with such precision,” she wrote to him in a 1969 letter. “I think like you that this is a five-year-old boy.” If you lead a normal life, you cannot faithfully represent your childhood,” he adds. But he assures her that what she went through, this drama of abandonment and abuse, will not be easily forgotten. “Neither the gestures, nor the words, nor the sounds, nor the colors” disappear from memory, he says.
Laguna, the independent Colombian publisher that published Memories by Correspondence, had published a few science fiction books from the early 20th century, but this time they bet on the compilation of letters that became their big bestseller: The Book went through seven editions ( Laguna is currently working on the eighth edition, which has been printed in Colombia about 30,000 times and has been translated into German, French, Chinese, Greek, Portuguese, Turkish, Polish, Italian, reaching 23 countries. In Spain, it published by Libros del Asteroid.
The English translation by Peruvian-American writer Daniel Alarcón, published by Penguin Random House in 2017, includes a short story about the cards. “The mere fact that this book exists is extraordinary,” writes Alarcón in the prologue. Germán Arciniegas had asked Emma to write down her story, but given her reluctance, they agreed that she would tell him in regular letters. “Emma had no formal education,” says Alarcón. “And yet his prose is not without finesse. On the contrary, I don’t think I’ve read many books with that level of vigor and grace,” he adds.
Laura Junco as Emma Reyes and Juan Pablo Urrego as Guillermo Botero in the second season of the series.RTVC
The letters were proposed to various publishers who ignored them until they arrived in Laguna thanks to the Arciniegas family. The publisher agreed that royalties from the book would go to the Hogar San Mauricio Foundation, which according to a person working there has helped more than 200 children abandoned by their relatives or taken away from them due to domestic violence cases. Supporting a foundation like this, it says on the last page of the book, was “the will that Emma always expressed”.
Ana Salas is a documentary filmmaker and for the telenovela Emma Reyes she did research beyond the book: she searched for unpublished files and interviewed more than 20 people who knew or were fascinated by the Colombian artist, such as Diego Garzón, a chronicler who In 2013 he followed in Reyes’ footsteps, noting that the memoirs contain many facts that correspond to reality, but others do not. “There are some lines from Emma that are even more haunting than those that appear in Memories by Correspondence, and most importantly, they show that she has always been a person with impressive oral skills who knew how to be in the limelight stands and knew how to do it.” “Tell the stories of your life. Live in an extraordinary way,” says Salas. “Emma Reyes said she wasn’t lying, she was exaggerating,” he adds. He wrote a reality sprinkled with fiction. The successful Spanish edition of Laguna features a prologue by novelist Carolina Sanín that only touches on the ability to tell the past with a memory that betrays the reader. “Memory is not loyal,” writes Sanín.
Despite her exaggerations, there is no doubt that Emma Reyes has lived an extraordinary life, although Salas is concerned about the overwhelming attention currently being paid to the artist’s childhood and youth. “I fear that everything now revolves around his life more than his work,” says the documentary filmmaker. “And it worries me because Emma Reyes has often complained that her work is not recognized in Colombia. Even though it was a character that was being talked about here, maybe the machismo had something to do with that lack of recognition,” he adds.
Prune Perromat, French journalist and grandniece of Emma Reyes, who is currently working on a documentary to save the artist’s life and work, agrees. “I made that promise to my great-aunt when I was a teenager, and she told me that her country had forgotten her,” says Perromat, Reyes’ parents-in-law: the artist had no children and left her legacy in the hands of her French man Jean Perromat. When Prune, Jean’s great-niece, read the letters in the English edition of Penguin, she decided to move to Bogotá with her family to start making the documentary. Now he is also the legal representative of the Emma Reyes Foundation in Colombia. “I promised her that we would not only talk about her but also about her art, because she really wanted to get this artistic recognition in Colombia,” he adds.
Meanwhile, childhood letters are being recognized in Colombia and Emma Reyes’ paintings continue to be well cared for in Europe. In March last year, a retrospective of all his work was held on the outskirts of Paris, including the paintings he presented at his first exhibition in France in 1949, works influenced by Diego Rivera’s Mexican mural, and dozens of paintings by Cubists, Impressionists and abstract.
“Emma Reyes doesn’t paint her pictures, she writes them,” painter Luis Caballero once said. And vice versa. Whoever reads “Memories by Correspondence” will understand that Emma Reyes did not write letters, but painted her memories. An artist who, both in life and after death, has proven to the world that she is just as talented with a pencil as she is with a brush.
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