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In march 1890, a baby called Benito Juan Martin was abandoned at the door of Casa de los Expósitos Orphanage, in Barracas neighborhood in Buenos Aires. He spent his first six years there until he was adopted by an Italian Immigrant, Manuel Chinchella, who had opened a coal shop in La Boca before marrying Justina Molina. The child adopted the last name of his adoptive father in the Spanish from: Quinquela.
When he was a teenager he helped in the family coal warehouse. At the age of 17, he enrolled at the conservatory to take courses of drafting and painting with the teacher Alfredo Lazzari, from whom he inherited a basic lesson: Freedom of expression in Art. His father obliged him to look for a“ decent” job while his mother was
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more sensitive to the artistic vocation of her son.
As from 1910, Quinquela Martín participated in some exhibitions and kept on painting landscapes, scenes from La Boca Port, Lezama Park, Palermo, and from Maciel Island. He felt more and more identified with the neighbourhood where he was raised, La Boca Port, The ships, the cranes, the cargos, and the neighbourhood that was the distinctive feature of his paintings.
He was discovered by Pío Collivadino, Director of the Academy of Fine Arts and told him:“ You may be the painter of La Boca and its Port. Here there’ s a special atmosphere, character and strength.
Besides you have an original personality, a different way of seeing and painting things.”
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Quinquela Martín gave up the coal for good. He was invited to participate in local exhibitions, then in Brazil in 1920, then in Spain in 1922.
There, the Museum of Modern Art of Madrid bought two of his paintings.
President Marcelo T. de Alvear was a great admirer, so much that he visited the painter’ s studio in La Boca.
He received a warm welcome at the circle of Fine Arts in Paris and the same happened in New York, Rome and London.
La Boca Pier where all the poor immigrants had arrived in the 1920s started to decorate the best museums and refined rooms. Workers carrying bags on their shoulders, old ships and the dusk were his most repeated scenes.
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of land and had a four-level house built so that they could open a primary school there, a museum for Argentine artists of figurative art, his own studio and residence. The Museum was called Benito Quinquela Martín.
The most visited street in La Boca was also created by Quinquela Martín: Caminito, one of the most beautiful postcards of Buenos Aires.
He had the great idea of refurbishing the abandoned railway and turning it into an open air Museum.
In the 1950s, the wooden and zink houses of the immigrants located there, were painted again with the lively colours that characterized the neighbouhood.
Quinquela Martín died in 1977 and he is undoubtedly one of the most popular artists from Argentina.
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