GREGORIO VALDES
95
ice-cream peddler, and for a short time a photographer, in the effort to
aupport his large family. He made several trips to Cuba and twenty years
ago worked for a while in the cigar factories in Tampa, returning to Key
West because his wife liked it better. While in Tampa he painted signs as
well, and also the sides of delivery wagons. There are some of his signs in
Key West,-a large one for the
Sociedad de Cuba
and one for a grocery
store, especially, have certain of the qualities of his pictures. Just down
the street from his house, opposite the
Sociedad de Cuba,
there used to be
a little cafe for the workers in a near-by cigar factory, the Forget-Me-Not
Cafe,
Cafe no me Olvidades.
Ten years ago or so Gregorio painted a pic–
ture of it on the wall of the cafe itself, with the blue sky, the telephone
pole and wires, and the name, all very exact. Mr. Rafael Rodriguez, the
former owner who showed it to us, seemed to feel rather badly because
since the cigar factory and the cafe have both disappeared, the color of the
doors and window frames has been changed from blue to orange, making
Gregorio's picture no longer as perfect as it was.
This story is told by Mr. Edwin Denby in his article on Valdes for the
Artists
Gallery exhibition: "When he was a young
m~
he lived with an
uncle. One day when that uncle was at work, Vaides took down the towel
rack that hung next to the washbasin and put up instead a painting of the
rack with the towel on it. When the uncle came back at five, he went to
the
basin, bent over and washed his face hard; and still bent over he
reached up for the towel. But he couldn't get hold. With the water stream–
ing
into his eyes, he squinted up at it, saw it and clawed at it, but the towel
wouldn't come off the wall. 'Me laugh plenty, plenty,' Valdes said..•."
This classical ideal of verisimilitude did not always succeed so well,
fortunately. Gregorio was not a great painter at all, and although he cer–
tainly belongs to the class of painters we· call "primitive", sometimes he
was not even a good "primitive". His pictures are of uneven quality.
They are almost all copies of photographs or of reproductions of other
pictures. Usually when he copies from such reproductions he succeeded
in
nothing more than the worst sort of "calendar" painting, and again
when he copied, particularly from a photograph, and particularly from a
photograph of something he knew and liked, such as palm trees, he man–
aged to make just the right changes in perspective and coloring to give it
a peculiar and captivating freshness, flatness, and remoteness. But Gre–
gorio himself did not see any difference between what we think of as his
good pictures and his poor pictures, and his painting a good one or a bad
one seems to have been entirely a matter of luck.
There are some people whom we envy not because they are rich or
handsome or successful, although they may be any or all of these, but
because everything they are and do seems to be all of a piece, so that even
if
they wanted to they could not be or do otherwise. A particular feature
of their characters may stand out as more praiseworthy in itself than others
-that is almost beside the point. Ancient heroes often have to do penance
for and expiate crimes they have committed all unwittingly, and in the
