Erminio Blotta

Erminio Antonio Blotta (Morano Cálabro, November 8, 1892 - Rosario, January 23, 1976) was a self-taught sculptor from Rosario of Calabrian origin.

Biography

Blotta was born in the Calabrian town of Morano Cálabro (240 km southeast of Naples), to a Calabrian father and mother: Giovanni Blotta Rímolo (shoemaker by profession) and Anna Filomena Mainieri Mainieri, Paioia line (spinner by profession). The dates of January 1895 or 1896, which Blotta alternately mentioned as his birth dates, are inaccurate.

In her Argentine documents (registration booklet, family booklet) she appears as Carmen E. Blotta, and on the death record in the El Salvador cemetery in the city of Rosario she appears as "Carmen E. Blotta, widow" [sic]. According to her Calabrian birth certificate, her full name was Erminio Antonio Blotta Mainieri.

Trip to Argentina

In 1869, with the opening of the Suez Canal, which allowed the importation of products from the Orient (such as silk) at lower prices, hundreds of thousands of Calabrians became impoverished and began to migrate to America.

In early 1894, Blotta, just a few months old, was taken by his parents on an immigrant ship to the Argentine city of Rosario (300 km northwest of Buenos Aires), on the Paraná River. Filomena embarked already pregnant with her second son Francisco, who would be born in Rosario on July 21, 1894. As a curious fact about the quality of the crafts of the Moraneses, the shoemaker Grimoldi came on another trip of immigrants, whose shoe company, it would become one of the largest in South America, along with Blas Blotta, who would settle, this one, in Rivadavia (Mendoza province). Giovanni (who in the port of Buenos Aires received the name "Juan Blotta") over the years came to have a small shoe factory in the family home, on Alvear street between Jujuy and Brown, and a "conventillo" (tenancy)..

Two of his father's brothers (Gaetano Cayetano and Rocco Roque Blotta Rímolo) were already living in the town of Paso de las Piedras, today Lucio V. López, 40 km to the northwest of Rosario, where these brothers would install a warehouse for the country's fruits, and portentously on the Carcarañá river, a small 100 kW hydroelectric power plant, selling its alternating current electricity to the town and the area.

Blotta was the eldest of nine siblings (although, as was common at that time, two of them ―Carmen (1898-1900) and Antonio (1914-1914)― died prematurely, being in the same niche 2nd v No. 414, from the El Salvador cemetery with his father Juan (1865-1934) and his brother Francisco (1895-1953).

He completed his last years of primary education (1903 to 1905) at Escuela Superior de Varones No. 1 (currently School No. 55; Domingo F. Sarmiento), located at that time at Calle Santa Fe 645, in Rosary beads. In this school, since 1912 located at Calle Buenos Aires 947 in Rosario, there are several of his sculptures.

Adolescence

As an apprentice on the Argentine Central Railway, he discovered his skills as a sculptor: «They had put me to model the clay with which the mouth of the oven was covered where the “guisa” was melted [from the Italian ghisa: 'cast iron'], and with that material I modeled all kinds of figurines: dogs, horses...", he told Luis Ernesto Aguirre Sotomayor in 1970.

He trained as an apprentice in the small medal workshop of Marcos Vanzo (1858-1930), where «two or three years after starting to model in clay I was braiding myself with blocks of marble bigger than myself», he would say. He modeled funeral plaques and portraits.

With the sculptor and medalist José Nardi (who arrived in Rosario around 1920), he worked as a sculpture student, Nardi having been a mentor to many sculptors.

Still a 17-year-old teenager, he traveled undocumented to Montevideo (Uruguay), where he lived for a year (between 1909 and part of 1910), with the exiled Argentine politician Alejandro Vázquez and related to the poet Ángel Falco (1885-1971). He spent another year (1911 and 1912) in Buenos Aires, frequenting the Alberto Ghiraldo club that met in the Paulista café on Maipú and Corrientes streets.

Bohemian

In 1912, at the age of 19, he returned to Rosario. Together with the sculptor and painter César Caggiano (1894-1954) and the poet Abel Rodríguez (1893-1961), he formed the art group El Clan. They frequented different cafes in the city, such as Paganini, a meeting place for bohemia and anarchism.

He was a regular at the Paganini Café Social, a meeting place for bohemia and anarchist circles, whose meetings lasted until 1921 and where most of the city's intellectuals attended. Other meeting cafes were La Brasileña or El Cifré, where he shared gatherings, covering topics ranging from the arts to those inherent to the city, the country and the world. Among the most prominent guests -apart from his roommates- the following stood out, among others:

• the Barcelonian painter Enrique Munné (1880-1949)
• painter, engraver, illustrator, scenographer and sculptor Alfredo Guido (1892-1967)
• the poet Domingo Fontanarrosa (1893-1921)
• painter Manuel Musto (1893-1940)
• poet Abel Rodríguez (1893-1961)
• the painter Augusto Schiavoni (1893-1942)
• the sculptor and painter César Caggiano (1894-1954)
• the painter and engraver Gustavo Cochet (1894-1979)
• the architect Angel Guido (1896-1960, creator of the Monument to the Flag)
• painter and engraver Santiago Minturn Zerva (1896-1964)
• the sculptor Daniel Palau (1896-1978)
• the Greek painter Demetrio Antoníadis (1899-1965)
• painter Luis Ouvrard (1899-1988)
• painter and sculptor Julio Vanzo (1901-1984)
• the cartoonist Aguilar
• the poet Aguilera.
• the poet Tomás Cozzolino
• the painter Manuel Ferrer Dodero
• the painter Isidro García Rouzaut
• the poet Marcos Lenzoni
• the painter José Marín Torrejón
• the painter Medina
• the painter Nicolas Melfi
• the drawing Marchcchi Paz
• the painter Francisco Miranda
• the painter Juan Naranjo
• the painter Julián Nicolas
• the drawer Jesus Palau
• the painter Pablo Pierre
• the sketch artist Rafaelli
• the poet Robertaccio
• the sculptor Alejandro Sartori
• the poet Sartoris
• the painter and painter of fat brooch Máximo Medina
• the sketch artist Manuel el Negro Zamora
• the painter Emilio Sánchez Sáns.

With his friend Abel Rodríguez, also from the clan, he exchanged the books that in 1913 inspired his first bronzes: the bas-reliefs of writers and poets Leo Tolstoy, Charles Baudelaire, Anatole France, Arthur Rimbaud and Mikhail Miguel Bakunin.

He attended the anarchist library assiduously (at that time Rosario was the most important center of anarchism in Latin America).

In July 1913, Blotta traveled by train to Buenos Aires, where his friends the painter Eugenio Daneri (1881-1970), the landscape painter Walter de Navazio (1887-1921), the sculptor Nicolás Lamanna (1888-1923), the sculptor Luis Falcini (1889-1973), the painter Valentín Thibón de Libián (Tucumán, 1889 - Buenos Aires, 1931), the painter Ramón Silva (1890-1919) and the painter Pedro Delucchi, They entrusted him with his works to hold an exhibition in Rosario. Rosario's works were contributed by the painters Emilia Bertolé (1898-1949), César Caggiano (1894-1954) and Alfredo Guido (1892-1967). The First National Salon of Rosario was held in a painting business called La Casa Blanca (at Calle Córdoba 911), owned by the enthusiastic amateur Casildo Souza. The advertising posters were made by the artists themselves. In that "Petit Salón" —so called humorously due to the small number of works, and to mock the snobbery of Rosario's upper-class families, who for decades had bought pictorial works exclusively from European painters—, Blotta presented his first four bas-reliefs. In those same days an Exhibition of Spanish Art opened in the Witcomb Hall, which had an astonishing financial success. On the other hand, the Petit Salón was not successful: they did not manage to sell a single work (even Sousa's business ended up going bankrupt).

The bronze of Tolstoy was exhibited in the Georgino Linares bookstore (later to become the Sorocabana café), where it was bought for one hundred pesos by the engineer Lampe, who later donated it to the Biblioteca Argentina Dr. Juan Álvarez, where it was exposed without any protection until it was stolen in the nineties. The anarchist library Alberto Ghiraldo has a copy of the bust of one of the founders of anarchism, Mikhail Miguel Bakunin.

Workshop

For four years he lived in conventillos (houses that contained many small dwellings, usually with access to patios and corridors) in different neighborhoods of Rosario. At the end of 1915 she got a piece of land at 1708 Pellegrini Avenue, where he set up his sculpture workshop in a large warehouse. There his friend Carlos Mauri made his first casting and began his trade experimenting with funeral plaques modeled by Blotta and cast in bronze.

Community

Beethoven bust, installed by Erminio Blotta in March 1917 in the Parque Independencia (Rosario).

In 1915, while he was sculpting the famous Beethoven in marble, his friends lived in his workshop-shed

• the pianist Alfredo Munné (1880-1949)
• the bass Felipe Romito (1893-1962, which would later become famous in Milan)
• the sculptor and painter César Caggiano (1894-1954)
• the painter Gustavo Cochet (1894-1979)
• painter and engraver Santiago Minturn Zerva (1896-1964)
• journalist Leandro Peuser.

The emeritus surgeon Artemio Zeno (1884-1935) paid the bills for this group of young bohemians. In gratitude, Blotta made a bust of him.

Accident and blindness

In November 1916, when he was finishing sculpting the monument to Juan Bautista Alberdi in situ (in Pueblo Alberdi, now a neighborhood 6 km north of the city center), the marble mason Blotta had hired, last name Lombardi, splinters of marble flew that broke Blotta's 24-year-old glasses and caused glass to enter both eyes. He spent several months completely blind and desperate. At the beginning of 1917 he underwent surgery in Buenos Aires with the surgeon professor Pedro Lagleyze (to whom he would later make a sculpture in gratitude); he only recovered vision in his left eye, meaning that he spent the rest of his life and his artistic production completely blind in that right eye. He possessed monocular vision, keeping in his memory the memory of stereoscopic vision (crucial to work as a sculptor).

His younger sister Elba (who was barely four years old in 1916) disagreed with this version of the sculptor and stated that he had lost his right eye due to an accident with quicklime.

An important piece of information is that when Blotta recovered his vision in his left eye, he continued working at the Alberdi, and on December 23, 1917, he was present at the inauguration of his work, together with the Commission for the Promotion of Pueblo Alberdi, which he had commissioned it.

Paraguayan

The surgeon Lagleyze gave him a recommendation to stay at the home of a Paraguayan friend in Villeta (a town 30 km south of Asunción, Paraguay). Convalescing, Blotta traveled (late 1917 or early 1918) along the Paraná River by boat to Paraguay.

In Villeta he cannot find the person who was going to lodge him, but he met by chance a mysterious man with a white beard who turned out to be Daniel Delgado Rodas, father of the painter Modesto Delgado Rodas. The Delgado Rodas extended him generous hospitality in his home. A few months later, on September 4, 1918, in the town of Emboscada, Blotta ("22 years old", although about to turn 25") married Carmen de Jesús Prieto Ruiz ("23 years old", although she was 22), who was born and lived in Luque and worked as a teacher in the same town (15 km east of Asunción). She was the great-niece of General Elizardo Aquino, Paraguayan hero of the War of the Triple Alliance (Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay).

At this time he collects indigenous art from the Tupi Guarani. There are originals and copies of his works in several Paraguayan cities (Asunción, Villeta, Boquerón, Emboscada, etc.).

Years later, due to his dedication and love for the Guarani land, he was designated an Honorary Citizen of Paraguay. On October 17, 1970, in the newspaper Patria of Asunción (Paraguay), Blotta expressed: "My greatest wish would be to die as a Paraguayan."

Her family

Erminio Blotta with his sons Herminio and Elio (on foot) and his wife Carmen.

In the middle of 1919 ―when he found out that his studio had been robbed― he returned to Rosario with his pregnant wife. On July 19, 1919, his first child, Herminio, was born. After several moves, Blotta established his workshop at Marcos Paz 3160, where he would live for the rest of his life. She would have a total of six children:

• Herminion (name Edgar, 1919-2010),
• Elio Antonio (1922-1997),
• María Alba (1926),
• Beatriz Carmen (1933-2020),
• Claudio Artemio (1936-2015) and
• María Evelina (1938, who would die a few months old).

In his house he gradually began to accommodate his in-laws from Paraguay. It was common for a total of fifteen or twenty people to live there.

He was a fanatical fan of Club Rosario Central, and regularly attended their matches.

Literary production

Between 1910 and 1940, he was a literary correspondent and a regular writer for the newspaper La Nación (from Buenos Aires). He signed his journalistic notes Spanishizing his name (Herminio), while in his sculptural work he signed his original Italian name (Erminio).

Influences and artistic styles

He would belong to the symbolist school of sculpture, whose most conspicuous representative was the Frenchman Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) and the almost contemporaries of Blotta, Arístides Maillol (1861-1941), Frenchman, and the Rosario Lucio Fontana (1899- 1967). He had a great influence from Greek art.

Blotta evolved by simplifying forms, with an increasingly «classical» interpretation of the human figure. From the face of Leandro N. Alem (in 1920) he was arriving at forms and models recreated without fuss, the faces express serenity (Monument to the Mother). He sought perfection rather than originality, and his style underwent little change during his career.

It should also be said something about the eclecticism of its style, about how bas-reliefs are more Rodinians, the most classic busts, the most symbolic funerary plates, etc. And about his relationship with Lucio Fontana (he and his father were partners of Scarabelli)...

Beatriz Vignoli, art critic and granddaughter of the sculptor Blotta

Not only was he not an academic, but in purely plastic aspects he made very good use of the series (he used the same image several times in different contexts, formats and sizes), collage (union and separation of different pieces to generate new images), the importance of the support (that "the Academy" asked for them on a very high pedestal, separating the public from the work, eliminated by Blotta after Sarmiento in 1916, considering it elitist, especially in Ansia de luz, which is exactly at the level of the observer's eyes), and the use of anatomy as one more tool to manifest human spirituality. Like many artists, he had a more commercial production (for example, the plaque on the wall of the Stock Exchange, in Corrientes and Córdoba streets) and another more oriented to his own convictions.

24/7 production

In his youth, apart from modeling clay, he sculpted marble and stone. But by the mid-1920s he produced less marble torsos—Santiago Ramón y Cajal and presidents Roque Sáenz Peña and Carlos Pellegrini, and funerary art—and leaned more toward producing clay works, which he had cast in bronze.. There is a graphic record (especially from the newspaper La Capital, from Rosario) of more than 200 works of this type.

By municipal decree no. 11,285 of October 22, 1951, he was named jury for the selection and awards of the Sculpture Section of the VIII Annual Salon of Rosario Artists.

He was a technical draftsman and reconstructive plasterer of the model of the trough (talweg, the line formed by the lowest points of the river bed) of the Paraná river near Rosario in the of Ports of Rosario. He made a living making funerary art (several hundred bronze works for tombstones, etc.) working on many occasions with his colleague Pedro Cresta (1912-1970).

Works by sculptor Erminio Blotta can be found at:

• Concepción del Uruguay (Province of Entre Ríos),
• Resistance (Chaco Province),
• province of Santa Fe
• province of Buenos Aires
• province of Mendoza
• province of Córdoba
• province of Tucumán
• Santiago de Compostela (Spain).
• Kibbutz Mefalsim (Israel).
• Villeta (Paraguay)

In his last years he received from the Municipality of Rosario, and managed by his friends, a "gratia pension" for his artistic work. He passed away at the age of 83, comforted by his family, on January 23, 1976 in Rosario, his adoptive city. He was buried in the El Salvador cemetery, in the city of Rosario.

Honors

Obituary

If the history of art and bohemia were written in Rosario, Erminio Blotta, who died after a long illness, would be an inescapable figure. Not only could he be dispensed with: he should be assigned relevant performance. Perhaps the uncertainty that he had of his own age—80, 83, 86—has been an index of his unborn carelessness, that which led him to work as a sculptor for decades, without fatigue, without his ill-replaceable labor, has never given him, almost never, benefits that were not the intimate satisfaction of the accomplished work. Despite his disdain for the material goods and the camaraderie with poets and musicians of a time that passed, there was no pause in his work. Only if he was detained by the ideological concern and a hasty escape to Uruguay and Paraguay, a country in which he fell in love and married and where he had intimate friends. He modeled and sculpted with enthusiasm, fervently, and did so until recently, when he was almost blind but animosous as a boy, his hands continued to create, perhaps in a sort of divination of the reliefs.

He died poor, with a minimum municipal pension, who, like him, had given the city the constantly renewed fruit of his inspiration, usually based on the admiration that aroused in him, exemplary men, several of these proceres of Argentinian civility. But he did not regret his poverty, which would have been consubstantiated by his way of being. He preferred to complain the story, which made him happy, of his adventure with marbles, bronzes and plasters in workshops and atticles. Gustaba evoke the humble origin, its awakening to beauty, its improvised readings, the youthful militancy and the magazine Bohemia, and he was pleased to speak, though without pride, his memorable triumphs: his Beethoven, set in 1917 in the park Independence by the hands of Blotta, of some friends and occasional collaborators, which was the first public monument to the illustrious musician erected in a Latin city and the second in the world, after the existing in Vienna; his then Alberdi, raised by the initiative of the author in what was the name.

Autodidacto, he himself once narrated his formation on a handwritten page for the archive of this journal: "I never attended an art academy. I had obtained a stimulus prize in the National Hall, and had placed in the National College No. 1 the bust of Sarmiento (that bust I took it from my workshop to school in a wheelbarrow and the monument to Beethoven was already in the Independence Park and I just entered a sculpture workshop in Buenos Aires and I could see how things were done in marble. At the age of 17 (sic), President Sáenz Peña offered me a scholarship and they took to Buenos Aires, one month later he was back and the promise was never fulfilled...».

In parks and squares, in schools and libraries, even in commemorative plates set in streets, in the tower of the Cathedral Church (Medallón del cura Navarro) and even in the presidential residence of Olivos (busto de Roque Sáenz Peña) is appreciated the exceptional fruitfulness of Blotta, his laborious passion, his ability to perform, San Martín, Belgrano, Moreno, Brown, Güvia Hernández, Rivada And the rosaries like Marcos Lenzoni, Domingo Fontanarrosa, Master Mazza, Juan Álvarez, and Artemio Zeno. In Paraguay, among his other creations, are the busts of Colonel Bogado and General Caballero. In Capital I wanted it strangely. It was not only assiduous visitor, but the author of busts of Ovidio Lagos (two of them located in public squares) and Ovidio Amadeo Lagos, as well as plates with the effigy of Adolfo Lagos, Joaquín Lagos and Leopoldo Lagos. Also, in our house, busts of Blotta honor the memory of Moreno, San Martín and Belgrano.

The sepelio, performed yesterday afternoon in the cemetery El Salvador, constituted an expressive ceremony of the sorrow caused by the artist's death.

Obituary in the newspaper La Capital (Rosario)

Sculptor Blotta Street

In 1978 —two years after his death— Passage Mercado was renamed (located on the block bounded by Warnes, Darragueira, Freire and Perdriel streets, at 2100 Rondeau Boulevard, 250 m from his monument to Alberdi on the north of Rosario), which was renamed Passage Escultor Blotta.

Contemporary tributes

From October 2005 to March 2006, a bronze plaque of the sculptor and a summary of the sculptor's biography and work were exhibited (the text of the explanatory panels was taken from this Wikipedia article), in the Lobby of the Municipal Bank of Rosario (in Calle San Martín 730). Its curator was the museologist Irene Zulli.

On March 9, 2006, the Municipal Council of Rosario, through Decree no. 27.167/06, declared the sculptor Distinguished Post Mortem Artist of the city of Rosario. The draft decree was the work of councilor Horacio Ghirardi and others. The mentioned distinction was granted to his direct relatives in the ordinary session of April 20, 2006. And in article 3, the Ministry of Culture and Education was instructed to dispose of the necessary resources for the preparation and publication of a "reasoned catalog" of the work of Erminio Blotta (which would be based mainly on the data presented in this article and on Wikibooks).

On April 12, 2011, a commemorative plaque was inaugurated on the Paseo de los Ilustres, inside the El Salvador cemetery (in Rosario).

Catalog of works

Short inventory with 605 works by the sculptor Erminio Blotta (1892-1976) belonging to the Argentine school, listed or discovered until October 9, 2015. The catalog of works by this sculptor is on Wikibooks, click on the following link: Catalog of works.

Fonts

The information presented in the inventory of works comes from various sources in Rosario:

• descendants of Blotta;
• the Library of the Argentine Library (in Rosario),
• the Bernardino Rivadavia Cultural Center,
• the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts «Juan B. Castagnino»,
• the Provincial Museum Julio Marc,
• the Museo de Arte Decorativo Firma y Odilio Estévez,
• the Museum of the City of Rosario;
• staff of the Women ' s Council Library (in Rosario),

• the descendants of the pink sculptor Pedro Cresta
• and many other entities and people who agreed to speak about the sculptor and show their works.