Let’s look at this man. He has all the traces of a bohemian. If he is, he must be an elegant bohemian, not one of those in a cantina: he is seen every afternoon in “La Concordia”, the famous café on Plateros street, in Mexico City, quoted by Gutiérrez Nájera in his verses and Chronicles.
This bohemian is a handsome man. He has a “manly beauty”. His hair, profuse and in deliberate disorder, is the envy of his bald or bald friends, like Luis G Urbina. He wears a small beard and a smaller mustache whose tips rise, in the romantic style of the time, over well-formed lips and a perpetual smile.
Because it happens that this man is happy. He has a beloved woman Carmelita Elizondo, of great beauty and exquisite goodness. She has great friends, among whom are the most select spirits of her time: the aforementioned Gutiérrez Nájera and Urbina; chucho valenzuela and Jesus Lujanwealthy men who like to protect artists; Federico Gamboathe consecrated novelist author of “Santa”; chucho uruetathe most notable orator that has existed in Mexico; Loved nervethe distinguished mystic of “The Immobile Beloved”…
This bohemian has been to Paris. He there he knew all the vices, but he did not fall into any. He also had a lover there: a perfect woman −or, better, goddess− whose body, of ebony beauty, he used to contemplate with rapture every day. That lover was a sculpture, the Venus de Milo, which in the Louvre is offered for the contemplation of the world.
“…My best hours -wrote the bohemian- I spend them contemplating with love the marble without lusts of the mutilated goddess…”.
The life of this man is a continuous happiness. Women love him; his friends love him; he is flattered by the powerful. Everyone says of him that he is a genius. And he is, indeed. An early genius, a young genius for whom misfortune awaits.
Misfortune awaits him, yes. In his youth he will fall ill with an irremediable disease, and will die in the flower of his age, leaving a wife and little children. But he will have known glory, and his name will live forever.
Is called jesus contreras. He was born in Aguascalientes. Since he was a child he showed his vocation for drawing and sculpture. He went to study those arts in Mexico City. He was just 18 years old when he became the main assistant to the sculptor Noreña, author of the famous statue of Cuauhtémoc. There he met for the first time jesus contreras the pain that often accompanies art: as the great statue was going to be melted down, the crucible that contained the burning bronze broke and a stream of burning metal fell on the boy’s feet. He was at death’s door, but managed to live to fulfill his vocation.
Commissioned by the Government of Coahuila, Contreras, already in his maturity as an artist, made two bronze statues that are today in the Paseo de la Reforma, in the Capital. The one is from Mr. Juan Antonio de la Fuente; the other of gift Miguel Ramos Arizpe. And he sculpted in marble the monument to Acuña that fills with its beauty the square that in Saltillo we all call “the market”. (Will follow).
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