After efforts and negotiations in which the artist’s children participated Ernest Deira (1928-1986), the Ministry of Culture and the chancelleries of Chile and Argentina, the seven works, which were held in Chile for 50 years, where the painter believed they had been destroyed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, arrived in our country to be transferred to the National Museum of Fine Arts.
The reception of the works was in the last hours of the day on Saturday and the Minister of Culture of the Nation, Tristan Bauer; the director of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Andres Duprat; the artistic director of the MNBA, Mariana Marchei; the painter’s son, Martin Deira; the grandsons Luca Saagar Deira, Julián Deira and Santiago Armando, along with Interpol’s Director General of International Coordination, Commissioner Marcelo El Haibe, Argentine Air Force Brigadier Fernando Mengo and officials from the General Directorate of Customs.
“It is a joy and a pride that this day has come after 50 years of intense search and joint work between Argentina and Chile: the return of the works of Ernesto Deira, one of the great Argentine artists,” said Bauer and thanked to Deira’s family and to the work teams of Interpol, the Ministries of Culture, Foreign Ministry and Defense of both countries.
“It is a joy and a pride that this day has come after 50 years of intense search and joint work between Argentina and Chile: the return of the works of Ernesto Deira, one of the great Argentine artists”Tristan Bauer
He defined the situation as “a great act of justice”: “We think it is very beautiful that it is just happening in this new stage of Chilean politics with the assumption of Gabriel Boric as president and with all the hope that this brings us for the region and especially for Argentina,” he said about the arrival in the country of the Chilean president, who will visit the works at the Museum of Fine Arts.
One of these works will be exhibited in the museum hall, but the exhibition of all the works will take place later and will be curated by Mariana Marchesi, artistic director of the institution, with a text that explains the particular contingency of that exhibition, as Duprat had explained this week to Télam.
These are seven works that are part of the “Identifications” series that Deira painted in black and white, and that allude to the torture and amputations carried out on detainees during the dictatorship to prevent their identification. The works were part of an exhibition that was exhibited at the Carmen Waugh gallery, in Buenos Aires, in 1971, and later at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) of the University of Chile, in 1973..
these paintings They arrived at the Jorge Newbery Metroplitano Airport in an Argentine Air Force Hercules plane from Santiago de Chile by agreement between the University of Chile and the artist’s family, the Ministry of Culture and the collaboration of Interpol together with bilateral organizations.
Interpol Argentina coordinated with its peer, Interpol Santiago, to have the support of the Investigative Brigade of Crimes Against Public Health and the Metropolitan Environment of the Chilean Investigative Police, for the transfer, security service and delivery of the works in the airport of the bordering country, which were duly protected in two wooden boxes, whose measurements are 2.5 m. and an approximate weight of 100 kg each.
“It’s really a very exciting moment and the first words that come to my mind are those of thanks to all the people and institutions that made this possible. For me, this is having beaten the “you can’t”. to see those works again and that all the people who want to, in the Argentine Republic, can see them”, said Martín Deira, the artist’s son.
“It is really a very exciting moment and the first words that come to mind are those of thanks to all the people and institutions that made this possible”Martin Deira
In 2003, seventeen years after Deira’s death, his friend and colleague Louis Philippe Noah learned that the paintings were in perfect condition in a deposit of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile. From that moment, the Deira family agreed with the Chilean authorities accredited in Buenos Aires, thanks to the support of the Ministry of Culture, the repatriation of the works.
