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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/22\/arts\/design\/alejandro-mario-yllanes-toledo-museum-bolivia.html?emc=edit_nn_20260923&nl=the-morning&segment_id=226928",
    "parsed_content": "AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTThis Forgotten Artist\u2019s \u2018Extraordinary\u2019 Work Was Saved From a DumpsterAlejandro Mario Yllanes, a self-taught Bolivian painter, made searingly political works championed by Diego Rivera. Their journey to major museums is a 50-year saga full of mysteries.Listen \u00b7 12:40 min Share full article\u201cLake Titicaca\u201d by Alejandro Mario Yllanes will hang at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. The painting was one of about a dozen found in a dumpster around 1978.Credit...Nic Antaya for The New York TimesBy Victoria BurnettSept. 22, 2026Leer en espa\u00f1olSee more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra m\u00e1s de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de b\u00fasqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google The painting was \u201cmind-bendingly great.\u201d The artist, a near-unknown.Adam M. Levine, director of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, had not heard of the Bolivian painter and engraver Alejandro Mario Yllanes until last summer. Then he saw \u201cLake Titicaca,\u201d a large 1935 oil-on-burlap of an Andean boatman, at a London art gallery.Levine was stunned by the painting of a reed boat on rippling water edged by blue mountains. In May, the Toledo Museum bought the piece to hang at the heart of its collection, which will reopen next year after a major renovation.Speaking by Zoom from Toledo, Levine said, \u201cIt is powerful. It is beautifully painted.\u201dThat\u2019s a remarkable change of fortune for a painting that, by several accounts, was rescued in the 1970s from a Manhattan dumpster.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTA Legacy OverlookedYllanes (1913-circa 1960) was a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Diego Rivera, the great Mexican artist of populist murals, who championed the bravery with which Yllanes made searingly political works. Yllanes (pronounced ee-YAN-es) was admired \u2014 and punished \u2014 for depicting the brutal hardship and colorful rituals of Indigenous Bolivians.But he left little trace of his life after 1950, leaving a cache of paintings, engravings and documents in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.Abandoned by their forgotten maker, those artworks made a decades-long journey from a Manhattan apartment to the home of a sharp-eyed policeman, and, eventually, a French collector\u2019s storage.Now, Yllanes is having a renaissance. Since 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College have acquired several works on paper by the self-taught artist; the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (known as MALBA) and Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine have bought large-scale oil paintings. In Toledo, \u201cLake Titicaca\u201d will hang in a gallery alongside works by Peter Paul Rubens, Mark Rothko and Hale Woodruff, Levine said.ImageAlejandro Mario Yllanes, \u201cEsta\u00f1o Maldito\u201d (1937), oil on canvas. Several institutions have acquired Yllanes\u2019s work since 2023.Credit...Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine; via Ben Elwes Fine Art, LondonThe revival has been led by Rachel and Ben Elwes, owners of Ben Elwes Fine Art in London, who learned of Yllanes a few years ago from David Le Louarn, a French client who bought the Manhattan cache in the early 2000s. Le Louarn consigned the work to the Elweses for sale.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cThis was clearly a legacy that had been overlooked,\u201d said Rachel Elwes, who spoke by Zoom from London. The Elweses exhibited Yllanes\u2019s artwork in the fall of 2023, kicking off a wave of interest. Museums, mostly in the United States and Canada, have since bought nearly two dozen pieces, for prices ranging from $400,000 to $1.9 million, according to the dealers.The Museums Special SectionRocky, Reconsidered: The sculpture is at the center of a show by the Philadelphia Museum of Art\u00a0that explores the meaning of monuments.Route 66 Turns 100: Exhibitions recall the history of the neon corridor that helped define the American road trip.A New Museum Comes With a D.J.: The space in Indianapolis, housed in a former dairy barn, aims to upend expectations of what an art museum can be.The Fisher Collection in a New Light: A Bay Area family made a deal with SFMOMA\u00a0that called for exhibitions of the collection\u2019s works every 10 years.More on Museums: Artists and institutions\u00a0are adapting to changing times.Michele Greet, a professor of art history at George Mason University who has written a book on Indigenous Latin American art, said that Yllanes\u2019s oeuvre is a \u201csignificant discovery.\u201d She herself was unaware of Yllanes until the Elweses hired her to research him. The artist added a voice to Latin American \u201cindigenism,\u201d a movement that focused on pre-Columbian people.\u201cIt basically puts Bolivia on the map as being part of this broader idea,\u201d Greet said.ImageAlejandro Mario Yllanes, \u201cTragedy of the Indigenous Worker\u201d (1932). Oil on canvas.Credit...via the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA)Eduardo Costantini, an Argentine collector who founded MALBA, said Yllanes\u2019s paintings \u201ccould be hung next to any great master of Latin American art.\u201d In 2024 he bought a mural-like painting by Yllanes, \u201cTragedy of the Indigenous Worker\u201d (1932), that depicts their struggle; and a 1941 composition of musicians and dancers surrounding a deity of the Aymara, a Bolivian Indigenous group. (He declined to say how much he paid.)Yllanes\u2019s life, he noted, was \u201cvery mysterious.\u201dA Life Laced With DramaYllanes was born into an Aymara family in the mining town of Oruro. By 18, he had been orphaned, worked in a tin mine, dropped out of law school and held his first solo art show. In Bolivia, Yllanes\u2019s political critique earned him fans and enemies. He told a Mexican newspaper in 1946 that he was banished to the Amazon for a year in the 1930s and that in 1941 he was briefly thrown in jail after an incendiary exhibition. Elsewhere, he was celebrated, holding a solo show in Mexico City in 1946 for which Rivera wrote a glowing introduction, urging Mexican artists to take note of \u201cComrade Yllanes,\u201d who had suffered for \u201cthe revolutionary assertions expressed in his art.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTImageThe Bolivian artist Alejandro Mario Yllanes in the 1930s, second row, fifth from left.Credit...via Ben Elwes Fine Art, London; Photo by G. RojasHot off his Mexican success, Yllanes moved to New York City in 1947 with his wife, Mar\u00eda Frontaura Argando\u00f1a, an educator from a prominent leftist family, according to documents shared by Ben Elwes Fine Art. He won a $2,500 grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1948 to research Native American culture and study painting.After that, the trail grows faint. Researchers have found few clues as to how Yllanes spent his last decade, and experts postulated that he was killed by right-wing militias in Bolivia or returned to Mexico and died there.But documents and letters reviewed by The New York Times suggest he spent part of the 1950s in New York and may have died there. He is listed in the 1950 census as a resident at 419 West 115th Street \u2014 the building, owned by Columbia University, where he eventually abandoned his artworks.And in 1955, over dinner in Manhattan, a radiant Yllanes told Eduardo Arze Loureiro, a Bolivian politician, that he had traveled widely in the United States; visited Japan, Europe and Africa for a textile company; and taught in Chicago \u2014 claims that the artist may have exaggerated, said Greet.In November 1962, a Bolivian art historian, Carlos Salazar Mostajo, wrote to Arze that Yllanes had died in New York days earlier but gave no other information. (The historian Jacqueline Barnitz wrote in her book \u201cTwentieth-Century Art of Latin America\u201d that Yllanes died in 1960, but did not explain where or how.)AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTAll that remained of Yllanes was a handful of murals and paintings in Bolivia and the cache of art in the Manhattan apartment. That collection included \u201cLake Titicaca\u201d and the other large-scale pieces that have since been sold to museums.ImageAlejandro Mario Yllanes, \u201c7 de Junio\u201d (1939). Lithograph in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Credit...Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; via Ben Elwes Fine Art, LondonIt also contained dozens of works on paper, among them \u201c7 de Junio,\u201d (1939), a lithograph in which hooded figures surround a military man, one pointing a gun to his head; and \u201cSelf-Portrait,\u201d a 1941 wood engraving in which Yllanes glowers at the viewer. Both were acquired in 2024 by the Met, which has six Yllanes works on paper, purchased from the Elweses and their French client.How did they come to be in French hands?A Chance EncounterThe cache of artworks left behind in Manhattan was acquired by Edward Ford, a policeman, and his wife, Teresa, in 1978, according to the Elweses. The artworks spent much of the next 45 years in storage, with the exception of three or four exhibitions in the Hudson Valley.The specifics of how the Fords acquired the works vary.Documents prepared for an exhibition of Yllanes\u2019s art at Bard College in 1992 say that Ford was \u201cnamed in the will of a lonely old woman he had often seen on his regular beat\u201d on the Upper East Side.But no will has ever surfaced, according to Angelina Giovani, a provenance expert who researched the Yllanes atelier; and Ford\u2019s police beat was, in fact, the Upper West Side. Three men who lived near Ford in the Hudson Valley and helped him research, exhibit or sell the Yllanes art in the 1990s and early 2000s gave a different account.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cHe found them,\u201d said William Jenack, former owner of William J. Jenack Estate Auctioneers in Chester, N.Y., adding, \u201cThey were in a dumpster.\u201d Jenack says he sold several Yllanes pieces at his auction house, including wood engravings and a self-portrait in oil.ImageAlejandro Mario Yllanes\u2019s glowering \u201cSelf-Portrait\u201d (1941).Credit...Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; via Ben Elwes Fine Art, LondonAnother man, Nicholas Clemente, an artist and graphic designer, said in an interview at his home in Loch Sheldrake, N.Y., that he met Ford in the late 1980s, and in 1992 curated a Yllanes exhibit at William Paterson College in New Jersey.Clemente said Ford told him he spotted a metal tube filled with rolled artworks in a dumpster outside the Columbia residence.The building\u2019s superintendent had stored the artwork for years but had given up on anyone returning to claim it, Clemente said. The superintendent gave Ford the tube, plus several boxes of works on paper and documents.Ford died in 2021, according to an online obituary. Teresa Ford and the Fords\u2019 two children could not be reached.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe superintendent appears to have been Louis Nieves, who died in 2019, according to his stepdaughter, Yvette Mazzamuto. She said Nieves never mentioned the art to her. But, following a telephone interview, she found among Nieves\u2019s documents brochures from the William Paterson and Bard exhibitions.Giovani, the provenance analyst, believes Yllanes left his artwork with his wife, Frontaura. She lived on and off at the Columbia residence until the early 1970s and then returned to Bolivia, according to her great-nephew, Victor Rico Frontaura, who spoke by phone from Bolivia.Image\u201cWirakhocha Danzante\u201d (1941) is one of the Yllanes pieces at MALBA in Buenos Aires.Credit...The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA); via Ben Elwes Fine Art, LondonIt is possible that Frontaura left the art with Nieves, who became superintendent at the end of the 1960s. Why Ford told curators at Bard that he had inherited the art is unclear.But Jenack, the auctioneer, said that Ford always had \u201ca fear that there was some claim lingering in the background.\u201d No claim has come to the surface.Clemente agreed to research and promote Yllanes\u2019s work in exchange for a percentage of sales, but he said the two parted company around 2003 because Ford sold some paintings and cut Clemente out of the deal. Clemente was given some pieces by Yllanes in lieu of payment, including four studies for murals and more than a dozen woodcuts.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIt was a third man, Anthony Gross, an art and antiques dealer from Woodbury Falls, N.Y., who connected Ford to a dealer who knew David Le Louarn and sold him the paintings for around $10,000 to $15,000 apiece. (Gross said he could not remember the dealer\u2019s name.)\u201cLake Titicaca\u201d went a different route: Gross said he sold it to a collector in Rhinebeck, N.Y., in the early 2000s; Le Louarn bought it from that person in 2021.In an email, Le Louarn said he was \u201cintrigued and beguiled\u201d when he encountered the art some 20 years ago. More recently, he decided to sell it because Yllanes\u2019s \u201ctime had come.\u201dLevine, the Toledo Museum director, declined to say what the institution paid for \u201cLake Titicaca.\u201d He wrote in an email that the museum was \u201cintrigued to learn of this alternative account, which differs in details but helpfully reinforces the chain of ownership.\u201dHe added that while Yllanes vanished, his \u201cextraordinary\u201d art did not \u2014 it was merely overlooked by institutions and by the art market. \u201cWe have to be honest about what is actually disappearance,\u201d he added, \u201cand what is, in fact, just: The West is finally paying attention.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2026-09-22T09:01:51+00:00",
    "author_name": "Victoria Burnett",
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    "ai_headline": "This Forgotten Artist\u2019s \u2018Extraordinary\u2019 Work Was Saved From a Dumpster",
    "ai_simplified_title": "Alejandro Mario Yllanes Art Rescued from Dumpster, Gains Museum Recognition",
    "ai_excerpt": "The works of self-taught Bolivian painter Alejandro Mario Yllanes, once championed by Diego Rivera and later found in a dumpster, are now experiencing a renaissance. Major museums are acquiring his political and Indigenous-focused art, highlighting a 50-year saga of mystery and rediscovery.",
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