January 2018 

Another significant museum acquisition of a painting by Cecilia Vicuña: her painting of Karl Marx from 1972 has been acquired from England & Co by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, with the help of the museum’s Latin American Circle.

This work is the first in Vicuña’s series of paintings from the early 1970s, Heroes of the Revolution, in which she depicted important political figures of international and Latin American socialism: Karl Marx, Lenin, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, and Violeta Parra.

Vicuña wrote in 1972: “In order to exalt Marx, I wanted to associate him with ideas that dogmaticians consider way removed from him, such as eroticism, poetics, blues, jazz and rock, female and homosexual liberation and that I consider intrinsic to the revolution.”