Mid-Century Mod, Venezuelan Style

When the intellectual Alfredo Boulton began remodeling what became his vacation home in the early 1950s, the 18th-century mansion was in disrepair.

The house, overlooking the Caribbean Sea, was located in the city of Pampatar on Margarita Island in Venezuela, where prosperous European families–Boulton’s among them–had first arrived in the early days of colonization in the 16th century. For that reason, the island held special significance for Boulton, as a point of origin for the country he would devote his life documenting through copious photographs and art historical texts (including accumulating thousands of portraits of Simón Bolívar, the liberator of Venezuela and Boulton’s hero).

The Pampatar house, created with an obsessive eye, was for Boulton an emblem of a modern Venezuela, bringing together pre-Hispanic and colonial cultural traditions with the latest avant-garde styles in art and architecture. He saw it as “a type of modern home that could serve as a model for all those interested in demonstrating their ‘Venezuelanness’ and their attachment to history, without abandoning notions of modernity,” writes art historian Jorge Francisco Rivas Pérez in Alfredo Boulton: Looking at Venezuela, 1928–1978.

Boulton saw the Pampatar house as a total work of art, dictating everything from the design and placement of the furniture to sourcing the green marble for the tabletops from a local quarry. “Boulton searched obsessively throughout Venezuela for the best raw materials,” writes Pérez, and he insisted the house be reconstructed using traditional techniques. At the same time, he filled the home with modern art. A colorful mobile by Alexander Calder, commissioned especially for the house, hung from the ceiling, while works by Venezuelan painters Armando Reverón and Arturo Michelena adorned the walls. Guests sat in sleek redesigned versions of butaques, low wooden armchairs used in Venezuela’s colonial era that were inspired by a kind of Indigenous seat.

The residence became a gathering place for artists, intellectuals, and socialites, a place of sumptuous dinners (Boulton even created a recipe book for the house that included his instructions for making a favorite rum cocktail, which called for a vigorous, rhythmic shaking “until the sound that comes out resembles the music of an oboe”). He meticulously arranged the tables and chairs in the fashion of a Roman dining room. “Boulton was positioning himself as a modern-day Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, the celebrated patron of the arts in ancient Rome,” writes Pérez.

In the midst of redevelopment, Venezuela was changing rapidly when Boulton designed his home. He thought of it as a link between past and future, an example of a new and distinct national style. After the renovations were finished, he published La Casa, a careful documentation of everything in the house and its proper placement, so that none of his original vision would be lost.

Join us for the program Music & Design: Mid-Century Venezuela, a live jazz performance and discussion of Boulton’s design of his house in Pampatar, which accompanies the exhibition Alfredo Boulton: Looking at Venezuela (1928–1978).