Tony Bechara, Painter Who Championed Latino Artists, Dies at 83

New York Times

25-05-2025

Tony Bechara's parents didn't believe he could make a living as an artist. So he majored in philosophy and economics in college and earned a master's degree in international relations. He started law school, too, but in his mid-20s he found his true passion as a painter.
Returning to New York from Paris, where he studied history at the Sorbonne, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in 1967, where he began painting black-and-white figurative imagery.
Animated by the chaos of the city's streets, he graduated to painting kaleidoscopic grids that he meticulously mapped, and he was embraced by critics and invited to exhibit in museums. He became a patron of the arts and of fledgling Latino artists and, for 15 years, led El Museo del Barrio, a showcase of Puerto Rican art that he expanded to encompass works from all over Latin America.
Mr. Bechara died in a Manhattan hospital on April 23, his 83rd birthday. The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman for El Museo del Barrio said.
From 2000 to 2015, he served as chairman of the board of the museum, on Fifth Avenue and 104th Street on the edge of East Harlem, where many newcomers from Puerto Rico originally settled (barrio is Spanish for neighborhood).
His mandate was to broaden the museum's collection and exhibits beyond the Barrio to include art from Latin America and the Caribbean. That expanded purview prompted some local critics to complain that the museum was neglecting its primary focus on Puerto Rican culture.
'If the criticism is that we're not an ethnocentric gallery, then that's fair,' Mr. Bechara told The New York Times in 2002. 'But our ambition and our mission demand that we become a world-class museum, open to all people.'
He explained that the museum's educational mission extended to East Harlem school students and that works by Puerto Rican artists, himself included, represent some 60 percent of the paintings and sculptures in El Museo's biennial survey of Latino art.
Mr. Bechara also served on the boards of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Instituto Cervantes; Studio in a School, which integrates the arts into classroom education; and The Brooklyn Rail, a cultural journal.
After he emerged in the 1970s as a promising talent, he also nurtured and promoted other artists, among them Carmen Herrera and Leon Polk Smith.
'They are an extension of my commitment to art, like unfinished murals in which I work during the night.' he said in an interview with AzureAzure, a bilingual cultural guide, in 2015.
His paintings, which one critic compared to 'optical confetti,' were inspired by the paintings of Titian and Tintoretto; Byzantine-era mosaics; Islamic tiles and calligraphy in the Alhambra in Spain; and 19th century post-Impressionist French pointillist painters like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.
His paintings consisted of thousands of quarter-inch quadrangles. Beginning with a palette of 125 colors, Mr. Bechara used acrylics, which added a dimension that evoked weaving and basketry.
He produced 'shimmering eloquent compositional arrangements developed by chromatic concentration of the squares to form abstract configurations,' Grace Glueck wrote in The Times in 1979.
'For every painting, I first use the one-quarter inch masking tape to create the grid, dividing the surface across equally,' he said in an interview with Phong H. Bui, the Brooklyn Rail's publisher and artistic director, in 2023.
'It begins with taping one layer on the whole canvas vertically,' he said, 'then proceeds the same horizontally. The next thing is to apply the selected color with a small brush, then remove the tape.'
'What I love is the degrees of surprise every time; to take each layer of tape off the canvas is to reveal new worlds of optical symphony,' he said.
His art appeared in the Whitney Biennial in 1975, was the subject of a solo show a decade later at El Museo del Barrio and was exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art's outpost in Long Island City, Queens.
His works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn.; the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N.Y.; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.; and the Museo de Arte in San Juan, P.R.
A book by Mr. Bechara titled 'Tony Bechara: Annotations on Color Schemes' is scheduled to be published later this year.
Antonio Jose Bechara was born on April 23, 1942, in San Juan. His mother, Rosa Margarita Martinez, was from Majorca, Spain. His father, Francisco Bechara, who was of Lebanese descent, operated a limestone quarry and was a developer.
Mr. Bechara is survived by a sister, Maria Rosa Bechara Escudero. His wife, Judith, and two brothers died earlier.
After graduating from the New York Military Academy, he earned a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University and attended Georgetown Law School (his parents wanted him to join the family business). He persuaded them to let him study at the Sorbonne and returned to New York in 1967, where he received a master's degree in international relations from New York University and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts.
Mr. Bechara passionately championed painting and its pre-eminence in the art world.
'As long as there are color pigments, and the fact that no technology ever can substitute this old practice, which has existed since cave paintings, way before language and the written words were invented,' he said, 'painting culture will always be with us.'