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Bestard, Jaime
(b Asunción, 26 June 1892; d Asunción, 1965). Paraguayan painter. He trained in Paris, where he lived from 1924 until 1933, attending studios and private academies. His landscapes from the period are constructed solidly with vigorous modelling, massive forms and clear outlines. The result is an image made up of compressed bodies and dense colours regulated by strict composition, as in the oil painting My Mother’s Patio (1934; Asunción, Paraguay, Mus. N. B. A.). His tendency to emphasize the structure of a work had great importance during the 1930s and 1940s as a forerunner of the revival of Paraguayan art, which until then had been dominated by a 19th-century type of naturalism. The paintings of Bestard and those of Wolf Bandurek prepared the ground for the break with academicism that took place in the 1950s. While Bandurek drew attention to the expressive content of paintings, Bestard’s contribution was to formal values. After 1950 he produced small-format sketches in oil, tempera, pencil, pastel and watercolour, for example The Football Match (c. 1950; priv. col., see Escobar, 1984, p. 74); these show great boldness of expression and a strong sense of humour, a mood which until then had rarely been introduced into Paraguayan painting.
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