111945

José María Menéndez Behety 1930

Seated three-quarter length to the right, head turned looking full face to the right, wearing a suit, a blue tie with a pearl tie-pin, his right hand on his right knee, his left hand resting on the arm of a carved chair, holding a cigarette.

Oil on canvas, 120 x 93 cm (47 ¼ x 36 ¾ in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / PARIS / 1930

Private Collection

This portrait was painted in de László’s Paris studio in January and February 1930 after sittings for the portrait [110556] of his wife and youngest son, Arturo, many of which José Menéndez Behety had attended. As a result, when it came to his turn to be painted, the artist and the sitter already knew each other well. On the back of the canvas is attached a note in Spanish giving a short summary of the artist’s career together with the title the family gave to the portrait: L’HOMME À LA CIGARETTE.

De László’s fee for the portrait of José Menéndez Behety was £1000, the artist had already painted the portrait of his wife and youngest son for £2000. As he explained in a letter: “I understand Mr. J. Menendez wishes to have two portraits painted. The one of his wife with child three quarter lengths for £2000 – and his portrait for £1000 – three quarter length – I accept to paint Mr. Menendez Behety portrait for that Honorarium as an exception – as I have to paint the group – but hope it will not be mentioned to friends.”[1] The artist’s honorarium fluctuated considerably and the sum quoted was slightly above the prices he commanded in 1930.

The portrait is listed in the catalogue of de László’s exhibition at the Charpentier gallery in June 1931, however, documents in the artist’s archive indicates that it was in fact the double portrait of his wife and son Arturo that was exhibited.[2]        

                                                                                                

José María Menéndez Behety was a sheep farmer on a grand scale. He was born in Magallanes, Punta Arenas, Chile on 15 May 1876, the second son of the nine children of José María Menéndez y Menéndez (died 1918) and María Behety Chapital (1848-1908). His father, from a modest farm-labouring family in Asturias, northern Spain, had set out aged fourteen for the New World in search of his fortune and had arrived in Argentina, via Cuba, in the mid 1860s. The year before their son’s birth, he and his wife moved south to live in Punta Arenas in the Chilean region of Patagonia, then a hostile pioneering region, its borders constantly disputed by both Chilean and Argentine governments, who showed scant respect for the indigenous Amerindian population. There he established his business empire[3] of the ‘oro blanco’[4] of sheep farming, having transported sheep from the Falkland Islands to Patagonia and founded his first company, José Menéndez y Compañía by 1876, the year of the sitter’s birth.[5]

José Menéndez Behety[6] grew up and studied in Patagonia and also in Uruguay, where his mother had been born. He began his apprenticeship, at an early age, in his father’s company, by now known as the Sociedad Anónima Ganadera Comercial Menéndez Behety. The company already imported sheep handlers and dogs from Scotland and New Zealand and the young José was sent to Australia for several years to gain further sheep-farming experience. He returned to work the ranches of San Gregorio, Avelina and the new ranches in Tierra del Fuego, Primera Argentina S.A. (Estancia José Menéndez) and Segunda Argentina S.A. (Estancia María Behety), and soon became Director of the Compañía Industrial y Frigorífico de Magallanes.

José María Menéndez Behety married Teresa Montes Thürler (1887-1984) in Punta Arenas on 13 June 1908. She was the daughter of José Montes Pello, an important ranch-owner in Patagonia of Spanish origins, and Eugenia Thürler Rauss. There were four children of the marriage: José Alejandro Menéndez Behety Montes (born 1909), María Teresa (born 1911), Luis Alfonso (born 1914) and Arturo (born 1918).

Together with his four brothers and three brothers-in-law, José Menéndez Behety administered and expanded the multiple businesses which had been so successfully established by José María Menéndez y Menéndez. The brothers founded the Sociedad Anónima Ganadera Argentina Menéndez Behety only a year after their father’s death in 1918.[7] José worked especially with his brother Alejandro in founding the Sociedad Ganadera Estancia Glencross in the Province of Santa Cruz and the Agrícola y Pastoril La Tehuelche Company in the Province of Buenos Aires.

After the death of their second son, Luis Alfonso, from appendicitis in 1924 at the age of eleven, José and Teresa decided to move the family from remote Patagonia to Europe for several years. After some months in Switzerland, they finally settled in Paris, where they stayed until 1936. During this period José returned at least twice a year to Argentina and Chile for business and family interests. In 1929, at the height of its production the company owned more than 300,000 hectares of land suitable for sheep farming and exported about one million kilos of wool annually. It owned coal mines, the Loreto railroad, saw mills, a fleet of ships that plied the Atlantic and sailed the southern seas, huge refrigeration plants, packing stations, and factories which processed by-products from sheep-farming.

José María Menéndez Behety was a devoted family man, passionate also about the development and smooth-running of the sheep-farming business his father had created. He died on 7 August 1951 aged seventy-five in a car accident, returning from their estancia in the Province of Buenos Aires.

LITERATURE:

•DLA121-0016, letter from de László to Luis Ramirez, 26 June 1928

With our grateful thanks to members of the sitter’s family for their invaluable assistance in preparing the biography for this entry.

SMdeL 2011

[1] DLA121-0016, op. cit.

[2]See DLA121-0029 and DLA115-0197

[3] In September 1892 the first of the company’s steamships, the Amadeo, put into port at Punta Arenas with a cargo of bricks for the construction of José Menéndez y Menéndez’s house. The ship has been declared a national monument by Chile and its hull is preserved in the Magellan Straits. The house, San Gregorio, is listed as a zona típica national historical monument.

[4] The term, which means ‘white gold’, refers to the wealth of the sheep-farming industry.

[5] José María Menéndez y Menéndez soon developed the Estancia San Gregorio to the north of the Magellan Straits. Activities multiplied over the next few decades to encompass the export of wool and frozen meat, the processing of by-products such as hides and tallow, cold storage plants, shipping, construction and banking. He transformed great swathes of both Argentine and Chilean Patagonia, ever increasing his number of sheep, constructing bridges, roads, schools and housing for his workers, even installing electricity, not only in the industrial plants and offices. In 1896 alone, he bought 105,169 hectares from the Argentine Government for his Primera Argentina ranch, which by the turn of the century had more than one hundred thousand sheep, excluding lambs. In 1903 he acquired 430,000 hectares of land in Tierra del Fuego.

[6] The sitter’s  name was José María Menéndez Behety, but to avoid confusion with his father, José María Menéndez y Menéndez , he is called José for the purposes of this biography..

[7] An Argentine commercial law of 1918 had forced the family to move the administrative headquarters of its Chilean companies to Buenos Aires. It affected the large Sociedad Anónima Importadora y Exportadora de la Patagonia  and the Sociedad Anónima Ganadera y Comercial Menéndez Behety, both of which had their headquarters in Punta Arenas.