Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508040076
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS LENGTH: Long
Not with traveling in Pancho Villa's army, not with the explicit sexuality of his sculptures, not with his claim that the legendary bandito wasn't around to perform his most famous raid; not with his own premature obituary under a banner headline in a New Orleans newspaper.
These days, people recognize the 94-year-old Alferez mostly through his sculptures: quiet, powerful figures that dot New Orleans and appear across the United States, Canada, South America, Europe and Asia.
Alferez' art gained international acclaim after he moved to New Orleans during the Great Depression.
He lived and worked sporadically in Mexico, New York, San Francisco and St. Louis, but always came back to New Orleans.
Dozens of his figures decorate New Orleans hospitals, churches and cathedrals, restaurants, courtyards and street corners.
New Orleans' City Park features more than 20 of his works, including sculptures of 1930s-era athletes intertwined in the iron gates of the park's Tad Gormley Stadium.
After World War I, Alferez lived in the French Quarter, dallying with flamboyant politicos, including Gov. Huey P. Long, obligingly playing his cello for famed cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.
``When I was finished,'' Alferez recalls, Piatigorsky said, ``That is amazing - I never knew such a terrible sound could come from such a beautiful instrument.''
Alferez removed the fig leaf from male nudes and sculpted sensual female forms. His dry humor guarded him against the ensuing furor from a public that wasn't quite ready for it.
A sculpture of the Virgin Mary, in garb other than the traditional flowing robe, prompted one outraged critic to sputter: ``She has legs!,'' to which Alferez replied, ``Doesn't every woman you know?''
After the unveiling of ``The Fountain of the Four Winds,'' created for a New Orleans airport in 1937 and featuring a well-endowed male nude, one horrified viewer asked Alferez if his mother knew about this.
``If she didn't know about it,'' the artist responded, ``I wouldn't be here.''
Under orders by the federal Works Progress Administration to chisel off the offending penis or cover it with a fig leaf, Alferez stood guard at the statue with a rifle for three nights, until then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt intervened on his behalf.
His flamboyance led some to brand him a playboy. His wife, Peggy Alferez, says, ``He was never a playboy. He didn't have time.''
His association with Pancho Villa sometimes gets more attention than his art.
As a 12-year-old in the impoverished north-central Mexican state of Zacatecas, Alferez was accused of breaking a glass pipette in school.
Glass was very expensive, and he thought his accident had thrown his parents into poverty, so he ran away and joined Villa's revolutionary army.
Alferez barely survived. With a bunch of other kids, his job was to follow the Americans and loot whatever they could.
By age 16, officers had discovered he could draw, and assigned him to sneak into enemy territory and make maps of the terrain. Alferez, a self-described coward, would fabricate the maps from a safe distance.
Alferez disputes the belief that Villa carried out the raid on Columbus, N.M., on March 9, 1916, killing 18 Americans. The attack brought American Army troops, under Gen. John Pershing, to Mexico to find Villa. They never did.
``He wasn't there,'' Alferez insists.
People said Villa was there because they heard cries of ``Viva Villa,'' but Alferez says that was just braggadocio.
Hours before the 4 a.m. raid in New Mexico, Alferez says, Villa and his army were outside El Paso, Texas, to get desperately needed supplies from sympathizers at the American Smelting Co.
``I remember seeing him that night around 8 o'clock, you see, and then I saw him in the morning, the next morning.''
It would have been impossible to traverse those rugged, steep hills to conduct a raid in New Mexico and then get back to El Paso by morning, Alferez says.
``And anyway, why would he attack a little town like Columbus, N.M.,'' he asked rhetorically. ``There was nothing to be gained over there.''
Few people, Alferez says, give him credence about that because they want Villa's legend to remain intact.
His contradiction of Villa's involvement in the raid was not included in a 1993 PBS special, ``American Experience: The Hunt For Pancho Villa,'' though Alferez' commentary is used throughout the rest of the documentary.
After the revolution, Alferez went to the Art Institute of Chicago. A job at Tulane University brought him to New Orleans.
Already famous in 1929, he was on a trip to Mexico when someone stole his satchel. When the thief was found dead with the satchel, there was a florid obituary in a New Orleans newspaper about the ``bold sculptor.''
``Enrique Alferez ... has yielded up the life into whose 28 years he has crowded enough adventures to fill a newspaper page,'' the obituary read.
The adventures have since wound down. The life of a journeyman artist - sometimes lavish, sometimes impoverished - has tempered into a comfortable existence in an inner-city New Orleans neighborhood. His house, a converted old church crammed with his pieces, cannot be seen behind a graffiti-scarred wall.
As recently as 1994, he toiled on an 18-foot bronze sculpture of a woman playing the flute, commissioned by City Park, on which he devoted ``at least nine hours a day,'' wife says. ``Up and down the scaffolding.'' When he finished it, he made another for his daughter.
A year later, though, she said, ``He wouldn't be able to do it now. He really wouldn't. Honey, he's 94 years old.''
Sitting in his daughter's house, decorated with dozens of his sculptures, Alferez holds a drink with work-gnarled hands. ``I'm getting old,'' he declares, something he is totally against.
Age and his vast experience have not managed to bring him total satisfaction with his work.
``Someday, I will do something I like,'' he says.
by CNB