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Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980
Catalog for an exhibition held at the South Bank Centre, London, in July 1989.
Discusses Latin American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, detailing the indigenous, colonial, post-colonial, and political influences.
Contents:
Independence and its heroes --
Academies and historical painting --
Traveller-reporter artists and the empirical tradition in post-independence Latin America / by Stanton Loomis Catlin --
Nature, science and the picturesque --
José María Velasco --
Posada and the popular graphic tradition --
Modernism and the search for roots --
The Taller de gráfica popular --
Indigenism and social realism --
Private worlds and public myths --
Arte madí/arte concreto-invencíon --
A radical leap / by Guy Brett --
History and identity.
Discusses Latin American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, detailing the indigenous, colonial, post-colonial, and political influences.
Contents:
Independence and its heroes --
Academies and historical painting --
Traveller-reporter artists and the empirical tradition in post-independence Latin America / by Stanton Loomis Catlin --
Nature, science and the picturesque --
José María Velasco --
Posada and the popular graphic tradition --
Modernism and the search for roots --
The Taller de gráfica popular --
Indigenism and social realism --
Private worlds and public myths --
Arte madí/arte concreto-invencíon --
A radical leap / by Guy Brett --
History and identity.
- GenresArtNonfiction
384 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1989
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January 23, 2022
A fascinating book based on a 1989-1990 international exhibition of 160 years of Latin American Art from 1820 to 1980, organized by the South Bank Centre in collaboration with the National Swedish Art Museums and the Spanish Ministry of Culture and acknowledging personal and institutional collaborations from Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Ecuador, France, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Peru, Spain, United Kingdom, USA, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
The book, and the exhibition focused mainly on painting, some graphic art and very little sculpture, photography, sculpture, pottery or ceramics. While Mexican, Argentine and to a lesser degree Brazilian art are well represented, the coverage of Venezuelan and Cuban art is more moderate and uneven, and there is relatively little or almost no coverage of Colombian, Haitian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Chilean, Bolivian, Central American and the rest of the Caribbean island nations' art, Bolivian and Paraguayan art. While the introduction and several sections stress the importance of popular art, there are surprisingly few examples included. In spite of such omissions, it must be stressed that this is an extraordinarily rich book, especially considering the natural limitations and difficulties of putting together the ambitious exhibition which the texts of the book accompanied. The introduction itself warns that:
The book is organized into a brief introduction which tries -rather unsuccessfully, in my opinion- to provide criteria for the exhibition, thirteen chapters, an appendix incorporating Latin American art manifestos from the 1920s to the 1980s, another appendix including brief but welcome biographical entries on the historical artists and writers of the times, and a select bibliography. The chapters are broadly organized both chronologicall and thematically. For example, the first chapter, Independence and its Heroes covers 19th century paintings about the independence movements, and tends to focus on contemporary or posterior realistic or allegorical portraits and, to a lesser degree with contemporary proclamation or battle scenes, such as Francisco de Paolo Alavarez' Riding to Bogotá with the Liberation Army, the 1822 Agustín de Iturbide proclaimed Emperor of Mexico on the morning of 19 May 1822 and José María Espinosa's Battle of Maracaibo painted over fifty years after the naval engagement. Most of the portraits are of Bolívar, several are of Manuel Hidalgo or Agustín de Iturbide and there are a handful of portraits of Policarpa Salavarrieta (Colombia), General Otamendi (Ecuador), José Olaya (Perú), José María Morelos (Mexico) and Pedro II of Brazil. Bolívar's portraits show very different likenesses of the Liberator while those of Hidalgo show how his image is transformed from the 1828 litograph by Claudio Linati, to twentieth century reimaginings by Juan O'Gorman and Orozco.
The second chapter, Academies and History Painting shows how XIXth century post-independence academic paintings in Latin America provided images targetted at turning history into romantic myths.
Chapters 3.i and 3.ii, Traveller-Reporter Artists and the Empirical Tradition in Post-Independence Latin American Art and Nature, Science and the Picturesque, are among the most fascinating in the book and provide an excellent introduction to the art produced by José Celestino Mutis, Alexander von Humboldt, Agustín Codazzi and Ramón de la Sagra''s scientific expeditions as well as to the indefatigable, rich and voluminous work carried out by Jean-Baptist Debret in Brazil and Johann Moritz Rugendas over most of Latin America. There are pointed and valuable references to other foreign artist travellers such as Daniel Thomas Egerton, Ferdinand Bellermann, Camille Pissaro (on his way to France), Frederick Catherwood, C. Nebel and latin american painters such as Prilidiano Pueyrredón (Argentina), Leandro Joachim (Brazil), Juan Manuel Blanes (Uruguay), Pancho Fierro (Peru) and José Agustín Arrieta (Mexico) amongst others.
The next chapters clearly show the explosive nature of art in Mexico, with chapters on José María Velasco (chapter 4), the popular graphic tradition of the Mexican Revolution (chapter 5, Posada and the Popular Graphic Tradition; chapter 8 The,/i> Taller de Gráfica Popular), Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and other mexican muralist painters (chapter 7, The Mexican Mural Movement). Mexican art continues to play a key role in chapters 6 (Modernism and the Search for RootsIndigenism and Social Realism and even 10 (Private Worlds and Private Myths. As regards Modernism, it is worth quoting the initial paragraph of chapter 6:,blockquote>The radical artistic developments that transformed the visual arts in Europe in the first decades of the [20th] century -Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, Purism, Constructivism- entered Latin America as part of a “vigorous current of renovation”during the 1920s. […] The relationship between radical art and revolutionary politics was perhaps even a more crucial issue in Latin America than it was in Europe at the time; and the response of writers, artists and intellectuals was marked by two events in particular: the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution.It is worth mentionning that the book includes an appendix which includes, in full, asome 20 manifestos which clearly show the connection between art and politics. The appendix is somewhat uneven, and unless you are interested in them, tend to become a little tiresome and due to their extravagant, radical and surreal claims; some of them barely mention painting (e.g. Pilot-Plan for Concrete Poetry), others clearly state the principles of a movement (e.g. Madí Manifesto), while others such as Manuel Maple Arce's A Strident Prescription prologue ti Actual: Avant-Garde Newspaper or the forward to the launching of the avant-guarde magazine Arturo embody confused, grandiloquent and impossibly idealist clarion calls:Man in not bound to finish on Earth. Abstract art, as part of a global whole, will guarantee a multidimensional harmony, without the need for psychological adaptation. It is worth mentioning that some readers of this review interested in modernist art and left-wing latinamerican politics may find https://americalee.cedinci.org/revistas/ an interesting collection of digitialized journals and magazines of the first half of the twentieth century on these topics. Divested of the appendix on manifestos, Chapter 6 is well worth reading and poring over deftly weaving together a narrative of works by Rafael Barradas, Dr. Atl, Diego Rivera, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, René Portocarreri, Amelia Peláez, Pedro Figari, Xul Solar, Joaquín Torres-García, and Armando Reverón.
Chapter 9, Indigenism and Social Realism is also an important chapter although somewhat unfairly dominated by Rivera. The Peruvian painters José Sabogal and Mario Urteagais are mentioned, as are the Mexican painters Orozco and Francisco Goitia and the Ecuatorian painters Camilo Egas and Oswaldo Guayasmín -the inclusion of just one of Guayasmín extraordinary works in this book is, in my opinion, very lamentable. Most of the chapter is devoted to Indigenism -only eight reproductions illustrate Social Realism; these include two naive paintings by José Antonio da Silva (Brazil) and Cándido Portinari's powerful painting on the backbreaking cultivation of coffee.
Chapter 10 (Private Worlds and Public Myths is somewhat of a mishmash dominated by surrealism and showing paintings and drawings by Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, Guillermo Meza, Carlos Mérida, Antonio Ruiz, Leonora Carrington and Roberto Aizenberg and, of course, Frida Kahlo; as well as haunting photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo. It also includes some voodoo inspired Haitian paintings and work by the Cuban artist Wilfrido Lam.
Chapter 11 shows the irruption of abstract painting, focusing on two key Argentine movements, Madí and Concreto-Invención. Though Dawn Ades confesses in the introduction to the book that:
Chapter 13, History and Identity is the personal and eclectic concluding chapter of the chapter uneasily squeezing in like afterthoughts an assemblage of very different artists, including Fernando Botero (Colombia) and Oswaldo Viteri (Ecuador) in a sort of token nod towards, what in the book remains a largely unexplored relationship between popular art and litin american identity.
The book includes a number of minor but irritating mistakes such as translating the Portuguese “violao” as violin, misspelling Venezuelan place name such as Guaira (or Guayra) and Guatire as Guaria ad Guatere respectively. Incidentally, Edward Lucie-Smith's Latin American Art of the 20th Century (1993) includes many of the 20th century artists and paintings selected for the 1989 London exhibition -in fact the first of Lucie-Smith's entries in the Select Bibliography section of his book is Dawn Ades 1989 texts for the echibition. Lucie-Smith's book is visually less appealing than Ades' since 133 of the 171 reproductions in Lucie-Smith's book are in black and white and the book has a a smaller format.
In short, Dawn Ades and her contributors put together, what was for the time, a very rich, somewhat flawed book, a worthy attempt to provide a book of paintings still well worth poring over and pondering.
The book, and the exhibition focused mainly on painting, some graphic art and very little sculpture, photography, sculpture, pottery or ceramics. While Mexican, Argentine and to a lesser degree Brazilian art are well represented, the coverage of Venezuelan and Cuban art is more moderate and uneven, and there is relatively little or almost no coverage of Colombian, Haitian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Chilean, Bolivian, Central American and the rest of the Caribbean island nations' art, Bolivian and Paraguayan art. While the introduction and several sections stress the importance of popular art, there are surprisingly few examples included. In spite of such omissions, it must be stressed that this is an extraordinarily rich book, especially considering the natural limitations and difficulties of putting together the ambitious exhibition which the texts of the book accompanied. The introduction itself warns that:
Although the exhibition is therefore on an extensive scale, it is not intended as a survey, and certainly does not pretend to any completeness […] However, the wide geographical and historical perspective has enabled an exploration of shared and continuous themes and preocupations: the tortuous and fascinating relationship with European art […], the debates between those committed to a tendentious political art and those who affirmed art's autonomy; indigenism, nationalism and the resurgence of “popular art”; the role of the visual artists in the construction of history; and above all the conflict and tensions involved in the sense for a cultural identity.In the introduction and some of the first chapters a few examples of pre-columbian and colonial art are provided but fall very short of being enough to provide an adequate framing of the history of Latin American art since 1820. Having said this, there is an extraordinary and compelling reproduction of a late 17th century painting of an Archangel with Gun, from the Circle of the Master of Calamarca who belonged to the Lake Titicaca School -the archangel has the splendor of a lacy butterfly and nonchalantly slings a musket over his shoulder. The book mentions but does not explore in any depth the relationship between Latin American and African art, clearly the subject of another exhibition and book but does manage to explore well the relationship with European art.
The book is organized into a brief introduction which tries -rather unsuccessfully, in my opinion- to provide criteria for the exhibition, thirteen chapters, an appendix incorporating Latin American art manifestos from the 1920s to the 1980s, another appendix including brief but welcome biographical entries on the historical artists and writers of the times, and a select bibliography. The chapters are broadly organized both chronologicall and thematically. For example, the first chapter, Independence and its Heroes covers 19th century paintings about the independence movements, and tends to focus on contemporary or posterior realistic or allegorical portraits and, to a lesser degree with contemporary proclamation or battle scenes, such as Francisco de Paolo Alavarez' Riding to Bogotá with the Liberation Army, the 1822 Agustín de Iturbide proclaimed Emperor of Mexico on the morning of 19 May 1822 and José María Espinosa's Battle of Maracaibo painted over fifty years after the naval engagement. Most of the portraits are of Bolívar, several are of Manuel Hidalgo or Agustín de Iturbide and there are a handful of portraits of Policarpa Salavarrieta (Colombia), General Otamendi (Ecuador), José Olaya (Perú), José María Morelos (Mexico) and Pedro II of Brazil. Bolívar's portraits show very different likenesses of the Liberator while those of Hidalgo show how his image is transformed from the 1828 litograph by Claudio Linati, to twentieth century reimaginings by Juan O'Gorman and Orozco.
The second chapter, Academies and History Painting shows how XIXth century post-independence academic paintings in Latin America provided images targetted at turning history into romantic myths.
Chapters 3.i and 3.ii, Traveller-Reporter Artists and the Empirical Tradition in Post-Independence Latin American Art and Nature, Science and the Picturesque, are among the most fascinating in the book and provide an excellent introduction to the art produced by José Celestino Mutis, Alexander von Humboldt, Agustín Codazzi and Ramón de la Sagra''s scientific expeditions as well as to the indefatigable, rich and voluminous work carried out by Jean-Baptist Debret in Brazil and Johann Moritz Rugendas over most of Latin America. There are pointed and valuable references to other foreign artist travellers such as Daniel Thomas Egerton, Ferdinand Bellermann, Camille Pissaro (on his way to France), Frederick Catherwood, C. Nebel and latin american painters such as Prilidiano Pueyrredón (Argentina), Leandro Joachim (Brazil), Juan Manuel Blanes (Uruguay), Pancho Fierro (Peru) and José Agustín Arrieta (Mexico) amongst others.
The next chapters clearly show the explosive nature of art in Mexico, with chapters on José María Velasco (chapter 4), the popular graphic tradition of the Mexican Revolution (chapter 5, Posada and the Popular Graphic Tradition; chapter 8 The,/i> Taller de Gráfica Popular), Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and other mexican muralist painters (chapter 7, The Mexican Mural Movement). Mexican art continues to play a key role in chapters 6 (Modernism and the Search for RootsIndigenism and Social Realism and even 10 (Private Worlds and Private Myths. As regards Modernism, it is worth quoting the initial paragraph of chapter 6:,blockquote>The radical artistic developments that transformed the visual arts in Europe in the first decades of the [20th] century -Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, Purism, Constructivism- entered Latin America as part of a “vigorous current of renovation”during the 1920s. […] The relationship between radical art and revolutionary politics was perhaps even a more crucial issue in Latin America than it was in Europe at the time; and the response of writers, artists and intellectuals was marked by two events in particular: the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution.It is worth mentionning that the book includes an appendix which includes, in full, asome 20 manifestos which clearly show the connection between art and politics. The appendix is somewhat uneven, and unless you are interested in them, tend to become a little tiresome and due to their extravagant, radical and surreal claims; some of them barely mention painting (e.g. Pilot-Plan for Concrete Poetry), others clearly state the principles of a movement (e.g. Madí Manifesto), while others such as Manuel Maple Arce's A Strident Prescription prologue ti Actual: Avant-Garde Newspaper or the forward to the launching of the avant-guarde magazine Arturo embody confused, grandiloquent and impossibly idealist clarion calls:Man in not bound to finish on Earth. Abstract art, as part of a global whole, will guarantee a multidimensional harmony, without the need for psychological adaptation. It is worth mentioning that some readers of this review interested in modernist art and left-wing latinamerican politics may find https://americalee.cedinci.org/revistas/ an interesting collection of digitialized journals and magazines of the first half of the twentieth century on these topics. Divested of the appendix on manifestos, Chapter 6 is well worth reading and poring over deftly weaving together a narrative of works by Rafael Barradas, Dr. Atl, Diego Rivera, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, René Portocarreri, Amelia Peláez, Pedro Figari, Xul Solar, Joaquín Torres-García, and Armando Reverón.
Chapter 9, Indigenism and Social Realism is also an important chapter although somewhat unfairly dominated by Rivera. The Peruvian painters José Sabogal and Mario Urteagais are mentioned, as are the Mexican painters Orozco and Francisco Goitia and the Ecuatorian painters Camilo Egas and Oswaldo Guayasmín -the inclusion of just one of Guayasmín extraordinary works in this book is, in my opinion, very lamentable. Most of the chapter is devoted to Indigenism -only eight reproductions illustrate Social Realism; these include two naive paintings by José Antonio da Silva (Brazil) and Cándido Portinari's powerful painting on the backbreaking cultivation of coffee.
Chapter 10 (Private Worlds and Public Myths is somewhat of a mishmash dominated by surrealism and showing paintings and drawings by Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, Guillermo Meza, Carlos Mérida, Antonio Ruiz, Leonora Carrington and Roberto Aizenberg and, of course, Frida Kahlo; as well as haunting photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo. It also includes some voodoo inspired Haitian paintings and work by the Cuban artist Wilfrido Lam.
Chapter 11 shows the irruption of abstract painting, focusing on two key Argentine movements, Madí and Concreto-Invención. Though Dawn Ades confesses in the introduction to the book that:
There are obviously many absences -much of the post-war abstract painting and sculpture , for example has not been included...in addition to chapter 11, Guy Brett provides a brief, and to be honest, a very personal and unbalanced overview of what he calls the concrete-optical-knetic movements of the 1950s and 1960s in chapter 12, A Radical Leap including such key artists as Lygia Clark (Brazil), Hélio Oiticica (Brazil), Lucio Fontana (Argentina), Sergio Camargo (Brazil), Mira Schendel (Switzerland-Brazil), Mathias Goeritz, Lygia Pape (Brazil) and the extraordinary trio of Venezuelan cinetic artists Alejandro Otero, Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz Diez.
Chapter 13, History and Identity is the personal and eclectic concluding chapter of the chapter uneasily squeezing in like afterthoughts an assemblage of very different artists, including Fernando Botero (Colombia) and Oswaldo Viteri (Ecuador) in a sort of token nod towards, what in the book remains a largely unexplored relationship between popular art and litin american identity.
The book includes a number of minor but irritating mistakes such as translating the Portuguese “violao” as violin, misspelling Venezuelan place name such as Guaira (or Guayra) and Guatire as Guaria ad Guatere respectively. Incidentally, Edward Lucie-Smith's Latin American Art of the 20th Century (1993) includes many of the 20th century artists and paintings selected for the 1989 London exhibition -in fact the first of Lucie-Smith's entries in the Select Bibliography section of his book is Dawn Ades 1989 texts for the echibition. Lucie-Smith's book is visually less appealing than Ades' since 133 of the 171 reproductions in Lucie-Smith's book are in black and white and the book has a a smaller format.
In short, Dawn Ades and her contributors put together, what was for the time, a very rich, somewhat flawed book, a worthy attempt to provide a book of paintings still well worth poring over and pondering.
April 25, 2023
Using this to help study for second comp exam and it is super helpful in breaking down some of the movements I was not as familiar with while functions as a great refresher for the ones I am familiar with. The arguments are clear and the use of many visual examples are great. Highly recommend for anyone interested in the broader history of Latin American Art or anyone who is preparing for PhD exams like me.
May 30, 2014
Used this for my Latin American art course - loved it!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews