Latin American Art Since 1900

World of Art

by Edward Lucie-Smith

An extraordinary synthesis of more than a century’s worth of art across Central and South America, Latin American Art Since 1900 covers everyone from popular figures such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, to a wide range of other artists who are less well-known outside Latin America. In this classic survey, now updated with full-color images throughout, Edward Lucie-Smith introduces the art of Latin America from 1900 to the present day. Lucie-Smith examines major artists such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, as well as dozens of less familiar Latin American artists and exiled artists from Europe and the United States who spent their lives in South America, such as Leonora Carrington. The author explains the political context for artistic development and sets the works in national, cultural, and international frameworks. Featured in this book are the artists who have searched for indigenous roots and local tradition; explored abstraction, expressionism, and new media; entered into dialogue with European and North American movements, while insisting on reaching a wide, popular audience for their work; and created an energetic, innovative, and varied art scene across the South American continent. With a new chapter that extends the discussion into the twenty-first century, a constant theme of Latin American Art Since 1960 is the embrace of the experimental and the new by artists across Latin America. 191 color illustrations

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History

240 pages, Paperback

Published April 14, 2020

About the author

John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith, known as Edward Lucie-Smith, was an English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster.

Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United Kingdom in 1946. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and, after a little time in Paris, he read History at Merton College, Oxford from 1951 to 1954.

After serving in the Royal Air Force as an Education Officer and working as a copywriter, he became a full-time writer (as well as anthologist and photographer). He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum in organising The Group, a London-centred poets' group.

At the beginning of the 1980s he conducted several series of interviews, Conversations with Artists, for BBC Radio 3. He is also a regular contributor to The London Magazine, in which he writes art reviews. A prolific writer, he has written more than one hundred books in total on a variety of subjects, chiefly art history as well as biographies and poetry.

In addition he has curated a number of art exhibitions, including three Peter Moores projects at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; the New British Painting (1988–90) and two retrospectives at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He was a curator of the Bermondsey Project Space.

Edward Lucie-Smith died in July 2026, at the age of 93.

Information about Lucie-Smith's death from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Shuhui Shen]

I spent my whole day squandering time, immersing myself in books which are not directly related to my dissertation. However, it seems that Latin American arts do not have an incomplete departure from the dominant Western art, as Lucie-Smith suggests, in their styles and forms, they still reflect influences produced by renaissance portraits and avant-garde paintings.

[Giovanni García-Fenech · Rating 3 out of 5]

Does what it sets out to do. The only surprise was the omittance of Gabriel Orozco, surely the most important Mexican artist of the 2000s, and one with a strong international presence and influence.

[teeny weiner chicken dinner · Rating 3 out of 5]

not sure how to feel about this
like it served me something but not sure it was dinner