This authoritative and beautiful book presents the first continuous narrative history of Latin American art from the years of the Independence movements in the 1820s up to the present day. Exploring both the indigenous roots and the colonial and post-colonial experiences of the various countries, the book investigates fascinating though little-known aspects of nineteenth and twentieth-century art and also provides a context for the contemporary art of the continent.
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.
This volume examines the work of more than 100 female artists with nearly 300 works in the fields of painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance art, and other experimental media. A series of thematic essays, arranged by country, address the cultural and political contexts in which these radical artists worked, while other essays address key issues such as feminism, art history, and the political body. Published in association with the Hammer Museum. The exhibition took place from Sep 15, 2017-Dec 31, 2017, in the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
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.
This important and welcome volume is the first English-language anthology of writings on Latin American modern art of the twentieth century. The book includes some fifty seminal essays and documents—including statements, interviews, and manifestoes by artists—that encompass the broad diversity of this emerging field. Many of these materials are difficult to access and some are translated here for the first time. Together the selections explore the breadth and depth of Latin American modern art as well as its distinctive evolution apart from American and European art history. Included in this collection are fascinating ideas and insights on the impact of the avant-garde in the 1920s, the Mexican mural movement, Surrealism and other fantasy-based styles, modern architecture, geometric and optical art, concrete and neo-concrete art, and political conceptualism. For students and scholars of Latin American art, the volume offers an invaluable collection of primary and secondary sources.
In Latin America, where even today writing has remained a restricted form of expression, the task of generating consent and imposing the emergent nation-state as the exclusive form of the political, was largely conferred to the image. Furthermore, at the moment of its historical demise, the new, 'postmodern' forms of sovereignty appear to rely even more heavily on visual discourses of power. However, a critique of the iconography of the modern state-form has been missing. This volume is the first concerted attempt by cultural, historical and visual scholars to address the political dimension of visual culture in Latin America, in a comparative perspective spanning various regions and historical stages. The case studies are divided into four sections, analysing the formation of a public sphere, the visual politics of avant-garde art, the impact of mass society on political iconography, and the consolidation and crisis of territory as a key icon of the state. Jens Andermann is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Birkbeck College, London, and co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Among his publications are Mapas de poder: una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (Rosario, 2000) and articles for major journals in Argentina, Brazil, Europe and the US. William Rowe is Anniversary Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck College, London. His book Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London, 1991) has been translated into several languages. His most recent works, apart from translations of a wide range of Latin American poetry, are Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life (Oxford, 2000) and Ensayos vallejianos (Berkeley and Lima, 2006).
“A lucid—at times, even poetic—summary of five hundred years of Mexican art. The illustrated works of art are well-chosen and beautifully integrated into Oles’s text. Indeed, it feels as if his words emanate from the art itself.” –Donna Pierce, Denver Art Museum This new interpretive history of Mexican art from the Spanish Conquest to the early decades of the twenty-first century is the most comprehensive introduction to the subject in fifty years. James Oles ranges widely across media and genres, offering new readings of painting, sculpture, architecture, prints, and photographs. He interprets major works by such famous artists as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but also discusses less familiar figures in history and landscape painting, muralism, and conceptual art. The story of Mexican art is set in its rich historical context by the book’s treatment of political and social change. The author draws on recent scholarship to examine crucial issues of race, class, and gender, including the work of indigenous artists during the colonial period, and of women artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout, Oles shows how Mexican artists participated in local and international developments. He considers both native and foreign-born artists, from Baroque architects to kinetic sculptors, and highlights the important role played by Mexicans in the global art scene of the last five centuries.
