Readings in Latin American Modern Art

Readings in Latin American Modern Art

Author: Patrick Frank

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0300133332

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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.


Essays on 20th Century Latin American Art

Essays on 20th Century Latin American Art

Author: Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-31

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1000567702

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Essays on 20th Century Latin American Art provides a broad synthesis of the subject through short chapters illustrated with reproductions of iconic works by artists who have made significant contributions to art and society. Designed as a teaching tool for non-art historians, the book's purpose is to introduce these important artists within a new scholarly context and recognize their accomplishments with those of others beyond the Americas and the Caribbean. The publication provides an in-depth analysis of topics such as political issues in Latin American art and art and popular culture, introducing views on artists and art-related issues that have rarely been addressed. Organized both regionally and thematically, it takes a unique approach to the exploration of art in the Americas, beginning with discussions of Modernism and Abstraction, followed by a chapter on art and politics from the 1960s to the 1980s. The author covers Spanish-speaking Central America and the Caribbean, regions not usually addressed in Latin American art history surveys. The chapter on Carnival as an expression of popular culture is a particularly valuable addition. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American history, culture, art, international relations, gender studies, and sociology, as well as Caribbean studies.


Surveying the Avant-Garde

Surveying the Avant-Garde

Author: Lori Cole

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2018-05-24

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0271081724

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Surveying the Avant-Garde examines the art and literature of the Americas in the early twentieth century through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde. Questions such as “How do you imagine Latin America?” and “What should American art be?” issued by avant-garde magazines like Imán, a Latin American periodical based in Paris, and Cuba’s Revista de Avance demonstrate how editors, writers, and readers all grappled with the concept of “America,” particularly in relationship to Europe, and how the questionnaire became a structuring device for reflecting on their national and aesthetic identities in print. Through an analysis of these questionnaires and their responses, Lori Cole reveals how ideas like “American art,” as well as “modernism” and “avant-garde,” were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation. Unlike a manifesto, whose signatories align with a single polemical text, the questionnaire produces a patchwork of responses, providing a composite and sometimes fractured portrait of a community. Such responses yield a self-reflexive history of the era as told by its protagonists, which include figures such as Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Jean Toomer, F. T. Marinetti, Diego Rivera, and Jorge Luis Borges. The book traces a genealogy of the genre from the Renaissance paragone, or “comparison of the arts,” through the rise of enquêtes in the late nineteenth century, up to the contemporary questionnaire, which proliferates in art magazines today. By analyzing a selection of surveys issued across the Atlantic, Cole indicates how they helped shape artists’ and writers’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Based on extensive archival research, this book reorients our understanding of modernism as both hemispheric and transatlantic by narrating how the artists and writers of the period engaged in aesthetic debates that informed and propelled print communities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Scholars of modernism and the avant-garde will welcome Cole’s original and compellingly crafted work.


New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America

New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America

Author: Mariola V. Alvarez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-09-27

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 1351062123

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This edited volume examines the history of abstract art across Latin America after 1945. This form of art grew in popularity across the Americas in the postwar period, often serving to affirm a sense of being modern and the right of Latin America to assume the leading role Europe had played before World War II. Latin American artists practiced gestural and geometric abstraction, though the history of art has favored the latter. Recent scholarship, for instance, has focused on geometric abstraction from Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. The book aims to expand the map and consider this phenomenon as it developed in neglected regions such as Central America and the Andes, investigatinghow this style came to stand in for Latin American contemporary art.


The Prado Museum Expansion

The Prado Museum Expansion

Author: Bridget V. Franco

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1469676869

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From 2001 to 2007, the world-renowned Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, underwent an ambitious expansion project that reorganized the spatial design of the museum and allowed for additional exhibition space. Coinciding with the completion of this large construction project were a series of celebrations surrounding the 2010 bicentenary of South American independence movements, a clear reminder of the complicated relationship between Spain and its former colonies in Latin America. Inspired by this significant historical moment and with an eye to diversifying its predominantly Spanish-centered permanent collection, the Prado Museum decides to host a competition for a new gallery of Latin American art. The game begins in 2010 as students, assuming the roles of curators, art patrons, living artists, and art dealers, set into motion a series of negotiation sessions that will help the museum decide which artworks to choose for the new gallery. Students will analyze a broad range of artistic movements and styles related to Latin American art from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, in an effort to support the acquisition of paintings that best represent the diverse artistic legacies and historical heritage of the region.


Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Author: Lyneise E. Williams

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-02-21

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1501332376

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Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 examines an understudied visual language used to portray Latin Americans in mid-19th to early 20th-century Parisian popular visual media. The term 'Latinize' is introduced to connect France's early 19th-century endeavors to create “Latin America,” an expansion of the French empire into the Latin-language based Spanish and Portuguese Americas, to its perception of this population. Latin-American elites traveler to Paris in the 1840s from their newly independent nations were denigrated in representations rather than depicted as equals in a developing global economy. Darkened skin, etched onto images of Latin Americans of European descent mitigated their ability to claim the privileges of their ancestral heritage. Whitened skin, among other codes, imposed on turn-of-the-20th-century Black Latin Americans in Paris tempered their Blackness and rendered them relatively assimilatable compared to colonial Africans, Blacks from the Caribbean, and African Americans. After identifying mid-to-late 19th-century Latinizing codes, the study focuses on shifts in latinizing visuality between 1890-1933 in three case studies: the depictions of popular Cuban circus entertainer Chocolat; representations of Panamanian World Bantamweight Champion boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown; and paintings of Black Uruguayans executed by Pedro Figari, a Uruguayan artist, during his residence in Paris between 1925-1933.


Divergent Modernities

Divergent Modernities

Author: Julio Ramos

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2001-06-22

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0822381095

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With a Foreword by José David Saldívar Since its first publication in Spanish nearly a decade ago, Julio Ramos’s Desenucuentros de la modernidad en America Latina por el siglo XIX has been recognized as one of the most important studies of modernity in the western hemisphere. Available for the first time in English—and now published with new material—Ramos’s study not only offers an analysis of the complex relationships between history, literature, and nation-building in the modern Latin American context but also takes crucial steps toward the development of a truly comparative inter-American cultural criticism. With his focus on the nineteenth century, Ramos begins his genealogy of an emerging Latin Americanism with an examination of Argentinean Domingo Sarmiento and Chilean Andrés Bello, representing the “enlightened letrados” of tradition. In contrast to these “lettered men,” he turns to Cuban journalist, revolutionary, and poet José Martí, who, Ramos suggests, inaugurated a new kind of intellectual subject for the Americas. Though tracing Latin American modernity in general, it is the analysis of Martí—particularly his work in the United States—that becomes the focal point of Ramos’s study. Martí’s confrontation with the unequal modernization of the New World, the dependent status of Latin America, and the contrast between Latin America’s culture of elites and the northern mass culture of commodification are, for Ramos, key elements in understanding the complex Latin American experience of modernity. Including two new chapters written for this edition, as well as translations of three of Martí’s most important works, Divergent Modernities will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand development and modernity across the Americas.


Cold War in the White Cube

Cold War in the White Cube

Author: Delia Solomons

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0271094087

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In 1959, the very year the Cuban Revolution amplified Cold War tensions in the Americas, museumgoers in the United States witnessed a sudden surge in major exhibitions of Latin American art. Surveying the 1960s boom of such exhibits, this book documents how art produced in regions considered susceptible to communist influence was staged on U.S. soil for U.S. audiences. Held in high-profile venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, MoMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibitions of the 1960s Latin American art boom did not define a single stylistic trend or the art of a single nation but rather attempted to frame Latin America as a unified whole for U.S. audiences. Delia Solomons calls attention to disruptive artworks that rebelled against the curatorial frames purporting to hold them and reveals these exhibitions to be complex contact zones in which competing voices collided. Ultimately, through multiple means—including choosing to exclude artworks with readily decipherable political messages and evading references to contemporary inter-American frictions—the U.S. curators who organized these shows crafted projections of Pan-American partnership and harmony, with the United States as leader, interpreter, and good neighbor, during an era of brutal U.S. interference across the Americas. Theoretically sophisticated and highly original, this survey of Cold War–era Latin American art exhibits sheds light on the midcentury history of major U.S. art museums and makes an important contribution to the fields of museum studies, art history, and Latin American modernist art.


From Lack to Excess

From Lack to Excess

Author: Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9780838756997

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"From Lack to Excess analyzes the narrative and rhetorical structures of Latin American colonial texts by establishing a dialogue with studies on minority discourse, minor literatures, and postcolonial theory. After reviewing the main contributions and limitations of Transatlantic, Early Modern, and Postcolonial studies for the interpretation of Latin American colonial textualities, Martinez-San Miguel takes as a point of departure the subtle yet pervasive semantic link between the terms "minority" and "colonialism" prevalent in current studies on ethnic and sexual identities. She then engages the disciplinary debate between Colonial Latin American studies and Early Modern, Transatlantic, and Postcolonial studies, paying attention to the epistemic and institutional junctures that explain the current reconfiguration of these fields." "As an alternative to an exhausted debate, Martinez-San Miguel uses Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of a "minor literature," along with current studies on minority discourse to propose new close readings of texts by Hernan Cortes, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. From Lack to Excess traces a discursive voyage that configures a linguistic matrix from the initial lack of language to the excessive Baroque representation of American reality."--BOOK JACKET.