BY 1920, AS POLITICIANS AND INTELLECTUALS continued to debate the coordinates for the identity of the region, a new dimension of the problem emerged around the inclusive notion of a “new art” for the continent. Straddling the line between “nationalism” and “Americanism,” the texts selected for this chapter apply the debate about “fragmentation or unity” introduced in Chapter I to the realm of the visual arts while clearly opting for continental integration. Specifically, they propose that despite the vast heterogeneity that characterizes the more than twenty countries south of the Rio Grande, their cultural and sociopolitical similarities, as well as their shared colonial history, far outweigh the differences between them. These conditions, in turn, paved the way for a distinct form of expression—in the form of “American” or “Latin American” art—to coalesce at the continental level. The aspiration to “surpass the local” lay at the core of this racially and culturally inclusive view espoused by artists and artistic groups across Latin America [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.5]. Implicit in this position was the attempt to harness the two ends—the local and the continental—of the seemingly irreconcilable or paradoxical equation that is Latin America into one. As described by Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García, the goal was to articulate “a general idea that, on one hand, embraces all the art produced everywhere on the continent and, on the other, includes, in appropriate proportions, everything local that should be included without negating the first requisite” [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.7]. A further manifestation of the pars pro toto position is the fluid terminology with which the writers included in this chapter refer to the phenomena at hand. Indeed, the majority use the terms “American,” “Latin American,” and/or “Native-American” interchangeably; and some, like Guatemalan-born Carlos Mérida, even go as far as freely substituting individual names of countries such as Mexico for the broader term “American” on the premise that they both share the same mixed ancestry of indigenous and Spanish peoples [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.4].
The origins of the controversial category of “Latin American art”—a construct challenged in recent years—can be traced to this “period of indocility,” in Mérida’s terms, that comprises the two and half decades between the First and Second World Wars. Historians generally acknowledge these years as the end of the colonial period and the beginnings of a stage of “self-consciousness” or “self-awakening” propelled by the surge of cultural nationalism throughout the region. Indeed, the consolidation of nationalist projects in many Latin American countries serves to frame the Americanist integration discourse exemplified by the texts included in this chapter. In this context, to acknowledge the existence of an art of continental versus national or local projection is equivalent to recognizing the unfettered right of this art—as well as the peoples it represents—to express themselves on their own terms. Hence “American” or “Latin American” art emerged during these years not as homogenizing categories, but as emblems of the struggle for artistic legitimacy that began in the period of Independence and only now had a real chance of becoming a reality. In the minds of many intellectuals, the in-unity-lies-strength position also functioned as a psychological barrier against unresolved issues such as the ever-lurking threat of “Yankee” imperialism or the distorted lens through which Europeans and North Americans engaged the overall complexities of Latin American reality.
The cultural awakening that supported the emergence of the new art was grounded in the social and political gains of the 1920s and 30s. At the political level, the Mexican Revolution (1910–17) quickly emerged as an emblem of self-determination and modernization for all of Latin America. Indeed, for most countries of the region, this period represented the consolidation of several waves of economic and political modernization projects set in motion since the late nineteenth century by the progressive elites of major countries like Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. These modernizing initiatives resulted in economic growth; the rise and expansion of a middle class; significant gains in literacy and education of the masses; the spread of radio and newspapers at an unprecedented scale; and a budding infrastructure for the visual arts in the form of museums as well as public collections and exhibition spaces. The unexpected ascendancy of countries like Mexico sharply contrasted with the spiritually exhausted and economically depleted Europe that emerged out of World War I. Confronted with this situation, Latin American intellectuals were convinced that the only way Europe could be saved was through “the mixing with virgin races” [SEE DOCUMENT II.2.2] embodied by the New World republics. Such a view lay at the core of Cuban painter Eduardo Abela’s conviction that “in America lies the source that will fertilize twentieth-century art.” Many such arguments made by the Latin American intelligentsia of the 1920s suggest that their understanding of the potential global (and specifically American) implications of the conditions in Europe were largely informed by Oswald Spengler’s highly influential The Decline of the West (1918–23).
II.1 In such a forward-looking context, “a new art for a new continent” became the rallying cry of a new generation of artists, critics, and intellectuals steeped in the values of both the cosmopolitan avant-garde as well as local cultures. As early as 1875, José Martí, writing from Mexico City, laid out the key idea that was to be repeated as a leitmotif over and over by almost every artist or writer active in the first half of the century: “A new society [needs] a new kind of painting to be imagined and created” [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.1]. The idea that Latin Americans should forget the Old World and devote all their energies to conceiving an original art and culture for their New World context was rooted in the legacy of Positivism that emphasized teleological progress as the basis for future-oriented, modern societies. For José Clemente Orozco, the production of this new art was not just an artistic task but a duty and a responsibility: “If new races have appeared upon the lands of the New World, such races have the unavoidable duty to produce a New Art in a new tangible and spiritual milieu. Any other road is plain cowardice” [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.6]. For Joaquín Torres-García the problem demanded an even more radical solution: a tabula rasa. In his view, Latin American artists “should proceed negatively: let us eliminate everything we have acquired, everything we have borrowed, let us create a void… For now, to be nothing is more interesting than pretending to be something we are not” [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.7].
With few exceptions, artists and writers who subscribed to these ideas had trained or spent time in Europe where they absorbed key principles of avant-garde practice and theory represented by such influential movements as Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism. Upon their return to their native countries, they sought to realize for the first time the promise of this new art for Latin America. Described by Mérida as “celestial lightning rods” [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.4], these artists assimilated and transformed for their own purposes the European avant-garde’s social and artistic iconoclasm, its utopian approach to art, and its emphasis on “creation” or process over representation. Furthermore, the avant-garde’s transnational sphere of action provided a perfectly suited vehicle for Latin American artists to break away from their subservient past in order to elaborate a truly cutting edge art for the continent. In the visual arts field, David Alfaro Siqueiros’s paradigmatic 1921 manifesto “Three Appeals for the Current Guidance of the New Generation of American Painters and Sculptors” [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.2] was the first text of its kind to espouse a continental call-to-arms in true avant-garde fashion. It also pioneered a concrete path toward achieving the new Latin American art. Eschewing unilateral interpretations of nationalism, universalism, and Americanism, it proposed the assimilation of both indigenous and avant-garde elements into a new form of artistic production. In this way, it called for the universalization of Latin American art through the exaltation of its difference. Siqueiros proclaimed: “Let us reject theories anchored in the relativity of ‘NATIONAL ART.’ LET US BECOME UNIVERSAL! Our own RACIAL and LOCAL physiognomy will inevitably come to light through our work.” Echoes of this position can be found in the manifestoes and writings of other Latin American avant-garde pioneers such as Xul Solar [SEE DOCUMENT II.3.2], Orozco, and even the Estridentista movement in Mexico.
If Siqueiros’s “Three Appeals” illustrates the attempt to articulate and project a continental art at the universal level, Ricardo Rojas’s extensive treatise Eurindia [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.3] sets out to develop an aesthetic theory stemming from the cultural nationalist perspective that would serve as the basis for such an art. Rojas considered that artists had to inscribe themselves in a tradition and that their country’s vernacular elements should provide the intrinsic, constitutive starting point. His treatise differed from other prevailing modes of cultural nationalism in that it included both foreign and native expressions (European + indigenous) in search of the definition of Argentinean culture while expanding such a characterization to embrace all of Latin America [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.3]. In this way, Eurindia also called attention to another facet of the topic under consideration in this section: it represented an acknowledgment of the role of immigration in shaping Argentinean (and Latin American) society in the late 1910s and early 1920s as well as a call to embrace heterogeneity in the creation of the new Latin American art. This was a turning point: as the century evolved, such an inclusive position would continue to grow in influence and significance across the Americas [see Chapters IV and VI].
II.2 There is, perhaps, no better indication of the scope and intensity of the debate concerning the new art for the Americas than the fact that it was the subject of “surveys” conducted by leading newspapers and magazines of the period. The survey was a popular journalistic genre that illustrated both the ascendancy of the press throughout the region and the articulation—in the pre-Internet age—of a transnational community of artists, writers, and intellectuals eager to engage in a public conversation about timely topics such as the identity of “American” or “Latin American” art. This section, “Surveys Concerning a Continental Attitude,” gathers together a sampling of responses to a series of four questions circulated by the Cuban avant-garde revista de avance under the title “A Survey: What should American art be?” Reflecting upon the purpose of the survey, Francisco Ichaso, one of the journal’s founders and editors, summarized the questionnaire as guided and “updated by the unanimous desire to present our spiritual profile to the world with lines as distinct as those of geography” [SEE DOCUMENT II.2.7]. The responses to questions concerning the justification for specific features and legitimacy of the “new” Latin American art cover the gamut of positions—from the fiercely committed to the presumably neutral. Yet, the respondents all agreed on one point: to avoid the issue was not an option and even “tantamount to losing one’s citizenship” [SEE DOCUMENT II.2.4]. The survey proved particularly revealing with regard to the question: “Do you believe there are characteristics that are common to every Latin American country’s art?” While all the contributors acknowledged the complexity of dealing with such a racially and ethnically heterogeneous continent, the majority of them still considered the notion of Latin American art a legitimate one on the basis of local similarities that manifested themselves through their own “essence,” “shading,” or “elemental psychology,” all of which clearly diverged from European art. Nicaraguan journalist and poet Eduardo Avilés Ramírez could not have expressed it more succinctly when he wrote: “Between Mexican and Bolivian painting . . . there is a distance in the manner of expression, but basically they are both ‘American’ originals” [SEE DOCUMENT II.2.4].
II.3 The various arguments for the existence of a continentally broad art based on the synthesis of “American” and “universal” elements naturally led the editors of this volume to raise the questions: Was the notion of a Latin American art mere rhetoric, or did it actually stand for something concrete? Which artists or trends did these authors have in mind when they argued for a “Latin American” art? And what were the specific features of this art? The third section of this chapter, “Harbingers of the New Art,” sets out to provide some answers to these questions through a series of texts focused on specific artists or movements advocated by the various writers included and offered by many of their contemporaries as models for the region. The consensus early on focused on Mexico as the “vanguard of the Americas, the forward prow of the race” [SEE DOCUMENT II.3.4], a view that found a justification not only in the country’s rich native past, but also in the visible leadership role that the 1920s post-revolutionary government had accorded to avant-garde artists through paradigmatic initiatives such as Mexican Muralism. Like Mexico, Peru also was considered representative of the new tendencies on account of the legacy of its indigenous past and the presence of artists such as José Sabogal [SEE DOCUMENT II.3.6] who took inspiration from his previous experience with the Mexican pictorial movement. The artists who served as models of the new art all had all spent time in Europe and their production combined references to local cultures through avant-garde principles. Such were the cases of Emilio Pettoruti, Diego Rivera, and the already mentioned Mérida. Describing the Cubist-inspired synthetic still lifes and architectural interiors of his fellow artist Pettorutti—“one of the Criollo avant-gardists of the future”—his friend and collaborator Xul Solar observed that his works possessed the “sober monumental scale of pristine native art,” as well as the “idiosyncratic intensity of white modernity, and the paradoxical constructions (which are pure intellectual joy) of the hyper-creative era to come” [SEE DOCUMENTS II.3.2, AND II.3.1, RESPECTIVELY]. A similar argument was raised with regard to Mérida, an artist considered by the French critic André Salmon as the most qualified to bridge “the abyss separating America from Europe” [SEE DOCUMENT II.3.3]. Mérida’s renditions of indigenous themes culled from the vernacular Mayan traditions of both Mexico and his native Guatemala relied on two-dimensionality and the values of pure painting—particularly a geometrical “wealth of color never seen before”—conditions considered prerequisites for a new art that qualified as avant-garde.
In addition to positing the need for the new art, much of the debate surrounding the topic in the 1920s and 30s hinged on the specific characteristics of this art. In this regard, despite emphasizing the expression of key elements of the American experience, proponents of a new art almost unanimously rejected conventional painting styles rooted in academic notions or mainly in the stereotyped picturesque. “Works of this nature have no place in the painting of the Americas,” declared the Guatemalan art critic Luis Cardoza y Aragón [SEE DOCUMENT II.3.4]. Instead, the type of art proposed by the authors featured in this chapter was one that embodied the two elements outlined above: “what is American” (i.e., indigenous, native, local) and “what is universal” (either avant-garde or cosmopolitan) perspectives. Moreover, Siqueiros’s points of reference were not exclusively the Mexican or Latin American indigenous traditions, but rather Cézanne, Picasso, and the early European avant-garde movements. For José Sabogal, a “major precursor” of Latin American painting was Paul Gauguin [SEE DOCUMENT II.3.6]. Bolivian diplomat Germán Quiroga Galdo argued, in turn, that Picasso’s widespread influence throughout Latin American countries served as both a powerful stimulus and leveling force against the nefarious influence of naturalism, naïve folklorism, and so on. According to this view, “the Indian, the Llama, the Condor, the Mountain, the Gaucho, and so forth—which until recently were the favorite motifs employed from Mexico to the Straits of Magellan—are today considered merely raw materials of construction” [SEE DOCUMENT II.3.5]. The paths outlined by both artists and intellectuals thus rejected “archaeological reconstructions” of indigenous, primitive, or American elements, in favor of the type of constructive synthesis advocated by the avant-garde movements. The reasons for such a position were as much ideological as strategic, as suggested by Salmon’s observation that only this type of art was “capable of appealing to Europe, while still questioning its possible decadence” [SEE DOCUMENT II.3.3].
By the outset of World War II, however, it was clear that the intellectual and material gains that supported the overarching optimism of the 1920s and 30s could not mask the inherent limitations and contradictions inherent to the Latin American milieu. At the end, despite improved conditions for artistic production, endemic calamities such as poverty, illiteracy, and a weak—if not inexistent—cultural and visual arts infrastructure impeded the consolidation of a truly autonomous field for art. It would take a new generation and innovative intellectual frameworks to again tackle the vast complexities at play in the very notions of either “an art for the Americas” or “Latin American art.”