AS LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES STARTED TO DEVELOP and affirm national identities in the nineteenth century, the United States began to activate a sphere of influence in the region. From the very beginning, North–South interactions played out in a field of asymmetric economic, military, and political power. A defining moment occurred on December 2, 1823, when President James Monroe in his seventh State of the Union address to Congress proposed a policy whose primary objective was to protect the sovereignty of newly independent nations in the Americas and to defend them from European intervention and control. Broadly known as the Monroe Doctrine [SEE DOCUMENT III.1.1], this protocol established the groundwork for asserting United States leadership in hemispheric actions and, by extension, for expanding U.S. interests in the financial and cultural arenas of the region.
In the years following the Great Depression, the United States redefined its Pan American efforts and adopted a more peaceful tone than the one introduced by the Monroe Doctrine, which was recast in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt in his diplomatic corollary to the doctrine, commonly referred to as his “Big Stick” policy. On March 4, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated in his inaugural address: “In the field of world polity, I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.”1 The trope of the Americas as a neighborhood with northern and southern neighbors sharing rights and responsibilities did much to foster hemispheric goodwill. From the North American perspective, a neighborhood is a space of communal interaction where the principles of friendship, trust, and confidence reign; a neighborhood integrates its members into webs of reciprocity and equity. These utopian ideals were fomented at the diplomatic level with cultural exchange programs and reciprocal trade agreements between the United States and diverse Latin American nations. The main principle of the Good Neighbor Policy was that of non-intervention and non-interference by the United States in Latin American domestic affairs. Nevertheless, this rule had been previously breached by the U.S. military occupation of Cuba from 1899 to 1902, of Nicaragua in 1909, of Veracruz (Mexico) in 1914, of Haiti in 1915, and of the Dominican Republic in 1916. Despite the two decades-long gap between the two (Theodore and Franklin D.) Roosevelt administrations, the Good Neighbor Policy was seen by many Latin Americans as mainly a new disguise of the cunning and conniving Northern wolf. In fact, as we will see in studying the documents gathered in this chapter, United States economic and cultural penetration continued albeit with more subtle maneuvers.
III.1 In this section, “The Monroe Doctrine: A Precursor to Pan Americanism,” we present documents that explore the complex historical, cultural, and political relationships between the Americas that followed the establishment of the Monroe Doctrine. Initially, reactions to the Monroe Doctrine within Latin America were generally favorable. Some politicians and intellectuals there looked to the United States and found inspiration in the eighteenth-century North American revolution, in the U.S. Constitution, and in its assertion of the political virtues of the nation as the domicile of individual freedom. However, another, more wary and skeptical view also emerged in Latin America and was characterized by a belief that differences in cultural background, core values, and historical origins would impede genuine reciprocity between the two Americas.
Throughout the nineteenth century, theorists in Latin America analyzed socio-political problems and the relationships between the various peoples and powers that comprised the Americas through the lens of science and race-centered theories embedded in the neo-scientific doctrines of Positivism, the dominant philosophy of the period. Engaging medical tropes of disease and sickness, some historians and cultural observers described their countries in terms of social organisms afflicted by an unhealthy virus contained in the intermingled composition of populations [SEE DOCUMENT III.1.3]. Social biologism and racist ideologies that underscored some of these views affirmed racial hierarchy; the dogma that racial mixing produced social degeneracy; and the ideas that political instability, cultural deficiency, and perpetual anarchy were pathological traits of an “ailing continent” that could only be mitigated by the immigration of white Europeans. This continental ailing process, as described by César Zumeta, “took place among the colonial powers,” which were, in fact, still highly relevant in the twentieth century.
III.2 Indeed, the Americas are, in the words of Waldo Frank, “Half-Worlds in Conflict,” and the tensions within and among these half-worlds comprise the focus of this section. At the turn of the nineteenth century, United States expansionist policies—coupled with major economic investments by American corporations throughout the region—activated a radical change in the mindsets of socially committed intellectuals. Dominant theories of racialized societies were discarded and replaced by institutional reform and social renovation anchored in cultural resistance and affirmation. In 1900, the publication of José Enrique Rodó’s polemical Ariel, a composite text that is simultaneously an essay, a sermon, and an idealistic parable, stimulated fervent debate [SEE DOCUMENT III.2.1]. Indeed, Ariel calls for Latin Americans to guard against a moral conquest by the United States. Instead, the text’s affirming, pro-Latin American vision avers that Latin Americans possess enduring moral and aesthetic values derived from their Greco-Roman and Christian Catholic cultural heritage. While Rodó praises the ideals of liberty and individual freedom of North Americans—as well as their efficiency and technological advances—he strongly warns against dependency on a society based on pragmatism and materialistic ideals. In an essentialist sense, Rodó urges Latin Americans to re-affirm their unique cultural identity rooted in the Spanish motherland rather than badly copy the values of the United States, a country still in a provisional stage of civilization. Rodó coins the term “nordomanía” to describe the mania for the North against which he warns. Moving beyond nationalism, Ariel introduces the concept of Latin American integration rooted in cultural unity. The work’s humanist idealism also intuits that the two Americas have a future shared destiny.
This key point regarding a joint future based on common concerns remained influential throughout the twentieth century. After its publication, intellectuals in both the United States and Latin America joined the enduring discourse “to define” the primal characteristics and values of their respective national cultures. The U.S. novelist, critic, and historian Waldo Frank notes the striking symmetry between the “half worlds” of America Hispana and Anglo-Saxon America [SEE DOCUMENT III.2.2]. In his view, each world lacks what the other has. The pragmatic, machine-oriented North has order but lacks life, while the heterogeneous, mestizo South has life but lacks order. For Frank, the effort to create a single, harmonious world through revitalization and the creation of a hemispheric culture would strongly depend on a conversion where the best qualities of the materialist and rationalist North and the spiritual unity and culture of the South organically converge into a unified entity.
Assessing the possibility for the co-existence of “the two Americas,” José Vasconcelos in Indología [SEE DOCUMENT I.4.2] proclaims a doctrine of cooperation against the struggle for supremacy between two vastly different cultures with unequal power. Vasconcelos believes that while the United States is already formed and powerful, Latin America is a potential force in the process of establishing a vital equilibrium between nature and culture. To reach its potential, Latin America must deal internally with oppressive caudillos and, simultaneously, with North American cultural and economic penetration and political interventions. According to the Mexican writer and politician, North and South are both developing cultures and must keep their doors open to immigration since both are not the result of one tradition but of many.
Continuing the polemic of differences and commonalities in hemispheric cultures, Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre uses the metaphor of an archipelago to envision a continentalism or a pluralist Americanism that is in no way uniform [SEE DOCUMENT III.2.3]. His country, in spite of a long-lasting monarchic tradition, created an interracial democracy. Freyre believes that Brazil is American in its rhythm and free forms of expression; it is Hispanic and particularly Portuguese in its values, motivations, and approaches toward life. He argues that a true American culture, like Brazil, will amplify values inherited from Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Art and culture are linchpins of Latin American modernity. Artist Diego Rivera states that art has an important social function for the construction of economic, social, and cultural unity in the Americas [SEE DOCUMENT III.2.5]. Taking a Marxist approach, Rivera argues that art has potential to excite and nurture the will for liberty, independence, and equality if it is connected to a program of planned industrialization linking the enormous natural and human resources of the region. Furthermore, he suggests that the Southern Hemisphere must move beyond its racist, Greco-Latin roots toward a continental American culture of an absolute modernity in its unification of the sciences, industry, and art.
Rivera’s commentary on the photography of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti offers a case study of sorts in the ways in which Northern and Southern traditions can be integrated to achieve more continental expressions. Rivera affirms that their photography is imbued with a sensibility that embraces the modernity and plasticity of the North and the living traditions of the South [SEE DOCUMENT III.2.4].
A young Octavio Paz describes mid-1940s Pan Americanism as a system of cultural penetration, noting that since 1896, it had become part and parcel of American “dollar imperialism” that involved expanding U.S. commercial markets in Latin America. However, Paz expresses some hope that such events as the first Pan American Conference, held in Mexico City in 1902, allowed Latin America a voice in Pan American relations. At the conferences, which were held every four years, delegates from the hemisphere came together to discuss treaties, pacts, and contracts that were then ratified by participating governments. The advantage for Latin Americans in such encounters was that they could debate, modify, or reject items in the United States commercial, political, and cultural agendas. According to Paz, the unilateral maneuvers of the United States were to be replaced by a new culture of negotiation and reciprocity. The ebb and flow of this reciprocal process is charted by his reportage, “Latin American Unity: A Battle of Diplomacy in San Francisco” [SEE DOCUMENT III.2.6].
The Cuban poet and essayist Roberto Fernández Retamar [SEE DOCUMENT III.2.7] speaks from inside the irremediable colonial conditions of Cuba, in particular, and Latin America, in general. Responding to the question [AN ISSUE VASTLY DEBATED IN THIS VOLUME, SEE DOCUMENTS I.2.4, I.2.5, I.2.6, I.2.7, I.2.8, I.2.9, I.2.10, I.2.11], Does a Latin American culture exist?, and echoing José Martí’s conception of our mestizo America [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.4], Retamar says that the mestizo cultural ethos is the essence, the central line of development of Cuban culture—“a culture of descendants both ethnically and culturally speaking, of aborigines, Africans and Europeans.” He stresses that while “capitalist countries long ago achieved a relative [racial and cultural] homogeneity” at the expense of internal diversity, the colonial world—including Cuba—remains a highly complex composite. Often Latin American cultures are seen as an emanation from Europe, especially since Latin Americans continue to use the language and many of the conceptual tools of the colonizer. Furthermore, rethinking the Shakespearean metaphors introduced by Rodó’s highly influential Ariel, Retamar joins the ranks of Latin American intellectuals, writers, and artists who object to open or veiled forms of cultural and political colonialism and equates Latin America with The Tempest’s Caliban, who denounces and curses the colonizer in his own language.
III.3 The third segment of this chapter, “Insights from Latin American on U.S. Art and Society,” considers the complicated relationship between the North and the South through the lens of art. Specifically, this section presents writings by Latin American artists who evaluate the cultural production of the United States with both admiration and condemnation. These critiques are underscored by and reflect Latin American history and realities, including the fact that, since the turn of the nineteenth century, artistic production in Latin America has been linked to broad social processes like nation building and modernization. Consequently, artists and writers had to grapple with a cluster of persistent cultural themes: the theory of mestizaje (racial/cultural intermingling); notions of cultural authenticity and differentiation from the Anglo Saxon North; and the ongoing reality of United States cultural penetration embedded in political strategies like Pan Americanism or the Good Neighbor Policy.
Latin American points of view on U.S. visual culture in this cluster of essays start in 1888 when the Cuban writer and critic José Martí, after viewing an exhibition of watercolor landscapes in New York, reports that artists in the United States—in “this province which is increasingly pulling away from England and going its own way in the field of arts and letters”—are slowly creating a self-confident native art less dependent on European models. In some respects he offers the United States as a model for other, emerging nations, noting that young artists from a coarse society have achieved the artistic discretion that more cultivated countries take centuries to acquire [SEE DOCUMENT III.3.1].
Speaking to his guild audience in Chicago, Mexican-based Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida looks back on the apogee of Mexican Muralism in the 1930s and considers the assimilation of Los Tres Grandes (Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros) into the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). His presentation coincides with the continuing development of U.S. mural projects under the auspices of the WPA (Work Progress Administration) [SEE DOCUMENT III.3.2]. Mérida chides Northern artists who are following without discernment the Mexican muralist experiment, which he notes is presently in its worse phase. Indeed, Mexican Muralism had several phases in its long-lasting process. Its initial period reflected major influences from folklore; then, the muralists sought to capture the true character of Mexico through graphic storytelling, while keeping in mind that the simple reproduction of what we see does not constitute an enduring art. Mérida, who is critical of the “false revolutionary art” of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, explains that the work of art cannot be based on unhelpful repetitions. If North American artists are to create a focused and vital work, Mérida argues, they must emulate the post-Muralist artists of Mexico whom he points out “are creating works that, although still imperfect, are nevertheless more vital, more revolutionary, and more expressive than any created by the legion of insipid illustrators.” The artists, he explains, “must not create art that is representative, but rather abstract, and they must take this word to mean the creation of a unique organism.”
In reviewing a touring exhibition of North American art in Montevideo in 1941, Joaquín Torres-García, who had lived in New York in the 1920s, questions the state of art in the hemisphere. He comments on the “significant changes and, what’s more, undeniable progress compared to what I used to see in those earlier years” [SEE DOCUMENT III.3.3]. In a “good neighbor policy” show with “obviously excellent, mediocre, and atrocious works,” the Uruguayan painter sees—among North, Central, and South American examples—“poor imitation and parody. . . a desire to emulate an old culture, European culture.” And he goes on: “This is why we do not yet have an art that we can call our own; and by that I mean our palette, our style, our way of understanding composition, our perception of reality—where we find our own concept of the visual arts.” According to Torres-García, what is missing are “Concrete elements that I would call abstract since they are not imitative.”
José Sabogal offers an alternative course for the future of American art, one based on an understanding and appreciation of indigenous art and culture. Writing in 1943, Sabogal records his impressions and thoughts about his seventy-two days spent traveling throughout the United States that same year [SEE DOCUMENT III.3.4]. Sabogal admires the grandeur of nature and the technical and functional focus of American society. Sabogal sees the North American museums he visited as dynamic centers of education and is especially enlightened by their collections of American Indian art, from the pre-colonial art of the continent to contemporary tribal arts of the Americas. The Peruvian painter proposes the idea of a museum dedicated to ancient art of the Americas (to be implemented with laboratories and a library) that would make it an undeniable hub for American studies.
In a letter from New York [SEE DOCUMENT III.3.5], Argentinean art critic Damián Bayón presents ironic observations on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art. Bayón argues that MoMA’s installation is very contradictory, mixing the best and the worst together so that unenlightened visitors begin to think that all the paintings are of prime quality. According to his report sent to the magazine Ver y estimar in Buenos Aires, Bayón says that ninety percent of the work exhibited at MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art is bad or immature in the best cases: they lack for him museum quality. A key point of his critique is that in this “rich country” even mediocre artists have great support infrastructure and so many opportunities that critics and audiences can easily confuse the good with the bad; suggested in this analysis are the broader, cultural implications regarding tendencies and values in a relatively privileged and wealthy society (as opposed to those of poorer nations). For example, regarding the overestimated U.S. artists, Bayón writes: “If they had been born in any other country in the world, they would still be struggling to avoid starvation and trying to show their work and sell it.”
III.4 The chapter concludes with this fourth section, “The United States ‘Presents’ and ‘Collects’ Latin America Art,” that explores how the operative construct of “Latin American art”—as applied to exhibitions and museum collections—was formed and fostered by a combination of U.S. institutions, government policies, and exhibitions starting in the 1930s. An early catalyst for interest in the region was the Rockefeller family, which united public philanthropy with private financial and business interests. The Rockefellers were deeply involved with New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) helped to co-found in 1929. MoMA’s initial interest in Latin American art was marked by Diego Rivera’s one-man show in 1931, and soon after the museum’s Latin American collection was established in 1935 with Mrs. Rockefeller’s gift of José Clemente Orozco’s The Subway (1928), followed a year later by two large Riveras. In 1939, the collection was augmented with paintings by Brazilian Candido Portinari, and in the 1940s, Lincoln Kirstein, MoMA’s consultant in Latin American art, greatly expanded the museum’s holdings in this area. From its inception, the construct of Latin American art has been U.S.-centric, reflecting hemispheric political agendas, and it has been filtered through MoMA’s significantly institutional narrative of modernism. The documents presented in this section trace the evolution of this Latin American art construct.
The Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Art was convened by the U.S. Department of State on October 11–12, 1939 [SEE DOCUMENT III.4.1]. Attended by 125 representative leaders from various areas of the art field in the United States, the conference carefully surveyed the panorama of artistic exchange between the United States and other American countries as well as the possibilities for future comparable endeavors. The delegates praised the present trend that had led artists to turn away from the resources of Europe and to recognize the native scene as a more vital source of inspiration and development. A special emphasis was placed on contemporary production and on the living artist, suggesting the recognition that the best cultural ambassadors are in fact the artists themselves. An important point made at the conference was the acknowledgment that Latin America is not a unit, but that it consists of twenty nations, a fact that must be considered in any program of exchange. Likewise the diversity of the United States surfaced when delegates favored a coordinated exhibition that might be illustrative of the “American way of living.” Nevertheless, a divergence of opinion arose as to what constituted truly representative art material from the United States.
As a follow-up to the Inter-American Conference of 1939, a Continuation Committee met on Feb. 15–16, 1940, in Washington, DC, seeking to create programs and structures to carry out future artistic exchange with the other American republics [SEE DOCUMENT III.4.2]. The committee repeatedly emphasized that selection of materials to go to Latin America should be made on the basis of what the Latin Americans themselves desire, and the essential reciprocity in artistic exchange was also stressed. The participants outlined possible programs including: a general volume on Latin American art; exchange of exhibitions; the granting of fellowships; and the creation of a clearinghouse of information and a coordinating agency for development of long-range artistic exchange programs.
Held the same year as the Inter-American Conference, the New York World’s Fair of 1939 included the Latin American Exhibition of Fine Arts [SEE DOCUMENT III.4.4]. As stated in the introduction to the accompanying catalogue, the exhibition was carried out in the spirit that the “Americas are developing an artistic and cultural consciousness of their own.” Other central ideas expressed in the catalogue include the notion that art can promote cross-cultural appreciation and that by focusing on national themes that have universal meaning, painters in the Americas can build solidarity and understanding to make “more readily possible the peaceful adjustment of international controversies.”
During the heyday of the Good Neighbor Policy in the mid-1940s, Americans began looking at Latin America “full in the face” with evident interest but with little true comprehension. During this period, Alfred H. Barr, MoMA’s director, amassed the most important collection of Latin American art in the United States. Among the central issues he raises in his paper “Problems of Research and Documentation in Contemporary Latin American Art” [SEE DOCUMENT III.4.7], presented at the 1945 Conference on Studies in Latin American Art, are those relating to artistic quality and interest. In his view, international standards can be applied to art that is international in style or character, but it is much more difficult to judge values that are national or local in character. He notes that the problem of standards is also evident in research where U.S. critics are concerned with systematic fact and documentation, which he says “has been rather hasty in a good many ways, and superficial.” He also considers the differences between Latin American and U.S. approaches to scholarship, noting that Latin American scholars are much more rhetorical, poetic, and use a more philosophical style in presenting their critical views.
Barr’s paper offers a view into the future and raises the problem of how to connect the wartime political promotion and financing of Latin American art with long-term and long-envisioned art collecting, exhibition, and study programs that will demonstrate quality and seriousness.
Also speaking at the 1945 Conference on Studies in Latin American Art held at MoMA, Grace McCann Morley [SEE DOCUMENT III.4.8], the first director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, addresses “regional schools with distinct personalities and character within national development.” Focusing on “national developments,” McCann Morley divides the countries and trends she considers into one of two categories: countries whose production reflects a pre-Columbian heritage and those whose recent developments relate to Europe. According to her, art in Latin America is weak in development and generally derivative from foreign styles; the result is that the creation of a national art follows an “international pattern.” She further notes that Latin American artists work in poor conditions, lack financial support, and have restricted opportunities for exhibition; moreover, patronage and audiences are small. She also cautions that whenever the term “Latin America” is used, “hidden behind surface unities and similarities there is great diversity and important fundamental differences between the various countries.”
Designed to coincide with the Pan American Games held in Chicago in 1959, the exhibition The United States Collects Pan American Art curated by Joseph Randall Shapiro signals the inadequacy of the term “Latin American art” to denote a single, homogenous identity. As Shapiro demonstrates in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue [SEE DOCUMENT III.4.10], differences in geography and ancestry have created quite opposite socio-religious cultures, histories, art forms, and styles. Shapiro, the founding president of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, argues that the artists gathered together in the 1959 exhibition work in a modern idiom that is both metropolitan and international and also one that parallels the progressive architecture of modern Latin American cites. Noting that many younger artists have adopted current “International styles” of abstract and non-objective painting, he observes that they are conversant with contemporary trends in the United States and Europe and adamantly oppose the traditional colonial and Indian art of their countries as well as sentimental, picturesque, and exotic tourist art. In creating these new idioms, the young artists, Shapiro explains, also respond to the heterogeneity of Latin American art—the native arts of Mexico and Peru, the Mexican muralists, regional folklore, and the currents of European art.
The United States interest in Latin America, which first peaked during World War II and was manifested in various political, diplomatic, and cultural endeavors, began to wane in the postwar period, with attention now being directed toward Europe and Asia with the advent of the Cold War. Nevertheless, in this same period following the Second World War, the discipline of Latin American Studies emerged within academic institutions, and scholars articulated new paradigms that critically explored the region’s politics, economics, and culture. Latin American art history programs began to train a younger cadre of art historians and curators who in subsequent decades would re-envision and re-conceptualize the operative construct of Latin American art.
1
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address,” Washington, D.C., March 3, 1933.