I WILL BEGIN BY STATING MY THESIS and then go on to state the arguments that led me to it. My thesis is that the expression “modern Latin American Art” still has no definition that accords it a precise meaning. Instead, it is a kind of vague, common desire of artists and critics to have a child with its own personality that bears the least resemblance possible to its parents and ancestors. In general, the “Latin Americanist” belongs to an extremely intransigent intellectual sect whose continental nationalism is even more virulent than any domestic nationalism. This is why I wish to base my thesis not just on my personal experience but on several important arguments from the panorama of Latin Americana art criticism.
My investigation is also based on my interest in finding a Latin American spirit that is our own, definable, and characteristic, from which we may deduce a common denominator that underlies all our visual artworks. I am adding to that aspiration, which is common among critics, the requirement not to commit fraud and to present the results of the investigation without embellishment. I am willing to risk that there is no common Latin American spirit whatsoever in our art. That yearning and that interest could take form in the beautiful words of Waldo Frank (Redescubrimiento de America) [Rediscovery of America]: “Europe’s blood runs in the direction of the sea to lands unknown. And the old Mediterranean is dying. Its death drains into the Atlantic, a new investigation by mankind, a new world without limits. Beyond the symbolic ocean we find a country ill named from the beginning, misjudged and not yet revealed: America.” The stage of knowledge must precede the intellectual or artistic expression of a people; until we know what the Latin American man is; [until we know] his ambitions and his tendencies, his capabilities, we will be unable to state the aesthetic grounds on which a continental art must be based.
It would seem indisputable that “Latin American art” cannot be found in visual renditions of folklore. . . . Therefore, it is not a matter of painting or sculpting “the picturesque” or of walking around in search of traditional things like some unimaginative tourist. But in spite of this rejection, the local, invertebrate, and undefined seem to be fundamental to the Latin American aesthetic need. Even the very people who hate the literal transcription of folklore allude to this requirement. For example, Julio Payró, one of the best known Argentine art critics, says of Emilio Pettoruti: “There are those who claim that his art is removed from nature and nationality, and he does not resort to a single localist prop—no poncho, no horse, no ruins, no gaucho, no mate and no Quechua patterns here. Nonetheless, his basically visual art becomes a limpid national pictorial poem, inspired by a deep understanding of our physical nature and invigorated by the complex emotions of the simple man.” A solution that seems intelligent on paper: “Let’s create an art that is neither folkloric nor national,” is nonsensical gibberish when it is expressed in canvas or clay. How do we create a work that contains the visual elements that represent a nationality? In which, at the same time, we avoid the folklore that those elements entail? The conflict is so great that it cannot even be resolved by painters such as the Uruguayan Pedro Figari. Figari himself claimed to have Latin American ways and Latin American thoughts. He also rejected “the apelike sentiments of young peoples who look at and follow Europe’s worn down path before acting or taking a step.” Confronted with the vehement desire to make something Latin American, Figari finally turns to the late colonial period, and his extraordinary painting becomes a chapter in the history of art with a treatment that is purely impressionist. It may be the most beautiful retrospective chapter written in Latin American painting, but it could never be a solution to the problem of creating our own art. Even Figari’s critic and biographer, Herrero MacLean, accentuates the anecdotal nature of Figari’s work, perhaps unknowingly: “To create something Latin American, all that work sought the source of decorative inspiration in the nature around the artist,” he writes. “Bird, animal, leaf, native flower, all, after skillful stylization, were used to create a new form of beautification. And after rummaging through nature, he turned to history and soaked up all the archaeological sources, seeking a new path for his inspiration in the Native, dormant past.”
We keep going around in a folklore/anti-folklore vicious circle. The Argentinean professor Ángel Guido is one of the Latin Americans who has done the most work to reassess continental values in art (Redescubrimiento de América en el arte) [The Rediscovery of Latin America in Art]. In one of his articles, he maintains that “To date, the skyscraper and Mexican painting represent the only original visual artwork in contemporary Latin America.” But regarding Mexican painting that would require a lengthy discussion. [To begin with,] people found the first polemical frescos of [Diego] Rivera, [José Clemente] Orozco and [David Alfaro] Siqueiros amazing. But once the commotion had passed, people began to notice that right from the start, this unforeseen union of political and art revolutions was disconcerting to pure aesthetics. Today, given a broader perspective (from outside Mexico, not within), we can clearly see the temporary nature of these realistic/historic/figurative aesthetics. Meanwhile, intelligent criticisms of the only unorthodox painter, Rufino Tamayo, are on the increase. The critic José Moreno Villa, in his book Lo mexicano en las artes plásticas, [“The Mexican” in the Visual Arts] gives the impression of running after a chimera that slips through his hands as he is trying to capture it. However, he also has the courage to raise the subject: “...we have no alternative but to come right out with the terrible question: ‘What is ‘the Mexican?’” At no point in his book does he reach any clear solution for this. In another paragraph, he goes on: “To me, ‘the Mexican’ can be found in two things that can be rendered perfectly clearly in words: one in the psychological, perhaps moral order; the other, in the physical order. The moral view is derived from a dramatic perspective on Native Latin American life; the physical, from its most characteristic colors, the dull earth tones: the red volcanic rock set off by the somber green of the cactus and the greenish gray of the jade.”
The effort to reduce the Mexican spirit to some kind of formula is clear, but what is also clear is the artificial and precarious nature of the solution. For example, the color factor seems to be of a completely personal nature, and if there is anything anarchic (marvelously anarchic) in art, it is a painter’s palette. An analysis of books on national painting written in Latin America provides no clarity on the matter either. Some critics, such as Gabriel Giraldo Jaramillo (“La pintura en Colombia”) [Painting in Colombia] analyze the common trajectory of Latin American art from colonial times down to our days, without attempting a more complex, aesthetic approach. But even in this serious art research work, the writer is unable to think straight about modern painting and sculpture. His serious attempt to give it a defined orientation or judge it en bloc as an authentically national expression is unsuccessful. Other critics, such as Soto and Samarra on the subject of modern Cuban painting, are such victims of their own yearning that they end up mistaking desire for reality. [Out of that confusion,] they praise Native Americanism as the true voice of Latin American visual art.
But what is Native Americanism? Is it the art of a group that proposes the resurrection of the Native soul? For that, we would have to turn our eyes back to France, where [Paul] Gauguin would become a precursor of the movement when he said: “La barbarie est pour moi un nouveau rejeunissement” (For me, barbarism is a rejuvenation.) And what does the rest of the Native world have to offer after four centuries of extermination, misery, and abandonment? [What has become of] the Native artist whom the archbishop of Mexico said in 1531 was: “exceptionally gifted, especially in painting?” Thanks to the work of civilization, he has been turned into the miserable manufacturer of small, insignificant vessels and jewelry made with metallic pieces where the motif is repeated infinitely, as in the art of the nomads.
“South America must harmonize the elements of its complexity,” writes René Huyghe, the conservator of the Louvre Museum, who has a vast knowledge of Latin American art. Ethnic elements? The Native in the art of [Oswaldo] Guayasamín? The triumphant Mestizo in the paintings of Rivera? The commanding Black man in the canvases of [Candido] Portinari? The Italian around whom the work of Pettoruti is ordered? The “world citizen” seeking his place in the universe in the work of [Joaquín] Torres-García? The U.S. citizen creating a frenetic rhythm in the canvases of Wifredo Lam? I believe that Mr. Huyghe, like all those who refer to this matter, is always talking about primitive ethnic elements: the White man, the Native, the Black man. But we have been trying to be civilized societies by accepting waves of immigrants for so many centuries that this idea is no more than a historical touchstone without any current reality.
Moreover, we need only glance at early art in Latin America to understand that, after the eclipse of the Spanish and Portuguese baroque periods, South America accepted France, without prejudice, as its artistic guiding influence. In 1816, Brazil received a French artistic mission directed by [Joachim] Lebreton—including a painter, [Jean-Baptiste] Debret, an untalented student of [Jacques-Louis] David, destined to sew the bad seed of a highly academic Neoclassicism. David’s influence later gave way to that of the Romantics, but, unfortunately, there were more supporters of [Théodore] Chasseriau than of [Eugène] Delacroix. Juan León Paillère in Argentina, [Raymond] Monvoisin in Chile, [A.A.] Bonaffe in Peru, [Victor] Meirelles [de Lima] in Brazil; these Frenchmen were the great “Latin American” artists of the nineteenth century. But neither an aggrandized, fictionalized history nor the exoticism promoted by the Romantics stirred the Native motif to life. Except for one precursor, the Peruvian Francisco Laso, a student of [Paul] Delaroche, not until the early twentieth century was there the emergence of Native, mestizo and Black motifs. The significance [of these motifs] is not purely a matter of visual arts, rather a social phenomenon, and the art in which it appears asserts the demands of these populations.
It is clear that there is also another problem: it was not an investigation of an aesthetic nature that prompted the Mexican or Brazilian motifs. Their origins were purely political; of course it is perfectly legitimate that politics should influence art, but there is no truth in the idea that politics “generates” art. The harmonization of elements sought by Huyghe is thus much more complex than it seems. And is it necessary to harmonize them? Must we incessantly pursue this aesthetic mirage that ends up being imposed on the entire artistic continent? Do we have to raise a banner with enthusiastic words that, upon close examination, mean absolutely nothing and do not lead us anywhere? It is possible that Latin Americanism is neither folklore, nor the vernacular landscape, nor the Native, nor the mestizo, nor the Black person. Perhaps it is not a mix of all these either. Maybe it cannot be found in any pre-established formula. It is possible that the invocation of “Latin Americanism” is the desire of provincial peoples born with an inferiority complex due to our evident lack of culture, or a falsely romantic concept.
No one talks about “Europeanism,” and it would be an almost impossible undertaking to give a common definition to European painting (totally fragmentary, chaotic, and parceled out). Undoubtedly, Latin America has an absolutely distinct and extraordinary geography; it is also evident that this rich, virgin continent is in a terrible state of misery. However, the artist’s lack of consent to this unjust and terrible situation must lead to something other than pure artistic speculation that may please the Europeans, who will accept it at face value. In short, we should expect a difference of expression from peoples soaked in culture and peoples who are semi-barbarian. But it is also possible that this expression has no commonality, given economic, geographic, and cultural conditions that are very different from one country to another in Latin America. It is possible that the expression will be individual, such as is shown to date in the five or six painters working in Latin America: [Candido] Portinari in Brazil, Pettoruti in Argentina, [Pedro] Figari y Torres-García in Uruguay, Wifredo Lam in Cuba, Guayasamín in Ecuador, [Alejandro] Obregón in Colombia. Varied as they are, their works do not allow us to “define what is Latin American.” However, they do have one negative element in common: in the continent’s great painting, folklore has been turned into a remote allusion submerged by the artist in the pure process of his work. Transformed into one more artistic element, it serves to remove all provincial characteristics from the art.
Back to the initial thesis: when there is an emphatic appeal to the necessity of creating a Latin American art, what is being said lacks any meaning whatsoever. It is unknown whether there is any honest definition that fits that requirement. Latin America will not be well named, judged, or shown if it constructs its future culture and art based on a misguided continental nationalism, just as dangerous and disastrous as regional nationalisms.
To balance this negative thesis, in the entire panorama of Latin America, I have only found one positive thesis worthy of respect, but unfortunately, it is starry-eyed. Though lacking certainty, Professor Guido (referred to above) bases his thesis on hopes. He believes with all his heart that the “undiscovered landscape” of Latin America, the “Latin American reconquista in art,” will evolve into a true Latin American voice (…though he doesn’t say through what media). Against all evidence, one man’s hope; for now, that’s all there is.