IV.2.4 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1061840
The American art historians Stanton Loomis Catlin (1915–1997) of Yale University Art Gallery and Terence Grieder, a professor of pre-Columbian art at the University of Texas at Austin, introduce their 1966 exhibition Art of Latin America Since Independence in this essay. While Catlin and Grieder are wary of the conflicted stances associated with ascribing a single cultural identity to Latin America, their point of view reveals a kind of Pan Americanism that is obsessed, in one way or another, with presenting the art of Latin American to U.S. audiences as part of a supposedly shared “American” culture. The present excerpt comes from the essay’s original publication [Stanton Loomis Catlin and Terence Grieder, “Introduction,” Art of Latin America Since Independence (New Haven, CT, and Austin, TX: Yale University Art Gallery and University of Texas Art Museum, 1966), 1–5].
The history and art of Latin America fall naturally into three periods: pre-Columbian, colonial, and modern. Of the three, the modern period is least known to the world at large. Its approximate duration of one hundred and fifty years—dating from the era of Independence—does not compare with the millennia of pre-Columbian artistic culture, and its span is only half that of the colonial period. Nevertheless it encompasses artistic treasures and remarkable personalities that deserve to be more widely known.
The material of the present exhibition is of special interest for the United States since it comprises the work of fellow Americans. That they are indeed fellow Americans becomes clear as we examine the achievements of the various periods here considered. In general, artistic development in the Latin American countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries follows a course surprisingly parallel to the evolution of the arts in the United States. On the other hand, in view of the fact that Latin Americans have so often been described, by themselves as well as by others, as poetic and emotional, the objectivity of their images is surprising when compared with the romantic enthusiasm of their North American contemporaries. The prevailing preconception of the public in both North and Latin America is that each holds the advantage in art. Although the interest of such a question is more political than artistic, the claim of Latin American artists to our attention cannot be easily ignored.
The Latin American painters may bring to mind cognates in the art of the United States. For example, the Venezuelan Juan Lovera may remind us of his contemporary, [John] Trumbull; [Juan Manuel] Blanes may be compared to [Winslow] Homer and [Eduardo] Sívori to [Thomas] Eakins. The dispassionately observed and conceptually controlled Mexican landscapes of [José María] Velasco make a striking contrast with the more poetic and emotional landscapes of [George] Inness, [Albert] Bierstadt, and [Frederic Edwin] Church. In some periods and styles there are no very direct parallels; for example, there are none for the strong Cubist-oriented school of the 1920s and ’30s of [Emilio] Pettoruti, Guido, [Lino Enea] Spilimbergo, and [Antonio] Berni in Argentina.
Two points, however, clearly distinguish the Latin American art world from its counterpart in the United States, namely the acceptance of the principle of patronage of art by all levels of government and, again in principle, the widespread respect of the public for artists. The Latin American tradition of government patronage is inherited from the colonial period, when patronage was extended both by the royal courts of Spain and Portugal and by their representatives in the New World. The Mexican Academy of San Carlos and the Brazilian Academy, founded in 1785 and 1816 respectively, are the earliest of the Latin American national academies and represent continuations of the Spanish and Portuguese traditions of the national patronage of art schools. National art academies were founded in Chile (1848) and in other countries, the majority well before our own. If some of these schools have lost their influence in recent years—with the notable exception of the National School of Fine Arts in Peru—their historical role has been impressive.
One of the results of government patronage is public esteem for the arts. Accomplished artists in Latin America, living or dead, are regarded as great men, and their profession is generally honored as a distinguished calling. In some cases, respect has perhaps been carried too far, as in the election, purely on his merits as an artist and great man, of Pedro Américo to the first Constituent Assembly of Brazil in 1890. (The excessiveness in this instance is evident by the fact that Américo did not perform his duties in the Assembly, but departed almost immediately for Florence to pursue his true vocation.) Other artists have held high political office, for example, José Guadalupe Zuno, governor of Jalisco, Mexico, and Pedro Figari of Uruguay. The presence of an Imperial court in Brazil from 1811 to 1889, which made Rio de Janeiro a major art center, also inspired a certain amount of emulation in other nations. But the tradition was well established in any case. In Mexico Porfirio Díaz, hardly an art lover gave a special grant to the late Dr. Atl [born Gerardo Murillo] for study in Europe when the young man approached him; and such stories are common in the artistic biographies from many nations. The artist who did not receive a government stipend for study in Europe is the exception, as a glance through the accompanying biographies will reveal—surely a situation that Homer or Eakins would have envied. Even governments that obviously could not afford to indulge in extravagances provided modest scholarships for art study abroad, as in the case of the Uruguayan government, which sent [Juan Manuel] Blanes to Italy with such meager funds that he could not afford to travel from Florence to Rome. So large was the return on the investment in Blanes’ case that it would be hard to calculate.
In addition to direct patronage of artists and academies, the continuation of the tradition established by the courts of Europe had other effects. It led to the beautification of cities, and especially of the public parks. The public interest, often neglected in social and economic terms, was unusually well served by handsome areas provided and tended by the government. Manifestations of the same tradition may also be seen in the importation of missions or individual artists from Europe to Rio de Janeiro in 1816 and to Buenos Aires in 1824 to design the public buildings of those cities, and to Peru in 1880 for Lima’s Exposition Park, a spacious green bounded by wide avenues and containing circles lined with monuments. The vast sweep of the multiple malls of Brasília (1956) is in this same tradition.
The acceptance of public patronage in Latin America is at least in part the result of the academic tradition, which considers art a learned study. Hence, judgment in art matters has been reserved to those educated in art. A remark of the sort “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like” is not unknown in Latin America, but the attitude expressed in it, historically speaking, has had less direct influence on important patronage than in our own country.
If the exhibition may be of special interest to North Americans for the light its comparison may shed on our art, it is of equal interest for the view it provides of European art and society of the times here represented. Perhaps unwittingly, we have accepted a picture of the nineteenth century that is far removed from the facts of European culture. Comparison of almost any major art gallery in North America with its Latin American counterpart reveals the relative wealth of the nineteenth-century collections of the latter as compared to the relative poverty of its twentieth-century collections. The reverse is the case in the North American museums, where the nineteenth century means the French Impressionists, with perhaps [Jean-Auguste-Dominique] Ingres, [Eugène] Delacroix, [Camille] Corot, and [Gustave] Courbet for good measure. [Édouard] Manet would perhaps be amazed, and not entirely gratified, by our over scrupulous selection of precursors of twentieth-century movements.
The revolution of taste against the Parisian Beaux-Arts tradition has been far less extreme and complete in Latin America. As we examine the collections of the Latin American museums, a phase of life and art is revealed that has been largely omitted from our frames of critical reference, but whose values and glories cannot be considered entirely transient. This phase was dominated by the sophisticated, luxury loving, international monied aristocracy whose world centered on Paris, whose literary models were French novels, and whose artistic tastes were based on those expressed by the Paris Salons. The First World War destroyed this world so completely that only vestiges of it remain, and these vestiges are possibly more alive in the cities of Latin America than in Europe itself.
This world is revealed again in the paintings of Américo and [Eliseu] Visconti in Brazil, of Tovar, [Arturo] Michelena, and Rojas in Venezuela, of Hernández and Baca-Flor in Peru, and of Pedro Lira and Valenzuela Puelma in Chile. This world’s complacency and materialism are most remembered now; but its insistence upon technical quality and finish, its formality, its modes of sensibility, and its serious concern, at least in theory, for the noblest human sentiments—in short, its idealism and its high technical standards—are refreshing, and so out-of-date as to seem avant-garde. This was the stylistic ambiance of Europe in the period from 1875 to 1910, as most respectable Europeans knew it, and some of its foremost names—Bouguereau, Collin, Cabanel—were the teachers of the Latin Americans.
In Latin America the esteem in which art is held is just one facet of an intellectual approach that favors the aesthetic. The Latin American pensador [thinker] is far more likely to write on Aesthetics (for example, [José] Vasconcelos, Pedro Figari, and Antonio Caso and, in a sense, Ricardo Rojas under the title, Eurindia [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.4]). The Mexican positivist, Francisco Bulnes, remarked in disgust “The great Latin delusion is the belief that art is the highest, almost the only object of national life.” Thus, he says, by trying to be artists, they turn their religion unto idolatry; they handicap themselves in industry; and in science they fail to understand the scientific method, all because “Latinos lend every effort to being artists.” Bulnes, writing before 1899, takes a negative view of what in humanistic studies can only be considered one of Latin America’s chief glories: her poetry and belles-lettres. Yet, even among the positivist thinkers, a large and influential group in the last decades of the nineteenth century, we do not find the pragmatic approach but rather an exaggerated idealism. The famous Puerto Rican educator, Eugenio Maria de Hostos, who worked primarily in Santo Domingo and Chile, saw his mission in terms of an ideal society—an approach that may be considered aesthetic rather than utilitarian or pragmatic. And among Latin American thinkers, generally, according to Crawford, many “were poets first, and nearly all wrote poetry.”
It is a strange fact that the subjective and frankly “aesthetic” appears more frequently in the literary than in the pictorial arts of Latin America which, as mentioned earlier, are often objective. Some of the best Latin American work in “science” has appeared in pictorial form, such as the botanical drawings of [José Celestino] Mutis’ late eighteenth-century academy in Bogotá, the ornithological paintings of Joaquín Pinto, the paintings of the Comisión Corográfica in Colombia, and the volcano studies of Dr. Atl of Mexico. These, Bulnes would say, are examples of the confusion of art and science. Whether they succeed as science may be debatable, but their artistic value is hardly in doubt.
The cultural and geographical implications of the exhibition’s title may again raise the question of the existence of an art that may properly be called Latin American. The creation of a “Latin American” art or a “National Art” has been a persistent concern among artists and critics in the Latin American world. As the complex problem of national identity that faces nations with highly diversified populations is cultural as well as political in nature, such concern on the part of artists is natural. This preoccupation cannot be discounted as a productive force when one considers artists such as [Diego] Rivera, [David Alfaro] Siqueiros, [José] Sabogal, [Candido] Portinari, [Carlos] Mérida, [Fernando de] Szyszlo, [Alejandro] Obregón, and many others, whose works have reflected regional, national, or ethnic values. In our opinion, however, it is more valuable at this stage not to attempt to consider this question, but rather to examine the kinds of art produced by artists who have an identifiable relation with Latin America as a whole.
This is a broad category. In an area and during a period in which artists, styles, and ideas from abroad have played a constant role, borderline cases frequently occur. For example, the style of the majority of nineteenth-century reportorial artists remains European in the course of their American activity. Here their involvement in American subject matter, and the premise that their art may well have played a part in the formation of the Latin American image of itself are the deciding factors. Moreover, except for the accident of birth, it would almost seem that such figures as the Peruvian Baca-Flor and the Venezuelan Michelena should be eliminated from the American category because of their almost totally Europeanized styles. However, birthplace is still everywhere accepted in cultural history as a basic fact of identity, and in these and other cases the styles practiced were variations on an international approach that was widely accepted in their times in Latin America. There is also the reverse position of the European professionals who came to America under contract to governments to teach in state academies. Although many of these artists continued in directions already established, they played an important role in the formation of new generations and in the shaping of the sometimes reactionary, artistic climate in the countries where they worked. Not at issue, of course, is the position of foreign artists who came on their own in search of New World careers and who borrowed or modified their styles under American conditions.
There are more questions about Latin American art since Independence than there are answers, and if the exhibition brings into focus the questions, it will have served its purpose. The visual arts, literature and philosophy, and the natural sciences probably have been more closely interwoven in Latin America than anywhere else. The disclosure of their specific relationships promises invaluable insight into the realities of Latin American society as well as its art and the problems of the Hemisphere that we have in common.